Poverty and Public Education: a summary

Second in a series

In my last post I promised a look at poverty and its effect on education.  It was an ambitious promise.

What is the national narrative about poor students and schools today? Why is the push toward more accountability in schools adversely affecting poor students, when part of its goal was to make sure no child was left behind?

I’m going to attempt to tackle the first question today.

Some facts about our current situation: poor children, for the most part, do badly on state standardized tests, the current measure used to judge the value of our schools. The stakes couldn’t be higher: under NCLB (No Child Left Behind), low scores on state standardized tests brought sanctions and mandates.

Today, many states have NCLB waivers protecting them from those sanctions, but test scores still initiate scrutiny from state departments of education; teacher evaluations are tied to test scores now, and some states have issued “school grades” drawn almost entirely from test scores. (The impact of this grading system is on more than just the schools. Want to buy a house in a district that has two Fs, three Ds and a C? If you have a family, are thinking of starting one, and can afford to pick and choose, the answer is no.)

Test scores are still thought to be the gold standard of school district quality; in truth, they are only an accurate measure of income level of district families. Study after study has shown that when you compare standardized test scores of kids in similar socio-economic backgrounds, you see that the scores are similar from one school to the next. School quality -- however you define that -- makes no difference to the test scores.

So what does poverty have to do with public education?

This short blog post from Matt Bruening contrasts unfair, mistaken notions about poverty and education, with the real effects of poverty on children’s success in schools. The bullet points on the list are interesting; Bruening inventories the popular theories about why poor kids do badly in school:

1. Genetics. Poor kids just aren’t smart. (Both he and I say, BZZZT. Wrong.)

2. Poor parenting. Bruening summarizes deficit thinking pretty well in this paragraph: “The conditions of poverty create a subculture with its own socialization, behaviors, and attitudes. That culture then transmits itself across generations, which accounts for why poor kids remain poor, and might therefore also account for why they do worse in school.”

That seems like a reasonable viewpoint, and it may sometimes be true, but whenever we form a stereotype in our minds, and approach individuals with those stereotypes, we are in danger of making hurtful assumptions. Why can’t we regard all students as individuals, with strengths of their own?

On the other side is the thought that “...poor parents are poor ...because they are lazy, stupid, and otherwise self-destructive. The same thing that causes them to be poor — these behaviors — is what causes them to be bad parents, and therefore what causes their kids to not do well in school.”

“Blaming the poor for being poor” is a very convenient notion, and comes packaged with a handy way of dismissing larger economic and social problems.

The most constructive way to regard the impact of poverty on parenting is to pay attention to the next bullet point:

3. Effects of poverty. “...economic instability, deprivation, risk, stress, and neighborhood effects that accompany poverty best account for why poor students do not perform as well.”  In other words, it is poverty itself that is the enemy of learning.

Bruening also states that poor kids live in circumstances that make psychological, developmental and cognitive difficulties more prevalent than their better-off peers.

4. Bad Schools. In his final point, he tackles the idea that spawned the Education Reform movement: “...schools in poorer areas are underfunded, mismanaged, and attract lower-performing teachers. As a result, poor kids do worse in school.”

Bruening says, “...when you control for socio-economic background, students that go to the same schools and very different schools tend to perform very similarly. If the schools are what make the difference, this is not what you would expect. Additionally, intense and widespread efforts at reforming schools and teaching models have had little to no success at improving the educational achievement of poor students.”

I had to ask a few people what all this meant, as my mind doesn’t wrap around statistics very well. If you have the same difficulty as me, perhaps multiple answers will help you too!

Laura Faith Tallant: “It just means that no matter which school they attend, across the board, students from poorer socio-economic backgrounds always perform poorer than their more affluent peers. And that the location and style of education doesn't affect this factor.”

Mark Moran: “It means that students with similar socioeconomic backgrounds show similar performance in school, regardless of where they go. By "control" they mean they only compare students with similar backgrounds so that it is removed as an explanatory factor.”

Elaine Walker “1) we removed socioeconomic status as a influencing variable, and found that kids perform about the same at very different schools. 2) thus, this type of research attempts to "prove" that socioeconomic status is one of the most important variables predicting future success -- not matter what kind of school they kids go to. So, in other words 3) socio economic status is more important, in general, than the quality of a school in predicting future student success. In middle school language we'd say ‘money trumps everything’”

It means, in essence, that statistics bear out the premise that socio-economic status is the single biggest factor contributing to students’ performance at school.

In different ways, various interest groups and stakeholders in the area of education are trying to fix the wrong problem -- at least, promote the wrong definition of the problem, so that they can sell the wrong solution. Teachers don’t cause poor students to do badly. Nor do poorly-funded schools. Poor genes and bad parenting are inflammatory and essentially useless non-starters. It’s poverty that makes poor kids do badly in schools.

More than ever schools and districts are responding to the high stakes of standardized tests by focusing on how to raise the test scores of our poorest students. In my next post I’ll address the second question: Why is the push toward more accountability in schools adversely affecting poor students, when part of its goal was to make sure no child was left behind?

Ruby Payne and Deficit Thinking

First in a series

School districts including mine are looking for ways to combat low achievement among our poorer students. This problem is so intractable that anyone offering wisdom and advice, who appears to have done some serious study on the issue, will be grasped by teachers and administrators for whatever wisdom is available. For ten years, Ruby Payne has been a major voice in guiding teachers and school districts through waters inhabited by poor people.

Ruby Payne’s seminal book, “A Framework for Understanding Poverty”, endeavors to provide educators with strategies for teaching children from poor families. 

But something happens when you try to do that. You take a snapshot of a classroom and you analyze what you see; you figure out what needs to be done to rearrange what is seen in that picture, and you advise people to do those things. But when you try to effect change based on a snapshot, you get it wrong. You get it so wrong that you do damage to kids, families, schools, and communities. 

Just as politicians are taught not to accept the premise of a question, we can't accept the premise of that snapshot. We have to examine it.

On the surface, it’s pretty simple, even if it seems impossible to solve: middle-class and wealthy kids do better on state standardized tests. They must be better equipped for classroom learning than their poor classmates. So let’s fix those poorer kids, make them better. Surely that is part of our job.

However, scholars, educators and public education activists have been attacking Payne’s work for years. There is a term that brings together the opposition to her framework: deficit thinking.

"Deficit thinking is a pseudoscience founded on racial and class bias. It “blames the victim” for school failure instead of examining how schools are structured to prevent poor students and students of color from learning”  -Richard Valencia, Dismantling Contemporary Deficit Thinking

It is important to focus a bright spotlight on deficit thinking now. On a national level, we are seeing an education movement toward learning that is pushed by standards and enforced by testing. This is not a trend; it is a tsunami. It has crashed over public education and left in its wake a horrific disaster.

In my next few posts I’ll try to make sense of America’s attitudes toward poverty and education -- a big subject about which Ruby Payne’s analysis is possibly the most popular, and most wrongheaded.

I'm going to try to tackle these topics:

•  What is the national narrative about poor students and schools today? Why is the push toward more accountability in schools adversely affecting poor students, when part of its goal was to make sure no child was left behind?
• What is Ruby Payne saying?
• What is Deficit Thinking, and how does it respond to Payne’s work?
• What’s the solution?

I have been collecting articles and research on both deficit thinking and Ruby Payne’s work. These are some of the sources I have found so far:

Dismantling Contemporary Deficit Thinking: Educational Thought and Practice by Richard Valencia

Miseducating Teachers about the Poor: A Critical Analysis of Ruby Payne’s Claims about Poverty by RANDY BOMER University of Texas at Austin JOEL E. DWORIN University of Texas at El Paso LAURA MAY Georgia State University PEGGY SEMINGSON

University of Texas at Arlington

Unlearning Deficit Ideology and the Scornful Gaze:Thoughts on Authenticating the Class Discourse in Education Paul Gorski, Founder, EdChange

Assistant Professor, Integrative Studies

George Mason University

Addressing the Marginalized Student; The Secondary Principal’s Role in Eliminating Deficit Thinking, by Joseph Anthony Simone

That is the result of my first few passes through search engines. If you know of good resources on either deficit thinking, Ruby Payne, or the impact of high-stakes testing on disadvantaged communities, email me or leave a comment here.

Part Two

Why am I on the school board?

Every time I walk through the doors of our schools to attend a meeting of the district Board of Directors, I feel myself start to compromise my beliefs. Sometimes I stick my face in my phone as I walk down the halls toward the meeting room, trying to hold on to those principles, as though the phone was my lifeline to them and not just to the people with whom I share them; a tool to avoid losing sight of what I believe and know to be right, as I sit as one of eleven members of the governing board of my school district.

The status quo of any school system is a powerful thing. Familiar, even comforting, it induces a kind of nostalgic haze over otherwise well-honed minds. Never mind that what we see in classrooms now is the result of a twisted, compromised history of education and not the result of a natural evolution of practices intended to bring out the best in all children.

The status quo in public education -- teachers defining what is to be learned and students endeavoring to learn it -- is what we all know.  Most of us believe it cannot and should not fundamentally change.

So as I feel the warm glow that spreads as I listen to reports by administrators, teachers, even students -- how hard everyone is working, how caring they are about children, how they genuinely want to find a way for all kids to be the best they can -- it’s very simple to start to compromise. It’s not that I don’t believe what they say; it’s all true,  even admirable, so I listen and feel the resolve slipping away. How else could we do it? I ask. This is good. It’s not perfect, but it works.

Here are some of the many things I try to hold on to:

• Learning is a consequence of experience. We all learn, all the time. What a struggling student is learning is that learning is a struggle. Difficulty, struggle, are not bad things if they lie along a path that students have chosen.

• The basics are learned more reliably while kids develop their own passions and interests than when they are taught in dry, tasteless and disconnected learning tasks.

• Kids in higher income or educated households do better in the current learning system. They are more likely to move on to more interesting projects and learning experiences while the strugglers stay behind. This can ultimately be called discriminatory. (This is a result of deficit thinking.)

• If we truly believe all students have an equal ability to learn, we would design our learning systems so that there is no need for failing grades, repeated years, or summer school to make up for what was not learned. While failure is essential to the learning process, a system should never communicate to kids that they are failures. When you give a kid an F or the equivalent, that is what they hear: I Am A Failure. 

• Focus on kids' strengths rather than their weaknesses, and all their skills will strengthen.

• Quality of life right now matters for kids just as much as preparation for their lives later on.

• The solution is democratic education. The solution is for every child to be in control not only of his or her own learning, but of the environment in which he or she learns. Equal citizenship between adult and child can produce learning environments where all children can find satisfaction and fulfilment in their lives.

   

Even when I successfully hold on to those principles, it isn’t easy to know when to speak and when to be quiet at these meetings. I often feel a little like I’m a stranger on Mars. What I know doesn’t seem to apply, doesn’t even seem relevant  to public education; as though I’m sitting in a room full of people who all seem familiar to me, but don’t speak my native language.

We talk about finances. We talk about policies. Some of them affect students directly, and some don’t. We hear about situations arising with the physical plant, usually after a solution has already been found.  Bus problems. School nutrition programs.

I might pick and choose, decide on one or two things at each meeting about which I can make some points, and the rest of the time allow the system to function as it will. I doodle my way through the reports. It helps me focus. Or I take notes if I want to try and formulate a response or a comment.

We spotlight pilot classrooms, we hear from teachers. We hold expulsion and grievance hearings. We talk about our transition to a standards-based system.

It is this last issue that makes my job the hardest. This is the effort my district and districts around Maine are making to change the structure of teaching and learning. The reasons why this effort creates difficulty for me are more than I can articulate here. Suffice it to say that it creates a sea change in how things operate in our classrooms without touching on any of the bullet points above. It takes a neat and legislation-driven end-run around the critical issues of teaching and learning. As long as we accept that learning should be driven by standards and enforced by testing, we can’t hit any of those bullet points. As long as we acquiesce to the questionable custom of adults deciding for children what they should learn and when, we can’t touch the change that kids really need right now.

So why do I continue on the school board?

More important, why should you consider running for your school board?

Friends who have served with me, then gone on to other things, say, “I don’t know how you still do it.” Actually, I have long been resigned to the fact that I do not do my best work at the board table. As long as I believe my audience is drumming their fingers and letting their minds wander; as long as I am aware that while I’m speaking, my superintendent is formulating responses intended to deflect and disprove, I’m going to fumble and falter while getting to the point. I know this about myself. I’m working on it.

Actually, I love it. I’m generally not Ms. Happy Fun Girl by the time the meeting is over (although during the meetings I do crack more jokes than most of my colleagues) but I am fully engaged while I’m there.  

I have been studying issues of learning and the public education system every day for a long time. I’ve collected a group of people from all over the Maine and the US who believe what I believe. Their support gives me confidence; their work shows me that what I dream of for kids is actually possible; their battles are the same as mine. It has taken me ten years to understand what my role in school board meetings is. I’m there to cut through the power of the status quo and bring up the simply and beautiful concept of what can be. 

What lessons can be learned from student failure?

(I wrote the following comments for a school board discussion of the high rates of student failure at our high school.)

To understand failure, we have to define what we mean by learning. I’d like to pull back and put learning and failure in a context that may be unfamiliar to you, but bear with me.

If we agree for the moment that learning is a consequence of experience, then we can also see that learning is effortless. In other words, the brain turns on, therefore the brain learns. It doesn’t turn off because teaching has stopped, or because content is difficult. It is simply not learning that which is being taught, or that which is being purposefully “learned.”

“We are learning all the time, so anything we engage in we learn about, provided we are interested and not confused. Anyone reading is learning about reading. Anyone reading an historical book is learning about history. Anyone engaged in a task involving mathematics, geography, astronomy, carpentry or cookery is learning about those things. How much they learn and what exactly they learn depends on whom they are doing those things with and their perception of themselves and of what they are learning about. They are learning through experience.” (Frank Smith, The Book of Learning and Forgetting)

When students “fail,” learning has not stopped...it has simply gone wrong. What a struggling student is learning is that learning is a struggle. Smith again:

“What is not recognized [in traditional education] is that learning is never absent, and that students who fail to learn what teachers are expected to teach them are nevertheless learning. They learn that they cannot do what is being taught.”

Or put another way,

“If there is no interest or comprehension learning may still take place but with more difficulty and what is also inevitably learned is that the task or subject matter is uninteresting, incomprehensible and not something anyone would normally do.”

The common red flags for learning that has “gone wrong” is confusion, anxiety and boredom.

"Because of the way they are trained and expected to teach, teachers often believe that it is possible for students to learn something even though the students don't understand it or aren't interested in it--provided they try hard enough, of course.  But we can only learn from activities that are interesting and comprehensible to us; in other words, activities that are satisfying. If this is not the case, only inefficient rote-learning, or memorization, is available to us and forgetting is inevitable." 

But with interest comes learning.

“Learning is far more likely with an interested student and demands that teachers promote interest are less liable to be reduced to fragmented, decontextualized and testable units than lists of specific knowledge and skills.”

This is just a taste of a different way of thinking about learning. If we believe all children are able to learn, and we create a system based on that belief, then we would not see failure. We wouldn’t see it as a result of assessments and testing; and the children in our schools wouldn’t have the knowledge of themselves as “failures.” We would see the ongoing process of our children, growing and developing, engaging with the world and with knowledge, all on an equal footing despite their differences.  

I once said to an administrator, “There can be a system of education that is based on student strengths.” She responded, “If we do that, how would we find their weaknesses?

This question reveals the administrator’s philosophy and approach to education. It is based on fear. We all feel fear with respect to our students, and our children. If they don’t learn what we tell them to learn, no matter how difficult,

• They won’t be able to support themselves.
• They won’t have any “work ethic.”
• They’ll have to rely on public assistance.
• They won’t be able to solve the world’s problems.

We need to turn the fear off, for good. I submit that any approach to education that is based on fear or in response to fear be summarily discarded. It’s not doing kids any good; it’s not doing society any good. Because the result of having kids learn stuff they do not value,  they don’t feel connected to, that they don’t comprehend, is that the learning, as explained above, will go wrong. All because adults are afraid of the consequences of them not learning it. So we are in our own way.

I have heard all the stories about teacher-wizards who, when “forcing” kids to learn such arcane subjects as Shakespeare, were able to light a candle in their students’ imaginations. In the end, those children loved the Bard, their whole life long.

My question is, do you really think that is true of all kids in all lessons they are unwilling to learn?

And what is lost when we redirect them away from the interests and passions they may already have?

Public schools are great bastions of something called deficit thinking, in the sense of kids being there to be filled with the knowledge and skills that they lack. My theory is that learning goes better and that more is learned when we build on strengths.

Deficit thinking, however, is also a phrase that has been used since the 60s to define a way of thinking about race and class in school. We are nearly monochromatic in our schools here in Central Maine, but we certainly have class distinctions and lots of poverty in our area.

Richard Valencia, author of Dismantling Contemporary Deficit Thinking, offers this definition:

“Deficit thinking, an endogenous* theory, “blames the victim” for school failure rather than examining how schools are structured to prevent poor students and students of color from learning.”

*Endogenous: having an internal cause or origin.

I am still working on coming to a deeper understanding of deficit thinking.  It is simple enough, however, to be aware that if some students find the learning experiences we provide “more difficult,” then, according to Frank Smith above, it is learning that has gone wrong. We talk often about our poor kids and what they need:

"The dominant theoretical explanation for disproportionate school failure of the poor and the minority was “accumulated environmental deficit”—that is, students entered school with a build-up of handicaps incurred in early formative years that would be irreversible unless significant action was taken when children were very young…. If, however, intervention begins early enough the child can recover from the lack of intellectual stimulation at home and the dearth of language…. The compensation for the deficits that are hypothesized to have occurred before a child enters school results in the leveling of the playing field giving everyone an equal chance at a desirable future."  --  Valencia

If there is a cultural difference between some poor students and better-off ones, is it assumed they have to leave their culture in order to succeed? If some students have experienced financial hardship and stress, is it assumed that nothing was produced in that deprived home that gave the child something worth developing?

A strengths-based learning environment “levels the playing field” in such a way that neither identity nor culture is lost.

When I first started exploring the idea of deficit thinking, I had no idea that it’s most notable detractor (Richard Valencia) had the same solution to public education as I do...but it does make sense! I conclude with his words on what we need to do to fix deficit thinking, put an end to student failure, and give all students the support needed for success:

“...we offer an alternative to deficit thinking in education, namely “democratic education.” We warn that unless schooling can meet the requirements of democratic education , deficit thinking will continue to exist and if anything, grow. We propose four requirements of democratic education: (a) providing that kind of knowledge that will enable every student to engage equally in an informed debate on every generally recognized important social and personal issue; (b) guaranteeing everyone equally the particular rights of freedom of expression (which includes the right to express unpopular political beliefs , and to disagree with constituted authority, including the teacher), specified rights of privacy, due process that includes presumption of innocence, trial by independent tribunal, and protection from cruel and unusual punishment, and freedom of movement; (c) providing everyone the opportunity and the skill to participate with equal power in all the decisions that affect one’s life; (d) providing everyone equal encouragement in all of society’s legitimate activities. Each of these four features of democratic education (knowledge; rights; participation; encouragement ) has specific relevance to different aspects of deficit thinking, which we examine closely."

Frank Smith was a reporter, editor, and novelist before beginning his formal research into language, thinking, and learning. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard and has been a professor at schools in Canada and South Africa. He has published twenty-one books and many articles on topics central to education.

Richard R. Valencia is Professor of Educational Psychology and Faculty Associate of the Center for Mexican American Studies at The University of Texas , Austin.

The Governor's Grades, Part II (The Travesty Continues)

Quick thoughts on the Morning After:

If student achievement can be shown (albeit in a flawed way) to be so low among high-poverty area schools, the only thing schools can do (since we can't give everyone jobs and health insurance) is change: move away from "education delivery" and toward education empowerment. In other words, create a school system where tests and scores are unheard of.

It is a cruel irony that poorer schools serve areas where the need for services is greater and the $$ is scarce. Michelle Rhee and her band of reformers insist that we stop "making excuses" for the poor performance of high-poverty schools--so they blame the teachers for those test scores.

That's not what I'm doing. We need services that help create stable home environments for kids, and we need to institute an educational philosophy that centers on the interests, strengths, enjoyments of kids. Help them find an identity outside of their SES. Create a system that doesn't show with every grade and assignment that they are the po' folks.

I'm also not saying all poor kids are bad students. In the Cooley Triad of Student Needs, you have to have an adequate income, stable family and an interest in education; all three and you can drop a kid into any school model and he/she will probably succeed. Two and you might do well too. But a stable family is IMHO most critically important. There are also outliers who can transcend their circumstances. I just don't believe in building a system or a philosophy around those outliers.

It takes money. Where do we get it? We shake our heads and grouse about the economy and the impossibly hard situation. But it's not rocket science. Billions upon billions are being spent on those damned standards and the high-stakes tests that enforce them.

Yes, that's where things really get ironic, right? We get an F as a result of the test-driven culture, which makes perfect sense statistically, as we have around 70% poverty according to the free/reduced lunch numbers. And the money that could help us do a better job by those kids is being poured into a system that makes it impossible for them to succeed.

Nice.

We can change this. If 6% of the kids at our schools opted out of testing, we would get an automatic F. That's like 25 kids at our high school. If we all did that, they'd have to throw out the numbers. 

They'd have to listen.

It's not that far out of our reach.

Join us.

Opt out of the tests. It's legal, and it won't affect your student's academic status. Find out more.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/OptOutMaine/

The Two Fronts

The battle for better public education has two fronts: the work to change the system, and to help those kids who are stuck in it now.  

The effort to change the system seems to be taking place in Maine districts that are moving to what we call the proficiency-based, or customized learning system. But we need to cast a very careful eye on what this change means for kids.

As the proficiency-based system unfolds in my school district, I become less convinced that it can really hold a key to creating a healthy education for all children. The effects of punitive measures for "not learning" are, IMHO, dire, both for those who appear to succeed and those who don't. This new system occasionally softens, but doesn't remove the worst aspects of the traditional model of public education.

To have the goal of students be the successful accomplishment of standards makes assessment more important than learning. I know all the arguments against that statement; I know how hard teachers are working to make that not be so. Just listen to the Twitter conversations among Maine teachers about the "science" of assessment! But the constant assessment is, and it always will be more important than learning, as long as we impose all of the same standards on all children regardless of their identities, their interests, comprehension and connection.

There are people who are working incredibly hard to make this system work. They believe in it deeply and defend it staunchly. They are trying, using all the tools they have, to take an assessment-driven system and make it look, sound, and behave like progressive, child-centered education. But it just won't scan.

Proponents of the proficiency-based system believe that in order for kids to be adequately educated, the same list of standards needs to be accomplished by all kids at just about the same time and regardless of interest and connection to the learning. This embeds in the system a fatal flaw, but public education has no other choice. These things are required by law and enforced by testing. The daily problem teachers face is: how to get kids motivated. But this is only a problem when their natural motivation is ignored; ignore it long enough and it will go away.

"The basics," those fundamental skills that we all believe kids must acquire in order to succeed in life, come when they have been made irresistibly interesting through students' activities. Public education is terminally topsy-turvy; you have to "learn the basics" before you get to do the fun stuff.

In my district both the middle school and the high school had special weeks where kids got to choose from a variety of fun and interesting things. At the middle school, my daughter got to work on puppetry and making solar cars. At the high school, my son got to do robotics, photography, and bridge design.

Those who had not finished the required standards did what they called "intensives." What's that? Can you guess? Catching up on unfinished standards. This probably seems right and natural on the surface. But it is punitive, and that is the way it will be taken by students. If you succeed in this system, you get to do cool stuff. If you don't, you don't.

What's wrong with this picture? Why does it have to be this way? Why does the system have to go against what would make kids happier, rev their engines, build self-respect from the accomplishment of really good work?

I think once again about Saul Kaplan's concept of connected adjacencies: rather than tearing down a flawed system, build a new one next door.  All kids need this option; those whose parents can homeschool or send their kids to a private school, and those whose families do not have that option. It has to be a community effort, with many families sharing the burden of providing a healthy education for their kids.

We need to think about two things: how to push back against this system and install one doesn't have directly or indirectly punitive consequences for "not learning;" and how to help the kids who are stuck in it now and are not thriving. Both endeavors need your help. 

Guns and Murder

Is "guns and murder" an appropriate topic of study in public school?

Recently I participated in a meeting of my district’s policy committee as we were developing a new policy on our basic instructional program. My district has been actively moving from what is called a “traditional” model of education to a “standards-based” program for a few years, and it’s necessitating some changes to our policies, one of the last steps toward full implementation of the new system.

Now, for my money, the only change that would significantly shift the paradigm from “traditional” to something new and better would be to shape student learning around their strengths, interests, and pleasures. The incessant clamoring to “bring the basics” back to student learning? We’re covered.  The “basics” are defined differently from adult to adult, but for some reason, everyone and their dog seems to think the learning of the multiplication tables is the most critically important task we can give our students. I’m willing to go further: you want basics? Reading, writing and math? Get kids involved in exploring the stuff they think about, talk about, and itch to explore. Give them an environment where they can make and create. Focus on who they are, each as individuals and collectively, as groups who gather around similar interests. The basics will happen.  It isn’t rocket science.

Well, actually, I’ve been told that rocket science isn’t really rocket science either; it’s rather simple when you come down to it. Put an engine facing down and a rocket facing up. Pack in enough fuel and a way to ignite it. Park a few people at the very top and try to attain orbital velocity. Bang. (Literally.) Rocket science.

How about this?

It’s not organic chemistry.

All of the scholastic achievers in my life have complained about organic chemistry. Empowering kids to learn is not organic chemistry; it’s more like rocket science: engine, fuel, rocket. Ignition, bang, liftoff.

So, back to my policy committee meeting.

My opinion of the newfangled “standards based” system isn’t all that high. I won’t go into why; you can read back in this blog.

Actually, since my last posts about my reasons for opposing the system, I’ve observed classrooms in three elementary schools and a middle school. I come out of that with admiration for teachers and principals working diligently to engage kids in learning the standards set down as important by the educational powers that be.  Some of them are doing great work; some of them are doing adequate work. All of them are working as hard as they can to engage kids in their learning.

None of them are empowering kids to do the learning that would be most meaningful to them.

So I have opinions about how we should shape a policy on our basic instructional program. I know my place; I’m one voice among eleven on our board, and we have collectively decided to pursue this road toward a standards-based system. We are all subject to laws on accountability, and we have very little wiggle-room, given the weight that has been given to teach the Common Core standards and be prepared for the tests that will demonstrate student “achievement.” So I’m not trying to stage an educational revolution in the policy committee room. I’m there mainly to be a pain in the ass, and try to insinuate some words into policy that give kids as much power as can be eked out of the system.

One instance of the replaying of my usual sentence, “Allow kids to follow their interests” provoked an outburst from one of the administrators around the table. “You know what kids in my school would want to study if we gave them the freedom? Guns and murder!”

I was taken aback and didn’t respond in the way that I knew, even then, that I should. I chickened out. I said instead, “Let’s not talk about the outliers as if they were the mainstream! Not everyone is going to want to study destructive subjects.”

What should I have said? Can you guess? I bet you can.

“Guns and murder? We can work with that. Want to raise the chances of kids being safer with guns? Let them study them. I wonder if you can get a plastic replica of a gun, one you can take apart and study its action and it’s mechanism. History. Famous guns. Guns of today. Gun laws. Write your position on gun control. Voila.

“Want to guarantee a kid won’t grow up to be a murderer? Let him study it. Study the Mansons. Study Gary Gilmore. Study violent death around the world. Study what happens when they get caught. Study what happens when they don’t.”

It doesn’t matter what they want to learn! I search my mind for stuff I really wouldn’t want a kid to study, and I fall upon pornography. I find I don’t have room in my mind for creating a course of study in that area. But I can’t think of another subject that you can’t make into something appropriate for school.

The thing is, this administrator doesn’t seem to know this. She didn’t know that the most important thing to give kids is your respect, and she didn’t know that the first thing you need to do to demonstrate that respect is to allow kids to study what they feel they most need to learn. Because learning what you want to know most doesn’t narrow your interests and your skills; it grows them. Pushing kids to learn stuff they don’t care about? THAT narrows learning.

Allow a kid to open his/her own doors, and more doors will open. Show a kid you respect what he feels he needs to learn most, and you will gain his trust. Then you’ve won the game. Continue to show that respect, and you will gain even more trust. “I”ll learn what you say I need to learn, because you have shown respect and supported my efforts to learn what I really want to know or the skill I feel I need to gain.”

How often do we allow kids in public education to get to that point? Exactly never. I mean, so seldom that it might as well be never. It can’t be proven that kids will respond badly to being given the freedom to learn because we simply have never tried it. All we’ve tried, in the lifetimes of kids who are in school now, is forced curriculum.

And in the standards-based system, where you are allowed to learn “at your own pace, and in your own way,” the same basic subjects are pushed at kids as under the “old, traditional” model. There is no education revolution here. This is newer, shinier coercive education.

There is occasional brilliance in our school district. Great teachers who inspire kids. Who work hard to get kids motivated (“motivating” being the process of first denying them the learning that they want, and then “getting them motivated” to perform tasks that are disconnected from their identities or interests. This demotivation process has been in operation since we first told kids to stop playing and come inside, sit at a desk and face the teacher).

But it’s no learning revolution.  Give the kid a chance to study guns and murder if he wants to, and you’ll create a learning revolution that is real.