Posted by: cornvillenutmeg | July 30, 2012

Teacher Testing

Mean SAT Score for reading and math tests, by year

Mean SAT Score for reading and math tests, by year (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

     Remember Judge James C. Chalfant and how he has instructed the Los Angeles Unified School District  to begin to use students’ academic achievement as part of its teacher evaluation system?  How do you think that might work?

     Well, you might say, grades.  Pay teachers based on how many of their students end the year with As and Bs.  Or go about it the other way;  any teachers more than half of whose students get Ds and Fs don’t get a raise.  Yes?  No?

     No.  Anyone who has taken a general psychology course knows that even the most scrupulous, assiduous, and honest teacher will over time – and not that much, in fact – begin to inflate the grades he gives his students. 

     Maybe standardized tests?  Well, okay, but don’t expect  anyone who knows much at all about research and statistics to give her stamp of approval.  Here is just one tiny thing the College Board website says about scores.  “Average (or mean) scores are based upon the most recent SAT scores of all students of a particular graduating class.”  Now, of this I am sure:  any teacher of more than, say, seven years experience out there will swear on his or her pension that from one year to the next, entire classes, identified as their year of graduation, are perceptibly different in any number of ways – behavior, intellectual curiosity or almost complete lack thereof, friendliness, energy or lethargy – one from the next. 

     So you take the SAT scores for Ms. Journeyman’s Juniors for 2010 and 2011 and 2012.  First you might see that the average scores are different by a significant percent.  Then you might see that Ms. Journeyman’s students’ average scores themselves were different during those years by an even greater percent.  Oh, my, you may think, Ms. Journeyman has been slacking off!  Or, you might think you see that Ms. Journeyman is today a much better teacher than she was two years ago.  And you would likely be wrong no matter what those scores led you to believe!  What makes you think you can compare in any meaningful way the scores of one small group of juniors one year to the scores of another utterly different small group of juniors another year? 

     Should you mange to take your findings to an actual statistician, you might find yourself being asked where and under what conditions the tests were administered.  Were the three populations (the groups of students) given the tests by the same proctors?  In the same room?  At the same time of year?  Time of day?  And – watch out for this one – were the tests identical in every way?

     So what’s your answer, hmm?  Let me help you out.  No, I don’t know, maybe, yeah, I guess so;  and no, of course not because if you gave identical tests there would be an excellent chance that the answers to many of the questions would be known to an increasing number of test takers.  After all, these tests and their results are supposed to help colleges with the admission decisions so the motivation for getting really good scores might just possibly lead 85 % or more of potential test takers to take advantage of student entrepreneurs who would most certainly be collecting questions and answers to past tests.

     Pick a standardized test given to any population of students across an academic year and its uselessness in determining the worth of a teacher is a foregone conclusion.

     So, what are you going to do?  Hunh?  You need to create a test, by which I mean a test needs to be created by people who are trained test creators, which will measure what you want to know about how a teacher goes about plying his trade.  Therefore the first question must be, what do you want to know?

     How well the teacher is doing her job.  Good.  Now, what defines a job well done?

     How well or how much the teacher’s students are learning.  Okay. 

     May I assume what you mean by that would be on the order of, say, how much Algebra?  Chemistry?  French?  Yes?  Good.

     How do you find that out?  Hmm.

     Oh, wait, aren’t there tests out there that measure skills and knowledge and facility with things like math and science and foreign languages?  Yes, things like the PSAT, SAT, ACT;  you know, they call them standardized tests. 

     Oh, oh.  Back to square one, hunh?  Bummer.

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Posted by: cornvillenutmeg | July 25, 2012

Dress Codes

Yesterday (7/24/12)  in the Arizona Republic we found this:  “Blue hair, ‘extreme’ hairstyles, facial piercings, distracting tattoos and ‘excessive’ earrings are all prohibited under a new dress code in the Litchfield Elementary School District.”  Missing, as far as I could tell was a prohibition on wearing T-shirts that promoted alcohol, drugs, or inappropriate conduct.  Then I realized that this new dress code is really an amended dress code, and likely such T-shirts were already banned.

When it comes to dress codes, my guess is that most people are agnostic, for most people’s dress is largely dictated by what they do for most of the hours of a day.  A butcher wears a full length smock because he’d rather not stain his own clothing with the blood of cows, pigs, and lambs.  Investment bankers wears dark suits because of the feeling of sobriety and thoughtfulness they convey.  While it is likely that were an investment banker to show up for a day’s money-making in work shoes, jeans, and a pocketed T-shirt, his immediate supervisor would suggest he not bother to turn on his computer till he had found appropriate habiliment, there is unlikely to be a dress code in the Investment Banker Handbook to which the supervisor would refer his underling.

English: Example of a common dress code for ma...

English: Example of a common dress code for males in modern Western culture. Note that these designations are far from universal, but offer examples of standard and commonly-understood levels of acceptable dress. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Agnosticism in matters of dress is replaced, however, when it comes to parents of children in schools, public and independent.   That constituency is of two minds:  pro-dress code and anti-dress code.  Those who support dress codes including school uniforms cite any number of rational reasons for their position:  decency, discipline, order, harmony, egalitarianism, and money among them.  The anti-dress code side adduce comfort, freedom of expression, and superficiality, and not much else.

In schools that once had strict dress codes – jackets and ties, belts, socks, skirts, blouses, and so on – and now have relaxed their expectations for student appearance, anecdotal evidence suggests a concomitant relaxation of behavior.  In schools that have moved in the opposite direction, an improvement in behavior is reported.  So we might expect the amendments to the dress code reported by the Arizona Republic in the Litchfield schools will have an ameliorating affect on the behavior there.  Let us fervently hope and pray for just that change, for the dress code referred to is for the teachers of that system, not the students.

I’d just love to know what you think about that.

 

 

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Posted by: cornvillenutmeg | July 19, 2012

The Growing Sped

     Andrew Coulson is the director of the Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom.  In the Wall Street Journal  (7/10/12) he writes that “according to the latest Census Bureau data, special ed teachers make up barely 5% of the k-12 work force.”  The title of his op-ed was “America Has Too Many Teachers.”  He pointed out that since 1970 the work force in public schools has doubled while the number of students has only risen 8.5%.  Now obviously if you’re paying more than twice as many teachers to teach fewer than ten percent more students, it’s going to cost you a lot more.  Since there is no empirical evidence that the increase in the number of teachers has had any positive impact on student learning – as measured by things like test scores, graduation rates – why not just go back to having fewer teachers? 

     An interesting point, I thought, but it was that 5% figure that caught my attention.  Among us certified, dues paying or management fee paying (me) teachers, the belief about Special Education was that it ate up 25% of the overall cost of Public Education

     Now it may well be that Mr. Coulson is correct;  I have no reason to doubt that 5%  datum, but I assure you that the cost of Special Education is far, far greater and is getting more so.  While the number of certified, special education teachers is apparently minimal, there are myriad others who devote all or most or much of their time to special education students.  Eeach special education student comes with his own support team, sometime small, often large.  For instance, twice in my career I taught deaf students, sisters as it happened.  Both, of course, spoke American Sign Language.  I did not.  To assist teachers to communicate with them, each sister traveled from class to class with an interpreter whose salary was an item in the Special Education budget.  Another student had Asperger’s syndrome.  She was assigned an aide who attended classes with her.  Aides who attend classes are fairly common with  Special Ed students, as are tutors and note-takers.  Another former student suffered from MS.  By the time I had the pleasure, she managed very well  without her aide, but Special Ed did supply her with a laptop computer into which she could type a question or answer, which the computer would then “speak” for her.  Most Down Syndrome students attend mainstream classes, and all are accompanied by an aide.  I’m not saying in any way that all these supports are a bad thing, by the way; I’m just saying there’s more to this 5% than meets the eye.

     See, Special Education is pretty much owned by the Federal Government by virtue of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which used to be the Education for All Handicapped Children Act.  (I’m pretty sure that the latter didn’t get a lot of traction because the acronym is kind of bad sounding.  EAHC.  The best you can do with that is, “E-yack,” which I’m pretty sure is the sound a rare Maldivian shore bird makes during mating season.  IDEA is way cooler.)  For many reasons that would bore you, E-yack finally became IDEA in 1997, and we were off to the races.

     Let’s say you’re a teacher.  You want to talk to Mrs. X about her child, who happens to be a Special Education student.  That should be fairly simple.  As simple in fact as looking up Mrs. X’s number and calling.  And to be fair, sometimes that works out.  Mostly not, though.  Anything that happens with a Special Education student has to be documented, which is to say there are forms, and the forms lay out steps that must be taken and who must take them and who must know about those steps. 

     The first thing that happens at the beginning of a year is you get a list of all the special education students who will be in your classes.  And each of those students has his or her very own special education teacher (not to mention the para-professionals attached to the hips of particular special education students).  Each of those teachers will send you each week a form to fill out so that the Sped (to use the acronym that everyone in public education uses despite the fact that it sounds like a slur of some kind) teacher can keep up to date on the progress or lack thereof of each of his Sped students.  You’d think maybe this could be taken care of less formally not to mention better through a weekly conversation.  Perhaps so, but those forms are all part of the Federal Government’s due diligence in making sure that the Federal dollars being sent to that school for those Sped students are not being frivolously spent.

     So, instead of calling Mrs.  X, you make your comment on the form to Mr. Sped.  Now Mr. Sped may or may not relate that information to Mrs. X.  Sometimes Mr. Sped’s judgment is that since Mrs. X is prone to fits of rage during which she does less than nice things to her Sped child, passing on your, the mainstream, classroom teacher’s, comment is not the best idea.  Then again, Mrs. X is more than likely a very nice lady who cares deeply about her Sped child, so that comment does get related.  Next thing you know, you’re invited to a meeting.

     A meeting.  With you and the Sped teacher and the Sped child and Mrs.  X.  Not a bad outcome, right?  Well, maybe, except for no such meeting as simple as that is ever going to happen when IDEA is running the show.  The meeting must include an administrator, a guidance counselor, Mr. and Mrs. X, assuming there are one of each and further assuming both want to be there – their presence is not actually required but they are sent a notice of and invitation to the meeting, which necessitates the meeting being scheduled well in advance (and if you’re thinking that a meeting so long in the future might have a kind of diluting the affect on the concern you had that you wanted to discuss with Mrs. X in the first place, you’d be right).  Also at the meeting will be one or both the school psychologist and school social worker, the head of the Student Services for the school system, and the Sped student’s Sped teacher (and Sped aide should there be one attached to this Sped student).  And, any other of the Sped student’s mainstream, classroom teachers who might want to attend because they are all sent an invitation. 

     It will not surprise you the teacher that once the meeting gets rolling and the administrator who is running it explains why it has been called, and he turns to you to reiterate your concern from a month and half ago, your mind will be mostly fuzzy.

     Now think about the cost of special education.  In terms of cost per hour devoted to this one student, what’s your best guess?  And don’t forget that by the time that meeting is over, life is different for everyone because no meeting under the IDEA umbrella can be over until a written and copied and filed plan for dealing with the issue is made, written, copied, and filed.  And that plan will become part of that form Mr. Sped will send you to fill out each week.  And won’t you be sorry you ever made that comment?  And do you think you’ll be likely to make another one any time soon?

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Posted by: cornvillenutmeg | July 9, 2012

All You Need to Know about Evaluation

The seventh grade teacher I have mentioned before, Mr. Friedman, also provided me with the definition of hyperbole that guides me:  exaggeration in the service of truth.  So let me say that in what follows, I make use of hyperbole.

 

     The paradox that colors the notion of evaluating teachers is that in the world of public education, none of the constituencies directly involved are much interested in doing anything about evaluating teachers. 

     Teachers don’t really care about being evaluated.  One is either a good teacher, a mediocre teacher, or a bad teacher.  The good ones are pretty good to start with, and then they get better and better.  Why?  What they care about is doing good which is to say teaching well;  and that results in innovation, self-improvement, self-reflection, work days that stretch well beyond contracted time, and an all but masochistic tendency to keep trying in the face of resolute indifference on the part of students, parents, and administrators alike.

     The mediocre teachers are of two sorts:  the first don’t know they are mediocre;  they think they do a good job, and no one will ever convince them otherwise.  The second do know how ordinary they are but are nevertheless satisfied. 

     The news about bad teachers is even worse.  Happily, we can count on there being a handful who are soon so dissatisfied with their teaching lives that they move on to something else;  unhappily, that handful is a small one.  Another but considerable handful hang in just long enough to move into administration, where their bad ideas about teaching translate in no time at all into bad ideas about administration.  Sad to say, they do not experience dissatisfaction so tend to stay on and on and on, staining the lives of students and teachers alike.  The rest of the bad teachers do things like involve themselves in committee work.  They have the time to do that because they are not spending very much time on their teaching work, so to speak.  Union activity is also a place to look for bad teachers (which is not, I hasten to add, that teachers who are involved with their unions are all bad;  some are good, some more are mediocre, but they all misguidedly accept the mendacity that education unions have more than only the tiniest bit to do with teaching.  The bad ones who go the union route are looking for ways to distract from their badness.  The rest get very, very good at keeping a low profile, putting in 35 + years, and retiring at 70% or more of their top salary.

     Tax payers care about evaluating teachers, mainly from the perspective of at least wanting the steady increase in the taxes they pay into education to be well spent.  Interestingly though, tax payers in any given school district think that the teachers whose salaries they pay are delivering good value.  Here I do not exaggerate.  Let me quote briefly from Education Next, “The Public Weighs in on School Reform (W. Howell, M. West, P. Peterson), Fall, 2011:  “No less than 46% …give their community schools an A of B,…”  whereas nationally, that percentage is only 22%.  So while the grass may always be greener on the other side of the hill, the public school your kid goes to is way better than the ones your local taxes don’t contribute to.

     Students evaluate their teachers constantly, but the evaluations are utterly predictable and by and large worthless.  Good students – that would be the smallest group – value good teachers.  Average students value teachers who require minimal effort and reward that effort with good grades.  Bad students don’t like any teachers at all, but will tolerate those who demand the least of them.  So, just by the way, if you were thinking that evaluating teachers based on their students’ grades might be the way to go, forget it.  Go to a system at all like that, and you will end up with an honor roll that graphs like the trajectory of a space launch.

     If not grades, then how about standardized test scores?  Almost every state has its own program of testing, especially with the advent of No Child Left Behind (or, as my brother prefers to think of it, No Child Left Standing).  So there are those tests and surely a majority of high school students take the SAT or ACT.  How about evaluating teachers based on the scores from those tests?  What do you think about that, hmm?

     No, really, what do you think of that?

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Posted by: cornvillenutmeg | June 27, 2012

Stark, Staring Mad

      I am fond of my fondness for grammar, although I shock myself sometimes when I edit my own work to see what I have written.  I put it down to haste.  A pleasure I take from writing is the rewriting and revision I do.  The book I’ve written on Public Education, which I hope someday to hear good news about, I have worked my way through six times.  To my chagrin, each time I found new and silly errors that needed attention.

     I wish I had been fond of grammar from whenever my first introduction to it was, but then, I wish I had been fond of school, too.  As I have said elsewhere, my knowledge of grammar really came into being when I began to teach it.  Come to think of it, that’s when I began to like school.  My undergraduate college education did not begin well.  I left Boston College at its request mid-way through my sophomore year, returned about a year later, and then left again on my own before the second semester ended.  I didn’t get back to college until I’d been teaching for seven years.  To my delighted surprise, I liked that side of the desk just as much.  It’s fun to be a star pupil, not to mention so much easier when you are nearing forty and the majority of your classmates are under twenty.

     I think I write fairly well, sometimes even very well.  I’ve always had a facility with writing that I believe is both nature and nurture.  My mother and her siblings all enjoyed language both written and spoken.  Of them, six are published writers.  Of my many cousins, six that I know of are published, one prolifically so.  And reading, reading, reading was emphasized and encouraged and required in my mother’s house.

     As an English teacher of seniors (the school where I first taught went up to ninth grade;  they were the senior class), I was required to write recommendations for them as part of their applications for the prep schools most went to the following year.  I took that as a challenge and was often rewarded by notes from admissions directors thanking me for my illuminating and entertaining recommendations.  That was my first inkling about me and writing and the pleasure I might get from it.

     I began to understand better the connection between writing well and knowing grammar when I realized I was solving many revision troubles because I knew grammar so well and could see the grammatical relationship between how words should work together and how I might say better what I was trying to say.

     As a result, I don’t misuse lie and lay, amount and number, imply and infer, like and as, and I never claim to be disinterested unless that is what I mean.  I don’t mistake pore for pour or effect for affect, although it did take me until I was much too old to stop typing loose when I meant lose, and that only happened because my Aunt Jane told me she would never speak to me again unless I learned the difference.  I refuse to pretend that they and their can be used in any way but gratingly to agree with singular antecedents.  I rarely to the point of almost never misuse nominative and objective case pronouns.  I know the exceptions to the i before e rule, and the dropping the final e when you add ly rule.  And when I hear people who should know better say things such as, “That is just between my wife and I,” I say the word me aloud.

     To me, grammar’s relationship to writing and speaking is the same as that of cooking to good ingredients and following directions.  If you bake, you know what I mean.  The difference between “beat until smooth” and “fold together just until moistened” is the difference between serving your zucchini bread to guests or running out at the last minute to buy something, anything at the supermarket.

     Which is why Public Education’s condescending attitude toward teaching its students grammar as a discrete discipline frustrated me so when I was teaching and still today makes be stark, staring mad.

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Posted by: cornvillenutmeg | June 22, 2012

Underwater Vacuuming

Back in Connecticut, mostly on the hottest and muggiest of summer days, I would give passing and unserious thought to the idea of having a pool. Generally, however, living with a pool was something I considered only indifferently. That was before we moved to Arizona. Today, for instance, it is 107 degrees.

Our home in Arizona came with a pool so now I am a pool owner and thus a pool taker-carer-of. Twice a day or more I net out of the pool leaves, myriad insects, the occasional lizard or ground squirrel, and once a tiny, baby rabbit; and I vacuum the pool a couple of times a week.

This morning as I vacuumed, I was thinking about teacher evaluation. Are you wondering what could possibly connect teacher evaluation with pool vacuuming? Well, nothing obvious really. At first the thinking and vacuuming were independent activities. Pool vacuuming is something that has to be done slowly, very slowly, or else you mainly stir up the silt on the pool’s bottom causing the vacuum head to suck nothing but water. My pool is not large. Still, to do a reasonably good job takes a bit more than an hour, so plenty of time to think. When thinking isn’t going well for me, I begin to force it a bit. I guess that’s what happened this morning.

Teacher evaluation had been on my mind since I read about Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant’s instructions to the Los Angeles Unified School District to begin to use students’ academic achievement as part of its teacher evaluation system. In his decision, Judge Chalfant mentioned that the district’s current evaluation system seemed somewhat out of whack in that in 2009-10, 99.3% of Los Angeles teachers received the highest performance ratings while standardized test scores showed that 45% of students performed at grade level in reading and 56% in math. I suppose Judge Chalfant was suspicious. Can’t imagine why.

In graduate school I took two courses where everybody received an A. The first was offered at a teacher college, the second at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. The instructor of the first was satisfied if each student produced the required three papers – two short, one long – none of which he graded. There was no exam. The professor at Wesleyan told everyone half way through the semester that because we were all adults and graduate students and that he knew everyone was putting in A effort, everyone would in fact receive an A. It was a poetry writing course. I myself am not a poet, but I am an English teacher and so have taught poetry. I can tell you with assurance that not all poetry is created equal, and not all students put in equal effort. I can also state with certitude that not everyone in any group of students is deserving of an A. Nor are 99.3% of teachers.

 

During my time in a Connecticut high school, the system for teacher evaluation changed three times. Each iteration was more complicated. required more paperwork, and took more time away from actual teaching. None ever accomplished anything in terms of encouraging good teaching, weeding out bad teaching, or ameliorating mediocre teaching.

Of course, teachers came and went, but not once that I know of was a teacher’s contract not renewed for reason of incompetence. Teachers who left the high school either retired or moved on to another school. One left teaching altogether after her first year. She was a nice and pleasant young woman who, back in teacher college, should have been encouraged to consider almost any other profession. Had she not decided for herself to put her hand to some other labor, I am sure she would still be toiling at the high school, the teacher evaluation system there notwithstanding.

 

Now, as to vacuuming the pool and evaluating teachers: a good teacher comes to understand that her job requires steady and consistent pressure, and a deliberate and resolute pace – not so fast as to make things cloudy, nor so slow as to invite somnambulation. There are places in my pool where the silt accumulates thickly. Moving the vacuum head through them is instantly satisfying. A clean band appears behind the head. There are other places where I could allow myself to believe that what I’m seeing is a permanent stain rather than a light coating, especially on the curved sides of the pool which require a greater effort to hold the vacuum head tightly to the surface. A good teacher grows to appreciate not only the obvious successes, the discernible flare that registers deep in a student’s eyes when in a burst of comprehension something comes clear. But of greater consequence both for the teacher and student, a good teacher can make out the barely discernible, often minuscule changes that she knows will by year’s end add up to a child markedly more learnėd than the one who sat before her indifferent or even hostile in September.

A standard part of a teacher’s evaluation, no matter what the system, is classroom visits by a supervisor. Commonly, the supervisor sits unobtrusively in the back or at the edges of a classroom, mainly watching the teacher. From there neither the flare or the gradual is perceptible. Discovering the competence of a teacher from that perspective would be exactly like evaluating my pool cleaning efficacy through the window of my dining room. If you want to know if my pool is getting clean, don’t watch me, look at the bottom of the damn pool.

Certainly Judge Chalfant is correct to suggest that standardized test scores are an accurate measure for teacher effectiveness, but they are also determinatively limited. I’m not proposing a definitive solution here, only suggesting that common sense may help. How well did I clean my pool this morning? Look at the bottom. How well does a teacher teach? Maybe this will help. To begin, don’t employ – or if you can’t avoid it, don’t trust – a system to do the evaluating for you. Look at the students, look at their records, ask their parents. Spend a few days in a teacher’s classroom watching the students. Good teaching produces good students.

 

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Posted by: cornvillenutmeg | June 7, 2012

Cooperating and Collaborating, I

Public School teachers rightly feel they are not consulted on matters pedagogical.  The administrative gestures in that direction – faculty surveys, “communication opportunities” with principals, and “listening” meetings with superintendents – do nothing to assuage the feeling.  Teachers see themselves more as laborers in public education than professional educators.  Hence the chance to Cooperate and Collaborate on matters of policy can be alluring.

I make no claim that a team approach to work is not good.  I know the automobile industry, advertising, television, soft ware, and a host of others rely on teams to keep the flow of production steady and successful.  The thing to keep in mind, though, is that teams of professionals are assembled by private enterprise with the express purpose of improving things, producing things that will create wealth, which is to say, money.  What such teams are not are children arbitrarily or otherwise assigned to work together to complete a project related to the study of a novel, a period of history, a geometry theorem, an eco-system, or the g-forces exerted by the thrill rides at the local amusement parks (don’t ask).  Nor are they teachers summoned from the comfort of their classrooms and lumped together with others with whom, likely as not, they have most significantly in common their desire to be almost anywhere else.

I once had a student who despised group projects.  She felt she could do more and better work herself.  I agreed with her but kept that intelligence to myself.  Our problem, hers and mine, was our high school was deeply, soulfully, righteously committed to the twinned concepts of Cooperation and Collaboration, or to put it in my student’s terms, group work.  In fact, Public Education is so invested in the efficacy of Cooperation and Collaboration that teachers themselves are forever being forced to participate in small group work during faculty meetings, long and short.

In faculty meetings, long (when students are not in attendance;  known as staff-development days) or short (when students have gone home for the day;  blessedly not all that often), teachers sit with other teachers with whom they work and/or are friends.  Thus science teachers sit together, physical education teachers, counselors, and so on.  While these are clearly groups and reasonably small, administrators found that such groupings will produce more humor than problem-solving. 

Administrators  do what they can about that.  Most other approaches work only marginally better.  The approach with the most success requites administrators pre-select teachers for each group.  If the administrators know their faculty, they end up with perhaps three tables that take the task seriously, a handful who give it the old college try, and just a couple who produce mostly drivel but don’t distract from the effort of the rest.

Before there were laws the purpose of which are to eradicate Bullying, there were some children of all ages who picked on other children.  Schools dealt with that sort of thing well, not well, or somewhere in between.  That changed in the aftermath of  Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s homicidal rampage at Columbine High School with the discovery that Harris and Klebold has been picked on by some other students.  In time, the behavior of those students was called Bullying, and, beginning with Georgia in 1999, Anti-Bullying legislation began to be passed.  Today such laws exist in forty-nine of our fifty states, Montana being the sole exception.  Montana schools, however, by board of education policy, do have Anti-Bullying policies which are every bit as prolix as those of the states which do have laws.

Interestingly, there is no federal anti-bullying legislation, and that is apparently because the Federal Government figured out that The Office for Civil Rights could more easily dispatch its approximately 650 attorneys, investigators, and staff  to rattle their sabers in the lobbies of the state capitals.  No need for mussing or fussing with Congress and that tiresome legislative process

See, it turns out, if you are a bully, you are as likely as not to have violated any one of more of the following:  Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and/or the Age Discrimination Act of 1975.  While all of the above make money available to public schools, along with that money – surprise! – come conditions, requirements, stipulations, and the like.

As a response to ARS 15-431, the local high school here in the desert region of the lower portion of northern Arizona not long ago put in place and published in its student handbook its definition, policy, and procedures for dealing with Bullying.

In the handbook mentioned above one finds:  “Harassment/Bullying.  “Harassment and bullying of students is prohibited on campus and during school-related activities or circumstances” (italics, but not bolding, added).  Nonsense such as that last word is a regular product of Small Teacher Groups cooperating and collaborating on a task precious few give a hoot about.  Never mind that the type of adolescent once known as a smart aleck will read the entire sentence and wonder aloud to anyone within hearing, “So, it’s what?  Okay to harass and bully like who?  The janitors?  The lunch ladies?”  But how about this?  What, in a pragmatic way, does circumstances mean?  What might the difference between school related activity and a school related circumstance be? 

Let’s say you are a teacher at this consolidated high school.  Let’s say you stopped off at the local Jack-in-the-Box on your way home.  You observe through the drive-up window two students engaged in what appears to be a heated discussion.  One is red faced and seems to be crying. 

You complete your transaction.  You pull into the closest parking space, exit your car, and go inside. 

You see the two students.  Now you need to assess the circumstances.  By this time, the (possible) bully is standing, preventing his (possible) victim from getting up from the table, all the while saying things you can’t quite make out but which clearly are upsetting his victim more and more.  About to despair of being able to intervene with the authority arrogated to you by the word circumstance  you see open on the table at which the students were apparently sitting, two biology books.  Now you, as a member in good standing of the Science Department, know these books to be copies of the text book for the high school’s Biology course.  Aha!  They were studying together.  Clearly a school related circumstance.  You step forward to intervene.

I know that’s ludicrous, but so is including such verbiage as circumstance, especially considering the way it got included which I know with absolute certainty because I have observed this sort of thing happen over and over.  Some twit in the small group insisted that school related activities didn’t cover every possibility, and no one else at the table had the doughtiness to object.  As my former student knew long, long ago, a small group is only as bright as its dimmest member.

Check back in a few days  to find out what the result of the Galahad science teacher’s actions would likely turn out to be.

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Posted in Anti-Bullying, Not Making Sense 101 | Tags: , , , , , , ,

Posted by: cornvillenutmeg | June 1, 2012

Preventing Bullying in Pre-school

When Public Education gets its hands on something, in this instance, bullying,  here is what happens.  I give you the U.S. Department of Education definition for bullying:  Bullying is unwanted, aggressive behavior among school aged children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance. The behavior is repeated, or has the potential to be repeated, over time. Bullying includes actions such as making threats, spreading rumors, attacking someone physically or verbally, and excluding someone from a group on purpose.  Do you wonder – I hope – how this longer washed out by phrases like “power imbalance” and “aggressive behavior” is an improvement over the dictionary’s  “1. To treat in an overbearing or intimidating manner;  2. To force one’s way aggressively or by intimidation”?

What the U.S. Department of Education focuses on, state departments of education will focus on if they want those Federal dollars to keep on coming.  And the U. S. Department of Education which never met a public teacher union it didn’t like a lot, has what public education likes to call a holistic view.  (First check out the definition of holism, then go her – http://www.infed.org/biblio/holisticeducation.htm –  to see what the Education establishment has done with that.)  Thus, in its Struggle with Bullying, why let any opportunity go by.

You can find the following for yourself at stopbullying.gov, but let me give you the flavor.

Early Childhood

Early childhood often marks the first opportunity for young children to interact with each other. Between the ages of 3 and 5, kids are learning how to get along with each other, cooperate, share, and understand their feelings. Young children may be aggressive and act out when they are angry or don’t get what they want, but this is not bullying. Still, there are ways to help children.

(Just for the sake of contrast, consider the Piagetian view of the development of a five year-old:  “Perceptions dominate judgment. In moral-ethical realm, the child is not able to show principles underlying best behavior. Rules of a game not developed, only uses simple do’s and don’ts imposed by authority.”)

Helping Young Children Get Along with Others

Parents, school staff, and other adults can help young children develop skills for getting along with others in age-appropriate ways.

  • Model positive ways for young children to make friends. For example, practice pleasant ways that children can ask to join others in play and take turns in games. Coach older children to help reinforce these behaviors as well. Praise children for appropriate behavior. Help young children understand what behaviors are friendly.
  • Help young children learn the consequences of certain actions in terms they can understand. For example, say “if you don’t share, other children may not want to play with you.” Encourage young children to tell an adult if they are treated in a way that makes them feel uncomfortable, upset or unhappy, or if they witness other children being harmed.
  • Set clear rules for behavior and monitor children’s interactions carefully. Step in quickly to stop aggressive behavior or redirect it before it occurs.
  • Use age-appropriate consequences for aggressive behavior. Young children should be encouraged to say “I’m sorry” whenever they hurt a peer, even accidentally. The apology should also be paired with an action. For example, young children could help rebuild a knocked over block structure or replace a torn paper or crayons with new ones. 

Think about what you just read.  Now, imagine a pre-school teacher, or two or three in those handful of school districts that can afford to put that many unionized teachers and/or paraprofessionals and/or aids into one classroom with twenty to thirty pre-schoolers.  (And how about that for an official designation of the school year before kindergarten:  pre-school.  When I was young, pre-school meant staying home with my mother.)

There they are, the cadre of adults, monitoring the developing skills of their charges.  “Oh, look, Billy just knocked over Betty’s stack of blocks.”  Billy is looking pleased.  The tumbling of the blocks was satisfying.  Betty is crying.  That may be a bit satisfying to Billy, too.  Billy would like to knock over another set of blocks, but Betty is monopolizing the block set.  Now Betty, through her tears, is considering picking up one of the blocks and smacking Billy upside his head.

Ms. Talbot and Ms. Bean come over.  “What happened children?”

Billy is incredulous.  Had he the vocabulary, he would be saying to himself, “What?  Are you stupid?  She was piling up blocks.  I wanted to knock over blocks.  I thought we were playing.  You know, cooperating and collaborating in a friendly way.  You know, the way you and Ms. Bean showed us when you held up the paper and she taped it to the wall?  Betty piles up the blocks;  I knock them down.    It was cool.  Then she started crying.”  Instead, he senses his teachers are not likely to champion his position.  Billy says nothing, or perhaps he says, “I didn’t do anything,” or the all purpose, “I don’t know.”

Betty has stopped crying, sensing that the teachers are on her side in this.   Works every time, the crying thing.

“Billy,” Ms. Talbot says, “can you tell Betty you’re sorry?”

Billy resists.  First off, he’s not sorry except in the sense that Betty’s crying has gotten him some unwelcome attention.  Second, he’s got his pride.  He’s not going to cave in right away.  He’s going to make his teachers work for it.

“Billy,” Ms. Bean begins, “how do you think Betty feels?”

More incredulity.  Betty’s checks are still wet from the tears.  Her eyes are red.  Snot is running over her lips.  “I don’t know.”

“Betty?  Can you tell Billy how you feel?”

Sniffle, snuffle.  Shake of head.

“Shall I help you?”

Nod.

“Billy, Betty’s feeling are hurt.  She was proud of the castle she was building out of the blocks…”

“It was a doll house,” Betty says.

‘Oh, was it?” Ms. Talbot joins in.  She’s a little disappointed.  She’s been striving to diversify her charges’ interests.  Truth be told, she would have preferred it if Betty had knocked over Billy’s doll house, but you take your opportunities to fight bullying where you find them.

In the end, of course, Billy says the magic words.  A brief attempt to get Billy to help Betty rebuild her doll house fails when Betty begins to tear up again.  Billy is guided over to the finger painting table where, after an initial resistance, he begins to express himself with abstractions in deep reds and angry purples that, frankly, Ms. Talbot finds disturbing.  She’s not convinced she has helped Billy understand the consequences for aggressive behavior.

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Posted by: cornvillenutmeg | May 29, 2012

Heroes Among Us

My first aspiration was to be a cowboy.  I wanted to be Hopalong Cassidy

(William Boyd) – he of the white stallion and black hat.  I had my own cowboy suit just like his, black pants, boots, shirt, vest, hat, and black double holster with two silver six-shooters.

I was also fond of Roy Rogers.  I liked the way a small trickle of blood slipped from the corner of his mouth each time he fought bad guys with his fists, never less than three at a time;  and because of Trigger and Dale Evans on both of whom I had crushes.  (And wasn’t she ahead of her time, not calling herself Dale Rogers?)  I couldn’t manage to warm up to Gene Autry though I can’t say why, but I did to Randolph Scott  (and no, I did not change my mind when I found out he was gay) and Gary Cooper.  And John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda.

I defined cowboy as any man who wore boots, a western style hat, and a six gun, although sometimes the men I aspired to be did not wear six guns;  instead they carried Winchester repeating rifles.  I must admit, however, I was always uncomfortable about that, and never quite relaxed until the film was over, fearful till the end that someone with a pistol would get the drop on them when their rifles were leaning in corners or against saddles while they sat by their campfires, or, worse, when their rifles were securely tucked away into the saddle scabbard.   If they were cavalrymen, as often Randolph Scott, Gary Cooper, and John Wayne were, I tried not to let it bother me that they wore their Navy Colt’s in flapped holsters that faced backwards and were on the wrong hip.  In my heart I knew that any non-military cowboy, even bad guys, could outdraw someone who wore a his pistol in such a way.   But then, most often the cavalry was more in danger from arrows than bullets.  Arrows had the most startling way of arriving, virtually noiselessly from who knew where, and penetrating deep into the chest of a trooper one had not bonded with. (The arrows did make a noise, but it’s very difficult to reproduce onomatopoetically;  zip doesn’t quite do it – too much sound, not enough air – but maybe you get the idea.)  I don’t mean to say that Messrs. Randolph, Cooper, or Wayne were never struck by arrows, because they were, but always in a non-lethal part of their body, the thigh perhaps, or a remarkably narrow window high up on the chest toward the shoulder where apparently there are no important muscles, nerves, ligaments, sinews, lung segments, veins, or bones.

I lived in St. Petersburg, Florida, when I began to want to be Hopalong Cassidy.  Nothing could shake me from that goal, even the time I was standing on the edge of a dock on the bay practicing throwing my rope and leaned a bit too far into the throw so that I fell into the bay, fully dressed in my Hopalong look-alike cowboy clothes.  I screamed in a very un-Hoppy way.  My father heard me and came to fish me out before anything worse than my being terrified could happen.

                I still wanted to be a cowboy when we moved to West Hartford, Connecticut,  but by that time, I was identifying the actor qua cowboy rather than the cowboy character, thus Gary Cooper not Will Kane superseded Hopalong.  My ambition didn’t change much until I saw To Hell and Back with Audie Murphy playing himself.  Before too long, I no longer wanted to be a cowboy to the exclusion of anything else, I wanted to be a World War II hero, preferably one that lived though the war, for while I greatly admired William Holden (The Bridges of Toko Ri and The Bridge on the River Kwai – and how about that for a  coincidence, two bridge movies and he dies in both of them), I didn’t see any real point to being a hero if you weren’t around to have the medal pinned on your chest.  Please don’t think me fickle.  I still greatly admired cowboys.  I added to my previous list Alan Ladd (Shane), James Arness (Gunsmoke) and Richard Boone (Have Gun, Will Travel).  And today I include with equal affection and reverence Clint Eastwood, although strictly speaking I was no longer a boy when he and I met up.

The truth is that any great literary or film hero is at heart a cowboy, or could be.  You see what I mean, yes?  Try this list of heroes on:, Galahad, Rob Roy, Travis McGee, Spartacus, Prince Valiant, Robin Hood, Jesse Stone,.  Put any of them (or all if you’re a Magnificent Seven fan) on a horse, let his beard grown for two or three days, put a Stetson on his head and pull the brim down low, let him work up a good squint, and strap on a Colt .45;  and, to paraphrase slightly the immortal words of General George Scott, “Well, he’ll know what to do.”  I have even imagined Oedipus Rex as a Western and in fact have written a screen treatment to that end.

When I was blessed with the opportunity to be a teacher, unbeknownst to me at the time, I was also given the opportunity to further my education.  For instance, while I did not recall much from my seventh grade study of grammar beyond the state-of-being, intransitive verbs Mr. Friedman insisted his First Formers memorize, I learned immediately that in one night I could learn as much grammar as any given fifth grader could learn in three weeks.  Same sort of thing for Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth, Lord of the Flies, how to write a five paragraph, expository essay, and the next five lists of vocabulary words.  In time, I learned (finally, pace Mr. Spring, Mr. Dorn, Mr. Doan) what hero really meant and what the value to society of a hero really is.  That did not change anything about my appreciation for the heroes of my boyhood, but it did greatly enhance my understanding of what heroes are owed.  All of which contributed to my understanding that to find heroes to whom much is owed one need not look very far.

You will find them among the teachers in the schools near you.  They will be those teachers who know what is right for their students and do what they need to do to provide it.  Weekly, fulfilling that obligation puts the hero teachers up against the odds, too often in the persons of those who ought to be supporting and cooperating with them:  their students themselves, those students’ parents, administrators, and members of the boards of education.  (I don’t exclude state boards of education, the Federal Department of Education, the Office of Civil Rights, teacher unions, and politicians, it’s only that those all are rarely encountered in the first person and so don’t exactly fit the bill as antagonists of hero teachers.)  I have nothing but the greatest respect for hero teachers, even if they don’t ride horses, carry a six-shooter, look grizzled, or aren’t men.

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Posted in Not Making Sense 101, Uncategorized

Posted by: cornvillenutmeg | May 24, 2012

Bludgeoning Bullying

Bullying is now among the social ills which Public Education is charged with curing and/or eradicating.  Don’t understand that?  Think about drug use and the signs that declare a school to be a Drug Free Zone.  Think about sexually transmitted diseases and the state departments of education mandates that make the study and prevention of HIV/AIDS a constant curricular inclusion in Health classes from Kindergarten through high school graduation.  Think about the laws that prohibit the carrying of firearms within x number of feet of a school.  You might call them Gun Free Zones.  Think about the now vanished but once ubiquitous butt rooms where teenagers with parental permission could smoke to their lungs content while sparing the non-smoking majority the reek ,stink, and manifest health hazard of stale cigarette smoke, these days now exclusively exhaled in student bathrooms.

Weigh for yourself how well these mandates have worked.  Guess how much money each has cost since its inception, then multiply that by twenty  or more to get the real figure, divide by the number of teens you see smoking, gunned down by other teens, infected with one STD or another ,or pregnant;  and you will end up with an idea of the individual costs of failure.

We have not yet declared war on Bullying, as in War on Drugs, but I guess that has as much to do with how silly it would sound as the fact that we’ve got all those real wars where people actually are killed and do the killing which seem to show promise of lasting as long and being as successful as the Richard Nixon declared War on Drugs, now forty some years long and counting.  Besides, there’s something oxymoronic about linking War and Bullying where the former is a cure for the latter.

Here’s an interesting thing to give passing thought to:  the American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) gives two archaic definitions for bully.  The first is a fine person;  the second, a sweetheart.  Etymologically AHD suggests that the word itself is derived from “Middle Dutch boele, (meaning) sweetheart, (which is itself) probably (an) alteration of broeder, (meaning )brother.”  Of course, the prime definition is one we are all mostly familiar with,  “A person who is habitually cruel or overbearing, especially to smaller or weaker people.”  And the verb form is consistent with that – “To force one’s way aggressively or by intimidation.”  Curiously, to me at least, AHD suggests no archaic verb form meaning other than “to act like a bully,” which would be a good thing only if one were acting like a fine person or sweetheart.  Still, there is the adjectival meaning of excellent and splendid.  What I can’t find because I’ve lost track of my two volume miniaturized OED is any examples of a good bully, if you will permit me, or how or why the meaning shifted so contrarily.  Unless, of course, the difficulty Able had with Cain applies.

 

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Cornville Nutmeg

In the near future, I shall offer a closer look at what resulted from the local high school’s efforts to put into place a policy on bullying prevention.

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