Poisoning the Well

There was a time when I resisted conspiracy theories-"black helicopters" if you will--as the nonsense of a delusional, paranoid public that has watched far too many movies.

But the recent news out of Flint, along with other nefarious plans to profit off of children, have me thinking the worst.

As details emerge, the state level oversight of Flint has been astounding in its callous disregard for the people, and most especially the children, of Flint, Michigan.  At every level it appears that harm was both acknowledged and covered up.  The cleaner water of Detroit was offered at reduced costs more than once, and the Republican leaders refused the offers.

What were they thinking?  Not about children--or maybe at the least they thought: Who cares about THOSE children?

There is a pattern in this crisis and other presumed "crises" surrounding our children and their well being.

• Steps are taken which are harmful and based on shoddy claims.
• People closest to the issue complain of mistreatment, unfair practices, and real damage.  
• The complainers are targeted as whiners with a bias, lazy "takers," and are ignored, villainized and basically told to shut up.

There is another pattern: business is inhumane.  Balance sheets and data which focus only on profits and rising scores create a boot of tyranny on the neck of the American people.

The complaints about the quality of education are a direct result of a policy which distracts from the real reasons our students cannot achieve at the levels of some other countries and foists punishment on the victims of those policies.  

Teachers cannot teach a student out of lead poisoning, or poverty, or a difficult childhood where neighborhoods are in disarray, overworked parents are absent to work numerous low-paying jobs, and reliable, safe food and daycare are unavailable.

There are no miracles.  

But there is science.  And we do know what conditions produce healthy, inquisitive, engaged, inventive brains.  For the past thirty years, public policy has offered us the total opposite of a prescription for healthy development.

We are all Flint: victims of the crime of exploitation and greed on a grand scale.

Literacy is Empathy

The teaching of reading and writing goes far beyond imparting two very useful and necessary skills. Reading, of course, is basic to survival in our modern world (think: leases, contracts, small print on the credit card...) Writing, not nearly as much, but is clearly the skill that opens doors.

Not only is literacy the way up and out of poverty, developing these skills improves the world. Yes. They may even pave the road to world peace, saving the planet, eradicating hunger, and a host of other human-created ills.

All of these changes are possible because good readers and writers learn empathy along with their ABCs.

In order to read well (and with pleasure) the fluent reader conjures an entire world in their mind. Like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix we really are having a virtual experience.  We stand in someone else's shoes, have their thoughts, feel their feelings.  We even experience smells, excitement, fear, and love.

All this cognitive practice is transferred to the real world where mind-mirroring grows easier and easier after the accumulation of these virtual experiences.  It is no mistake that my poorer readers have a harder time sympathizing with their classmates. They've had less practice. Pleasurable reading is a long graduate course in understanding our fellow man.  Is it any wonder that the non-reading rabble in Medieval England enjoyed public hangings as spectacle?

And what about writing, reading's conjoined twin?  Writing is also an act of empathy.  Strong writers imagine an audience as they write.  Who will read this?  What would appeal to his or her taste? What does my reader need to know in order to understand my point?

And not only that, the strong writer is often a strong reader who has had years of practice negotiating virtual worlds across continents of imagination.  They need only conjure their own world, and then write it down.  Visualizing experience is the first step in showing rather than telling.

That's why we need to focus on creating readers who love to read, above all else. Even above STEM skills, because what use is engineering, science, technology, and math if you don't know (or have) humanity? And every test--even a math test--is a reading test first.

One day we will expend whatever it takes to create readers out of every child.  We know how.  We just need to commit. Moreover, we need to expand the time students have to learn to read and to learn to love to read. And following on the heels of that will be scores writers.

And one day, we will change the world.

More Joy...Less Stress

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is carrying a great burden." Philo, 1st Century.

"I grow old.  I grow old.  I will wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."  T.S.Eliot

School is back in session tomorrow.  With one semester ended and new courses beginning, it is deja vu all over again: first day of school.

The last post described my schizophrenic existentialism.  Survival mode means focusing on the details of the day and ignoring the larger picture as much as possible--which includes ignoring the utter lack of interest and passion among the seniors.  Age?  Or 12 years of testing mania at play?

My mantra for the fall was: "If nothing else, we are going to have some fun."  So....lots of smiling, laughing.

That is an old person's prerogative: just let the little things go.  We don't care so much anymore.  The trousers will be rolled.  Your paper is late?  No sweat.  We will work on a way to git 'er done.  Fell asleep in class?  You must be uber tired.  Sleep is probably better than what is going on right now. No breakfast?  Here's a granola bar.  Screw the no food, no drink rule.

Highlights from the fall where I was completely unaccountable and did not do my job collecting data and leading from the front of the room:

• Getting the chance to really get to know my students while wandering around the city library on a field trip.  Exploring the building, talking about favorite places to eat, laughing at the name of the old guy in the painting (it is a funny name).  You know, just talking?
• Joining in on a technically inappropriate joke in class.  But, hey, it was hilarious.
• Letting the kids interview me as practice before their interviews with other adults.  Talk about engagement.  Everybody sat up straight and joined in that day.  (This should tell us something about how kids want to interact with the grown-ups. They think we are kind of interesting.)  I gave honest answers. They mostly wanted to know what it was like when I was young, how I met my husband, stuff like that.  No one asked me about grammar....
• Helping the kids develop the questions for our British literature study.  (Again, not doing my job.) They were given the topic: The Evolution of the English Language.  They came up with doozies: What is English? Why do other languages borrow from English? When and where was the English language created? How was it influenced (and how frequently)?  How old is the English language?  How long did it take to develop?  How many countries and people speak English? We hung the questions up.  They knew the answers later.
• Putting kids in groups to read and share their own writing.  Many highlighted this as their favorite exercise.  They learned without me...
• Dancing to a students' rap music played through his phone until he was so disturbed by my old lady, white girl moves that he put the phone away (trousers rolled).  That's another day when I can say that every student was fully engaged...and laughing.  I didn't write him up.
• Watching kids explain their work to their parent/grandparent/guardian sometimes in Spanish or Bulgarian, on a conference night where I did not lead the conference. Don't I wish I spoke more than one language like so many of my students....?
• Hearing a student share a poem (written in 7 minutes) and enjoying the snapping and applauding from the kids after...followed by an instant evaluation: "You need to put that in the creative writing magazine!"  Who needs a gradebook? Who needs a teacher?
• The day we wrote about someone we were grateful to have in our lives. And then called them. And read it to them.  That assignment was never turned in.

So much of school is not kind.

We tend to rule from a deficit model:  start with 100 and take away whatever is not there.  We measure what you're missing, not what you came with.

We hold everyone to the same due date (for fairness) when what goes on outside and inside school is not really fair.

We sort kids into groups and everyone knows who the Bluebirds are.  We make the same rules that everyone must follow.  We ask everyone to pass the same (stupid) tests.

But some kids have more access than others.  Some have more support than others.  Some have more healthy food than others.  Why does school always have to have these "fair" rules when everywhere else the scales are tipped?

We'd be better off teaching and modeling some empathy or, perhaps, how to have some fun everyday.

Mantra for the spring:  "If nothing else, we are going to have some fun...."

Poverty Leaves Every Child Behind

• "What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?"  ran on the New York Times Opinion page on January 18.  It reveals a study that occurred when the Cherokee Nation in North Carolina decided to distribute the largess of their new gambling casino to every family, no strings attached.  Luckily, 1,460 children in the group had already been under a study by Professor Jane Costello of Duke University Medical School. She was tracking incidents of psychiatric disorders among the group.  She had a baseline measure and was in the perfect position to track the effect of the infusion of cash, which eventually reached $6000 per family per year.

• Recently I heard a re-broadcast of the October 19, 2012 This American Life.  The theme that united the four stories were people or groups who managed to "get away" with something.  The fourth story was called "Pre K-O. "  It was about how the governor of Oklahoma managed to pass a law stipulating universal pre-school right under the noses of state legislators who might object to the intrusion of big government.  Now, of course, no one could imagine cutting the program.  A prominent businessman helped in the fight because he saw it as an investment that would save money in the long run.

The results in both of the above cases were immediate and lasting for children.  Measurable and economically rewarding things--sometimes astoundingly so--for both the state and the children began immediately.  The younger the child the more pronounced were the changes.

In the case of the Oklahoma pre-K instruction, teachers and superintendents saw an immediate change in student ability to learn and an increase in enthusiasm for learning, all observable in the first year following universal pre-kindergarten instruction.

In the case of North Carolina, it turns out that the reduction of stress on the Cherokee families resulted in a lessening of mental illness, an increase in on-time high school graduation, a reduction in crime among the young.  As the article states:

By age 3, measures of vocabulary, working memory and executive function show an inverse relationship with the stressors experienced by parents.

In both cases economists see the expenditures spent early in life as far out-weighed by the savings to society.  It is good business for a state to spend money on its youngest citizens.  It saves lots of money down the road.

The evidence that expenditures on children is good for the economy and future investment of resources in social programs--prisons, mental hospitals, addiction programs--has been indisputable and well-known even before Richard Nixon vetoed the Economic Opportunity Amendment in 1971.

Here is some of what he said on that occasion:

Though Title V's stated purpose, "to provide every child with a full and fair opportunity to reach his full potential" is certainly laudable, the intent of Title V is overshadowed by the fiscal irresponsibility, administrative unworkability, and family-weakening implications of the system it envisions.  We owe our children something more than good intentions.

Family weakening.  Pish-posh.  The North Carolina study reveals that the real weakening of families is caused by the stressors of poverty.

Nixon, however, was right about something: we do owe our children something more than good intentions.

The No Child Left Behind Act has been overshadowed by both fiscal irresponsibility (billions of taxpayer dollars diverted to testing companies), and administrative unworkability (billions of taxpayer dollars diverted to the collection of data).

It has been a very bad intention -- shifting public dollars into private hands -- cloaked in the Orwellian language of a truly good intention.  We have been duped.  Repeatedly.

Dismantle the testing industry and divert the dollars to enriching the lives of our youngest, poorest citizens.

Statistics, like the ones used in the two situations above, have proven that the past decade has been reckless spending with zero results.  If we shift those dollars to shoring up our 16 million children (22%) living in poverty,  the impact will be immediate and long lasting.

And we can start to feel good about ourselves again.