030: On Education (And on Betsy DeVos)

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Transcript I had the idea to do this episode a few weeks back, but I sort of sat on it for a bit – in part because it’s such a complex issue.  Not that I’m any stranger to researching and writing and talking about complex issues, but because this one is still in motion and no-one really knows yet how it will turn out.  So today we’re going to talk a bit about the education system in the U.S. and how it got to be where it is at the moment, and what Betsy DeVos might do with it.  The point I want to make with this episode is ‘what if the focus on which kind of school is the right kind’ is the wrong question to ask? And, not entirely coincidentally, I also wanted to let you know that I’m launching a course to help parents who are thinking about homeschooling their children to decide whether homeschooling could actually be the right thing for their families.  It’ll cover all the aspects of making that decision, from understanding whether homeschooling is legal in your area to how you’ll still be able to afford your mortgage; from whether you need to understand everything your child needs to know before you even begin to whether homeschooled children can get into college.  Right now I’m looking for a few people who are interested in this to help me pilot test the course – so you would take the course and let me know what you think of it, through email feedback or a phone conversation with me.  In exchange for your opinions I’m offering a steep discount – the cost for the pilot will be $99, which will be a 50% discount on the full price of the course once it’s finished.  If you’d like more details, with no obligation to sign up, do send me an email at jen@yourparentingmojo.com. I should probably also mention that I graduated from my master’s program; for those of you who haven’t been following along since the beginning I launched this podcast as a way to share some of the information I was learning as I worked toward a Master’s in Psychology focused on Child Development.  So I’m all done with school – again, for now, at least – although I should note that I reserve the right to go back and get a third master’s in Education in the not too distant future if I decide it’s warranted.  But anyway, here’s my celebration for the one just finished: yay!.  That’s more celebrating than I’ve done for any of my previous degrees, so I hope you enjoyed being part of it. Moving swiftly on – I wrote my thesis on the topic of “what motivates unschooled children to learn?”.  Unschooling is a specific kind of homeschooling where the parent doesn’t directly teach the child anything (unless the child specifically requests it): instead the child is permitted to engage in self-directed learning, which means the child decides what he or she wants to learn and the parent supports the child in that effort.  Now before you say “that sounds like a crazy idea!,” let me tell you about some of the research on schools that I delved into as a foundation for my work, which I felt was needed before I started trying to understand an alternate model. I’d always assumed that the purpose of school is to help students develop to their full potential – and maybe to help even out some of the disparities in circumstances that separate people at birth.  I was actually really surprised to find that that wasn’t at all the case.  We live in a capitalist economy.  And schools produce the workers for that capitalist economy.  It’s the schools’ job to turn out workers capable of participating in this capitalist economy, so they can produce goods for people to buy, so the employers can keep making profit.  To do this, the school system uses grades and test results to determine individuals’ position in the system that they will find themselves in once they graduate.  An Austrian philosopher called Ivan Illich pointed out that “the pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.  His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value.” There is a close correspondence between the hierarchical nature of a workplace and the hierarchical nature of a school; a student has about as much power in a school as a worker does in the workplace.  The extrinsic motivators of grades and approval from teachers (as well as the threat of failure) closely mirror the external motivators in the workplace – positive performance reviews and increased wages (as well as the prospect of unemployment).  The highly rule-governed world of high school mirrors the type of supervision a blue collar worker can expect to receive; the freedom from continual supervision in elite colleges mirrors the work environment of white collar workers, while moderate amount of freedom granted to students in state colleges and community colleges reflects the amount of supervision people in low-level technical or supervisory roles can expect in the working world. It’s a bit depressing, isn’t it?  As a product of the school system myself, who didn’t learn to think critically at all until about age eighteen – and that was something I stumbled on when I realized that my psychology teacher was telling us about one theory one day and another the next day, presenting each as fact, and I said “wait, didn’t the guy from yesterday say the opposite?”  I did well in what would generally be called “elite” schools, so I have the luxury of doing the majority of my work while sitting on my couch at home because I have “earned” this right.  Yet I am, to some extent, trapped in this role by a hefty mortgage in a high-cost-of-living area and the trappings of middle class life. I want to be clear that I don’t think anyone is conspiring against us.  I think that the majority of teachers go into teaching because they want to help children.  And the majority of people working in companies that contribute to things like the Common Core standards (because a lot of companies do have a lot of stake in developing the Common Core standards) don’t have nefarious interests; they’re just doing what they’re supposed to do, which is to make money for their company, and the individuals involved probably think they are doing something to help children as well.  But these individuals are working within that system that is all about creating workers for the economy, and is not at all about helping individuals to achieve their own personal goals. And the school system is really great at one thing: preparing children for the kinds of jobs that existed in the U.S. between about 1880 and 1960, in the height of the manufacturing era when factories needed people to sit in a row and churn out widgets that looked exactly like the widgets their neighbor was making.  But in a world where employers look for leadership, the ability to work in a team, communication skills, problem-solving skills, and a strong work ethic, the memorization of facts starts to look markedly less important.  Even now, the system is not designed to help children achieve their learning goals.  I read a great article in The Atlantic describing how the school system doesn’t want to change, because it serves the needs of its adult stakeholders quite well – both politically and financially.  Politicians find schools useful for providing placement opportunities for important constituents, the means to get favored community and business programs adopted and funded, and patronage hires for individuals who have performed some kind of favor for the politician.  Politicians get support from teacher’s unions, who are among the top spenders in politics, and who can get a person elected or stop a person they see as being unfavorable to the union from being elected.  The unions want more money and power which means getting more members, and to get more members they need happy members, and to get happy members they need to help members get what they want, which includes job security, pay related to seniority rather than performance, less work, and early retirement with pension and healthcare.  So as Joel Klein writes in The Atlantic: “whether you work hard or don’t, get good results with kids or don’t, teach in a shortage area like math or special education or don’t, or in a hard-to-staff school in a poor community or not, you get paid the same, unless you’ve been around for another year, in which case you get more. Not bad for the adults.”  Klein thinks that three things are necessary to make schools successful: rebuild the entire K-12 system on a platform of accountability, attract more top-flight recruits into teaching, and use technology very differently to improve instruction.  I have no objections at all to attracting and hiring better teachers, and I think there is the potential to use technology to improve instruction although Klein admits that he is now paid by the News Corporation to work on exactly this, so it would be more surprising if this topic *didn’t* make his top three.  My main objection to his proposal is to rebuild the K-12 system on a platform of accountability, by which he means getting children to take standardized tests and tying teacher pay to children’s performance on those tests.  In my pre-Master’s days before I started researching this topic I would see news articles on the Obama administration’s Race to the Top and think that tying teacher pay to student performance sounded like a good idea – why *wouldn’t* you pay teachers better when their students get better test scores?  Then when I started to learn more about this I realized *how* some teachers were achieving better test scores – they were sacrificing real, deep learning on subjects the students were interested in in favor of simple fact memorization to improve student test scores. Finland has taken the opposite approach, professionalizing teaching requiring a master’s degree for entry into the system, paying new recruits more (unlike the system in the U.S. which pays new teachers horrifically badly and back-loads the compensation into the early retirement and pension with health benefits for those teachers who hang on for 25 years even though they’re burned out and just going through the motions), and giving teachers a great deal of freedom to determine what they teach and how they teach it.  Finland’s children are only tested once, at the end of high school, but when they are tested they far out-score American children.  For several years Finland was at the very top of international league tables of student performance, although those numbers have dropped a bit in recent years as they go through a period of budgetary pressure. Finally, the more I learned about standardized testing, the more I realized that standardized testing isn’t a very good way to assess what children know.  Firstly, it’s possible that the tests used to assess children’s performance may be biased against poor, non-White children because they tend to require a set of skills and knowledge that is more likely to be possessed by children of higher socio-economic backgrounds.  Secondly, the socio-economic gap is widened because children from rich families get test preparation outside of school, which children from poor families cannot afford.  Thirdly, standardized tests tend to measure, as much as anything else, a child’s ability to take a standardized test – which is usually a different skillset from that needed to engage in deep learning and critical inquiry.  In fact, researchers at the RAND Corporation looked at standardized tests from seventeen states – and picked the states whose tests are regarded as the most demanding.  0% of students were assessed on deeper learning in mathematics, 1-6% were assessed on deeper learning in reading, and 2-3% were assessed on deeper learning in writing through these tests (Yuan & Le 2012).  Fourthly, many educators are leaving the field because they are frustrated by the difficulty of trying to produce high quality teaching in a political environment that prizes test results above all else.  Fifthly, it is especially the teachers of struggling children who are affected, as these children are branded “failures,” along with their teachers, when required test outcomes are not met (Kohn 2004).  So who are the main beneficiaries of increased reliance on testing?  Well, the companies that produce the tests for one.  Standard & Poors, the financial rating service, has been contracted by Michigan and Pennsylvania (to the tune of $10 million each), to publish the performance of every school district in a state, based largely on test score results – and on the assumption that test score results are an appropriate metric of school performance.  But Standard & Poors has a vested interest in this conclusion: it is owned by McGraw Hill, which is one of the largest creators of...