How rewards demean

I'm taking a short detour from my extended book report on Punished by Rewards to share the horror of a few rewards systems I've read about at NEA.org. Here's one that's sure to inspire morbid fascination:

From Sybil Rice (Sybsci@aol.com), an eighth grade science teacher at Texas Middle School in Texarkana, Texas:

"Our middle school developed a school wide reward program aimed at encouraging good behavior and taking the focus off of the negative. Students receive PRIDE points for good behavior in the classroom, on campus, and at school sponsored events. (PRIDE stands for Personal Responsibility In Daily Effort) Once each grading period, we hold grade level PRIDE assemblies where achievements are recognized and students can win prizes from drawings they entered by cashing in their PRIDE points. Once each semester, we hold a school wide assembly to honor good behavior and achievements. Last time, the grand prize drawing was for a motorized scooter! Our administration liked this idea so much they implemented a similar system for the staff! We can now earn PRIDE checks to be used for drawings toward things like manicures, massages, and a free day off!"

Wow, teachers earn "PRIDE checks" for good behavior, eh? And does the principal give them a pat on the head for getting to school on time? Seriously, how can this woman not feel demeaned by this? Suppose your spouse came home one night, starting praising you for keeping the kids clothed and fed all week, and handed you a gift certificate? And said that if you kept them fed and clothed next week there'd be another gift card in it for you?

As for the students, apparently the points are used to buy raffle tickets which give them merely a chance of being rewarded-- just to boost the level of unfairness, I suppose. I have serious doubts that these points are given out in a fair way in the first place, since they are apparently at the whim of teachers. Additionally, either some classrooms provide a better chance of winning prizes because the teacher gives out points more liberally, or there is a limit on points given within a classroom, in which case jealousy and strife can be expected to ensue between classmates. Meanwhile, kids are taught there is nothing in it for them if they behave responsibly, it's just behavior that someone pays you for, for their convenience. And by the way-- why be responsible outside of school, when there are no PRIDE points to be collected?

Worst of all, when a student acts responsibly, they appear to be doing it for PRIDE points, not of their own volition. The rewards system strips them of the actual pride of being responsible. It's like if your spouse paid you to be nice to the kids; would other people perceive you as being patient and understanding and kind, or as just wanting the money? Would you perceive yourself in exactly the same way, or would the ulterior motivation subtly erode your self-esteem? Would your kids still view your kindness as evidence of love and empathy? Would they model the same behavior although they were not being similarly paid, or would they feel entitled to an allowance? Why on earth would anyone ever introduce such a caustic system?

I'm picking the spouse example intentionally, because it demonstrates how an egalitarian relationship can be changed if someone begins to give out rewards. The principal at the school mentioned above must be quite a power-hungry bastard, to set himself up as the patriarchal bestower of gifts. Yet the teacher who wrote in was so thoughtless as to merely appreciate the manicures, so she obviously wouldn't see the harm this is doing to her students, either.

Another behaviorist scheme on the NEA suggestions board is more obviously demeaning and humiliating:

From Nancy Morrison, a third grade teacher at Elkhart Elementary School in Elkhart, Kansas:


"I adopted this system from my sister who is also a teacher and it works great! At the beginning of each 9 weeks, each child receives $25.00 in play money. Anytime they break a classroom or school rule, they are charged a fee. Breaking rules that COST them include such things as not returning homework, disrespect to the teacher or peers, abusing computer limits, etc.

"At the end of the 9 weeks, I have a celebration. I charge a fee such as $10.00 as a cover charge. Then I assign prices to the amenities like $2.00 for popcorn, $1.00 for pop, $4.00 to read a book to the class, $5.00 to be the teacher for 30 minutes and the kids just love this. They are not allowed to lend money to friends and I have truly seen a change in the behavior of my kids. Those that do not have enough money for the cover charge are the waiters and waitresses and believe me in the fact that they are so jealous of the others that they make sure they are NOT the servants at the next party."

Note that the punishments are subjectively determined: what constitutes "disrespect" toward peers? And how can the teacher possibly observe all interactions between students? This creates feelings of resentment and perceived (as well as actual) injustice. From Punished by Rewards (p. 56):

[A]ccording to a series of studies by psychologist Carole Ames, people tend to attribute the results of a contest, as contrasted with the results of noncompetitive striving, to factors beyond their control.... The result is a diminished sense of empowerment and less responsibility for their future performance.

Competition also breeds anxiety, which interferes with learning. Further, it decreases the likelihood that students can work together effectively. Kohn cites research that shows students learn better in small, well-structured groups than they do when working on their own. Collaboration improves learning, in spite of the way schools promote individualism. Of course, it's harder to dole out rewards and punishments when students can assist one another and work together, and it's harder to measure the performance of each student.

Working alone, working for rewards, working in competition with peers. If you believe Alfie Kohn, and personally I think it's hard to ignore his command of the literature, all of this is just totally wrong and antithetical to optimal learning.

Part III: Rewards don't really work

I'm now through Chapter 3, on the effectiveness of rewards. The first part of the chapter shows that when an incentives program is used, and then that rewards program ends, people exhibit worse behavior than those in control groups who were never offered rewards. This was found to be true when behaviorist programs were used to promote weight loss, smoking cessation, use of seat belts, and use of math-related games in elementary school. At the very beginning, for a brief time, those getting rewards would do better than those offered nothing. But once the payments stopped coming in, these folks (as compared to controls) lost less weight, were more likely to smoke, were less likely to use seat belts, and were less likely to engage in games that used math.

No surprise, really. Can't you just hear the thought process? "Why should I bother... it's not like I'm getting paid for it anymore."

When you're given the extrinsic motivator, you don't have to find your own reasons, or talk yourself into making an effort. You're getting paid, that's why you're doing it; and when you stop getting paid, then why do it at all? If you're asked to attempt some behavior change and you're not paid, then you develop your own reasons ("It's for my health" or "I could use the extra help in math"). And when it's your own personal reason, it persists.

Apparently this happens so often in studies of incentives programs that (p. 40): "...behaviorists have had to invent a neutral-sounding name for it: it is technically known as the 'contrast effect'." In other words, there is a backlash when you take away a reward you had previously offered.

Even more fascinating is the detrimental effect rewards have on performance, even while the rewards are still being given. This one is harder to wrap one's mind around, considering the continuing popularity of rewards systems in schools. For instance, on one NEA page of 25 ideas to motivate young readers, 8 of the 25 involve explicit rewards, while several others involve less tangible incentives, such as having your drawing hung up on the wall.

The popularity of incentives notwithstanding, the 1970's and 80's were full of research indicating that performance in the presence of a rewards system is worse than performance when no incentive is offered. This might be hard for some people to believe, so I'm going to give a list of examples from Chapter 3. These are all treatment (rewards) vs. control group experiments.

• Nine-year-old boys asked to determine the difference between pairs of similar faces made more errors if paid for their successes than if they were not paid. Payments of 1 cent or of 50 cents both produced inferior performance compared to the control group.
  
• Undergraduate students were less able to construct a candle holder and attach it to a wall, when given various materials, when they were paid anywhere from $5 to $20. In fact, it took them 50% longer to devise a suitable holder, compared to unpaid controls.
  
• Children did less well on a word memorization task when given an M&M after each success, as compared to children who merely saw a visual indication of their successes.
  
• Undergraduates were asked to examine three patterns and identify the most dissimilar of the three. Those who were paid did significantly worse than those who received no incentive. The researcher, baffled, doubled the reward, but received the same result.
• Students were being trained to write headlines for a student paper, following specific rules. Some of them began to receive payment for each headline produced, and the ongoing improvement in the quality of their headlines ceased. Students who had never been paid continued to improve.
  
• Fourth graders performed more poorly on a task even when allowed to choose their preferred reward, a particular toy or type of candy.
  
• High school students were given 5 different tasks, some creative and some testing their memory. Regardless of the type of task, performance was lower in the rewarded subjects than in the control group.
• Preschoolers rewarded for each completed drawing produced more drawings than controls, but objective observers judged their drawings to be of lesser quality than those made by unrewarded children.
• Sixth grade girls promised movie tickets for teaching a game to younger girls were less successful as tutors than comparable girls offered nothing. Those promised tickets became frustrated more easily, were less efficient at communicating ideas, and had pupils who understood the game less well than pupils taught by unrewarded girls.
• Third graders promised a toy for working on some "games" (actually an IQ test) tested lower than those promised nothing.
• Young writers instructed to spend five minutes merely thinking about the rewards their writing might bring them (money, fame, etc) wrote less creative poetry than others who had not been instructed to ponder rewards. The quality of the poetry in the treatment group was also judged to be lower than previous work done by the same students.
  

Two further conclusions, both quite surprising and with broad implications, have come out of recent research on rewards and performance (p. 45):

After conducting six separate studies, Morton Deutsch concluded that "there is no evidence to indicate that people work more productively when they are expecting to be rewarded in proportion to their performance than when they are expecting to be rewarded equally or on the basis of need."

In other words, merit-based bonuses, commissions, tips, and all those competitive payment structures which create so much stress and destroy camraderie generally do not work. (I guess it's more about destroying worker solidarity and cementing the power of management than it is about improving quality.)

Secondly (p. 45):

Ann Boggiano and Marty Barrett found that children who are extrinsically motivated -- that is, concerned about things like rewards and approval they can get as a result of what they do in school -- use less sophisticated learning strategies and score lower on standardized achievement tests than children who are interesting in learning for its own sake. The reward-driven children do more poorly even when they are compared with children whose scores the previous year were identical to their own.

So the more rewards (tangible or social) given by the school or parents for higher grades and test scores, the worse performance will be, and the more simplistic the learning strategies students will employ. Most people would find this hard to believe, but I guess I could direct them to the 41 research references footnoted in Chapter 3.

One researcher summed all this up in fairly damning language (p.48):

[Those offered rewards] choose easier tasks, are less efficient in using the information available to solve novel problems, and tend to be ... more illogical in their problem-solving strategies. They seem to work harder and produce more activity, but the activity is of lower quality, contains more errors, and is more stereotyped and less creative than the work of comparable nonrewarded subjects working on the same problems.

It seems clear that rewards should not be used in schools. To reward a child for reading a book, for instance, is to imply that reading is unpleasant drudgery. When the rewards end, we would expect the child to be less interested in reading than if they had never been paid. And they will tend to choose easier books and will read them with less attention and comprehension. It's a shame, then, that each year an estimated 22 million K-6 students are rewarded with pizza coupons for reading books.

It's a shame that the NEA website is positively peppered with enthusiastic emails from teachers about the latest rewards program they're using (candy, toys, paper money, tokens-- you'll find it at NEA.org). What are they teaching in teaching schools, if not that rewards programs produce only short-lived results and actually impair learning? Is this not an important pegagogical point?

Some homeschoolers feel there must not be enough discipline in schools, because just look how kids act these days. My answer to that is, when you see kids-- which is usually when they are not in school-- well, then they're not being paid for good behavior like they are when they're in the classroom. So why behave well? What's in it for them? Where's the paycheck?

It's not lack of discipline. It's misguided Skinnerian discipline that is eroding real maturation and the development of social behaviors and personal responsibility. Similarly, we don't need yet more time in school, yet more homework to be turned in for tokens; we need the eradication of rewards for learning.

Once again I'll return to something my mom, as a college writing instructor, once overheard a student saying: "Man, I can't wait till I graduate and I never have to learn another thing." That's a student who has been thoroughly taught over two decades that learning is drudgery, that you must be forced by law to do it, that you must be praised or threatened all the way through, bribed with the promise of a higher salary. Some kids probably feel they'll have more dignity and autonomy if they simply refuse to be taught at all, since learning occurs by coercion, however subtle much of this coercion may be.

(Suddenly it seems less surprising to me that 11 percent of young adult Americans in a 2002 survey could not find the United States on a world map.)

Punished by rewards: Part II

One of the points Kohn makes about behavior modification techniques is that they reinforce the power and status difference between the person handing out rewards or punishments and the person being controlled. He writes (p.28):

If you doubt that rewarding someone emphasizes the rewarder's position of greater power, imagine that you have given your next-door neighbor a ride downtown, or some help moving a piece of furniture, and that he then offers you five dollars for your trouble. If you feel insulted by the gesture, consider why this should be, what the payment implies.

This is also something to consider when praising one's children. When it happens spontaneously, and you say "Wow, that's a great cat you drew!" because you're truly surprised and pleased, I can't see why anyone would object. It's an authentic and natural comment. But if you get into the habit (I've been there myself for periods of time) of saying "Good job!" every 5 or 10 minutes, consider what it would sound like if instead you said "I approve!" At some point it becomes demeaning to the child and implies they are, and perhaps should be, working constantly to impress and please you.

Kohn also argues that while behaviorists may claim their techniques are value-neutral and apolitical, in fact rewards and punishments invariably reinforce the current power structure, and are thus inherently conservative. In this case, one of the founders of behaviorism, John Watson, admitted as much, as quoted on p. 29:

[We] are constantly manipulating stimuli, dangling this, that, and the other combination in front of the human being in order to determine the reactions they will bring forth -- hoping that the reaction will be "in line with progress," "desirable," "good." (And society really means by "desirable," "good," "in line with progress," reactions that will not disturb its recognized and established traditional order of things.)

Kohn also quotes two psychologists who reviewed behavior modification programs in schools, who concluded that these systems "have used their procedures to serve the goals and values of the existing school system." I guess this is obvious, but as Kohn says, such programs are always sold to parents and teachers as benefitting the students, not the easier administration and management of the school or classroom. That a token reward system increases the power of the teacher over her students is usually not considered, nor what this might do, in turn, to erode a child's self-reliance, self-discipline, or personal responsibility. The question more likely to be asked is "And did it increase test scores?" Thus the political side to the carrot and stick system goes unaddressed.

Kohn goes on (p. 30):

While it may seem that reward-and-punishment strategies are inherently neutral, that any sort of behavior could, in principle, by encouraged or discouraged, this is not completely true. If it were, the fact that these strategies are invariably used to promote order and obedience would have to be explained as a remarkable coincidence.

More realistically, we must acknowledge that because pop behaviorism is fundamentally a means of controlling people, it is by its nature inimical to democracy, critical questioning, and the free exchange of ideas among equal participants. Rewarding people for making changes in the existing order (which might include the very order that allows some individuals to be controllers and others controlled) is not merely unlikely but a contradiction in terms. "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," as one writer put it.

The problem is that with children, we need them to throw off the existing order at some point. We need them to grow up to be self-reliant and self-disciplined, to be personally responsible and able to investigate and learn all on their own. Yet the behaviorism in schools is antithetical to this goal. I'll end with an excerpt from a speech by John Gatto which makes this very point, and I find it interesting that the main reward bestowed upon students, in his opinion, is simply the teacher's attention.

The American economy depends on schooling us that status is purchased and others run our lives. We learn [in school] that sources of joy and accomplishment are external, that the contentment comes with the possessions, seldom from within.... Schools were conceived to serve the economy and the social order rather than kids and families -- that is why it is compulsory. As a consequence, the school can not help anybody grow up, because its prime directive is to retard maturity. It does that by teaching that everything is difficult, that other people run our lives, that our neighbors are untrustworthy, even dangerous.... [School] ambushes natural intuition, faith, and love of adventure, wiping these out in favor of a gospel of rational procedure and rational management.

About a month ago, the New York Times sent a reporter to three daycare centers.... [A]ccording to the reporter, each gave only token personal attention to individual kids, because mathematically no more than that was possible. Communication was by cheerful admonitions like "Don't do that Wilma" or to-whom-it-may-concern statements like "It's line-up time!". Workers saw their goals more as managing children than interacting with them. Managing children is what professional childcare is about in America. Schools are part of the professional child care empire and education has nothing whatsoever to do with it....

The U.C.L.A. study done recently of a 1000 public schools found that the teachers averaged 7 minutes daily in personal exchanges with students. Divided among 30 kids, that is a total of 14 seconds each. The constant scrambling for attention and status in the close confines of the classroom, where those are only officially conferred by an adult who lacks both the time or the information to be fair, teaches us to dislike and distrust each other. This continuous auction of favors, has something to do with our anger, and our inability to be honest or responsible, even as grown-ups. Yet, ironically, irresponsibility serves the management ideal much better than decent behavior ever could. It demands close management, it explains all those lawyers, all those courts, all those policemen and all those schools. Now either we are structurally undependable, necessitating constant policing, or somehow we have been robbed of our ability to become responsible.

Consider the strange possibility that we have been deliberately taught to be irresponsible and to dislike each other for some good purpose. I am not being sarcastic or even cynical. I spent 19 years as a student, and 30 more as a school teacher and in all that time I was seldom asked to be responsible, unless you mistake obedience and responsibility for the same thing, which they certainly are not. Whether student or teacher, I gave unreflective obedience to strangers for 49 years. If that isn't a recipe for irresponsibility then nothing is. In school your payoff comes from giving up your personal responsibility, just doing what you're told by strangers even if that violates the core principles of your household. There isn't any way to grow up in school, school won't let you.

As I watched it happen, it takes three years to break a kid, 3 years confined to an environment of emotional neediness, songs, smiles, bright colors, cooperative games; these work much better than angry words and punishment.... Ceaseless competition for attention in the dramatic fishbowl of the classroom, reliably delivers cowardly children, toadies, school stoolies, little people sunk into chronic boredom, little people with no apparent purpose, just like caged rats, pressing a bar for sustenance, who develop eccentric mannerisms on a periodic reinforcement schedule....

Punished by rewards: Part I

I am reading Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards, and will probably have several posts on this as I work my way through it. Kohn is fast becoming one of my favorite thinkers. Here's the first paragraph of Chapter One, on behaviorism:

There is a time to admire the grace and persuasive power of an influential idea, and there is a time to fear its hold over us. The time to worry is when the idea is so widely shared that we no longer even notice it, when it is so deeply rooted that it feels to us like plain common sense. At the point when objections are not answered anymore because they are no longer even raised, we are not in control: we do not have the idea; it has us.

It does seem to be a common assumption that people will not expend effort unless there is some external reward to be gained, and yet my own life is clear proof to the contrary. Behaviorists believe there is no true altruism, which I dare them to say to a haggard mother of a 6-week-old. Having a toddler in my home also provides constant evidence that humans are possessed of enormous intrinsic motivation. If you watch Tristan for any length of time, you'll see him making up challenges for himself. He'll think: can I step onto this stool while holding the pickup truck without dumping the little pig out of the back of it? And then he'll repeatedly try it out, over and over again, getting back up after falling, putting the pig back in the truck, until he succeeds (or has a tantrum). This can't be explained by the simple idea that he's having fun and enjoying himself, because more often than not these experiments leave him hollering with frustration and rage. There is obviously some desire for mastery and understanding which in part drives human behavior.

Kohn maintains that behaviorist thinking is dehumanizing, not only because many carrot and stick systems are based explicitly on studies of animals, but because it denies our full potential:

[O]ur everyday practices rest on an implicit theory of human nature that fails to do us justice. When we repeatedly promise rewards to children for acting responsibly, or to students for making an effort to learn something new, or to employees for doing quality work, we are assuming that they could not or would not choose to act this way on their own. If the capacity for responsible action, the natural love of learning, and the desire to do good work are already part of who we are, then the tacit assumption to the contrary can fairly be described as dehumanizing.

Kohn is himself a parent, and as I read him, he is sincerely sympathetic to how difficult it can be. Unlike other parenting book authors I've read, he's realistic about how exhausted a parent can become. Behaviorist methods, doling out "time out" or gold stars, revoking TV privileges or giving out cookies, work very well in the short term and for the limited goal of controlling observable behavior. They're easy. They don't require creativity, empathy, communication skills, patience, negotiation, compromise, or the disapproval of others (most of whom will inevitably be Skinner devotees, though perhaps unwittingly).

Last February, after a miserable period of three weeks during which one or both kids were sick (as was I), I resorted to giving Anya little plastic beads in return for remembering to brush her teeth and get dressed without being nagged, or for picking up toys, or for trying a new food. About 3 days into this program I was chatting enthusiastically with friends and relatives about how this had really gotten us back on track, back into some semblance of a household routine. About 10 days after I began this, I was completely demoralized and could not bear hearing another "Will I get a bead for that?" or "How about I do this, then will I get 2 beads?" Suddenly Anya would not budge a finger unless there were beads involved, and it took more and more beads to cajole her into doing things. I quit using these rewards, but the economic model persisted for weeks afterward. The tokens were gone, but she thought we should keep track of favors: if she'd done me two favors (and even things she had previously done spontaneously now became "favors" to me), then I "owed" her two favors in return.

Even more interesting was that she started to use threats all of a sudden, although I had not been using threats myself. Once the economic model is entrenched, I guess the absence of "payment" seems as natural a tool as the payment itself. Suddenly it was, "If you don't let me watch Franklin, I'm not picking up my toys."

So I've experienced both the instant but superficial success of behaviorist techniques, and the longer-term unintended consequences (which I'm sure Kohn will be describing in detail in later chapters). For my family, introducing an economic model was extremely corrosive to what you might call our social ties-- not the deeper familial love, but certainly the everyday desire to be polite and get along, the desire to help each other out, the desire to make ourselves understood and elicit empathy and assistance. In other words, much of the higher level primate behavior was stripped away, leaving mainly the behavior of rats in mazes, who are unwilling to move unless they can smell the cheese around the corner. Thankfully it only took a week or two (and much discussion) to get back to normal.

Chapter One of Punished by Rewards begins with this apt quote:

For the anthropomorphic view of the rat, American psychology has substituted the rattomorphic view of man.

--Arthur Koestler

And one more quote, this from Chapter Two:

As behaviorists cheerfully admit, theories about rewards and various practical programs of behavior modification are mostly based on work with rats and pigeons. The underlying assumption, according to one critic, seems to be that "the semistarved rat in the box, with virtually nothing to do but press on a lever for food, captures the essence of virtually all human behavior."

Bu it is not only researchers who make this assumption. We join them in taking "one giant leap toward mankind" when we import the principles and techniques used to train the family pet to the realm of raising children. The way we sometimes talk about (or to) our daughters and sons reflects a view of parent-child relationships quite congenial to a committed behaviorist. Discussions about how to "handle" our kids are a case in point; on reflection, this seems a rather peculiar verb to use in the context of a relationship with another human being. Likewise, when we call out a hearty "Good girl!" in response to a child's performance, the most appropriate reply would seem to be "Woof!" With respect to the workplace or public policy, we talk casually about the use of "carrots and sticks," and there is food for thought here, too. Before these words came to be used as generic representations of bribes and threats, what actually stood between the carrot and the stick was, of course, a jackass.

The thing about the rat or the pigeon is that naturally we care only about their behavior, as they are unable to communicate to us their thoughts. We don't care whether they love us, respect us, hate us, or fear us; we aren't trying to foster such sophisticated ideals as a sense of social responsibility, charity, or altruism. Kohn has elsewhere (in his Unconditional Parenting) described the long-term ill effects of withdrawal of love and attention through the use of "time out," which naturally did not bother the original creators of the time out method, as they were using it to train pigeons.

One other facet of behaviorism is its enormous emphasis on and requirement of measurement. We must measure such elusive things as effort and success, learning and understanding, in order to know how to dole out rewards. When criticizing the constant grading, testing, and labeling of children which goes on in most schools, we should keep in mind that this mania for measurement came about at the same time as behaviorism, and is a required part of any system of rewards and punishments.

You can't give up incessant measurement without giving up behaviorism.

Schools and hurricanes

You know, if it made any sense to have a bird flu / peak oil / homeschooling blog, I'd probably post every day. My non-education-related interests flared up in the past week, with uncontrolled human-to-human H5N1 transmission in Indonesia, and oil and gas shortages looming because of Rita. I have had some school-related observations, though.

In the wake of Katrina, Bush proposed allocating $1.9 billion in private school vouchers to aid school-aged children displaced by the hurricane, although no doubt most of these children previously attended public schools. This is another instance of taxpayer dollars paying to send children to private institutions. The Republicans are expert at "incremental" politics, a method of attaining one's goals through relentlessly pursuing minor changes and half-measures, gradually changing legislation a sentence at a time, over decades if necessary. They have not by any means given up on the total privatization of schooling, and as much as I complain about public schools, the CEP example shows that privatization would be a disaster.

I've blogged before about fuel costs and the impracticality of busing kids to mega-schools once oil supply starts to fall short of oil demand (here, here, and here). So I found it interesting that the governor of Georgia has called for 2 days of school closings to alleviate diesel fuel shortages. The diesel fuel requirements of school buses (about 250,000 gallons per day in Georgia) compete with the needs of farmers who are bringing in the harvest at this time of the year. Although this particular shortage will be relatively short-lived (depends on how many refineries were destroyed or damaged, how many oil rigs were lost in the Gulf, and how much damage the Continental pipeline received), schools will increasingly compete for fuel with other segments of society.

I've found it bizarre, as I've read about Katrina refugees, that so much emphasis was placed on "getting the kids back to school." Here these kids have been through terrible trauma, thousands of them living in the hell of the Superdome or the Convention Center for days, and the main concern is to take them away from their parents and relatives. Of course, they phrase it differently: it's all about "giving them a sense of normalcy" by rushing them into Houston schools. Personally I don't think "normalcy" can be achieved while sleeping on cots on the field of the Astrodome.

The Other kind of private school

I've been reading an article in The Nation about Community Education Partners, a corporation that sets up alternative schools for "disruptive and low-performing students." CEP gets paid in the range of $9,000 to $13,000 per student per year, often twice what the public schools receive per pupil, but yet it pays its teachers less than the public schools. After all, CEP is a private corporation that expects to make a profit, which it sets about doing by raising its prices and slashing quality. As a private school, it is not subject to No Child Left Behind and in fact has no apparent "accountability" requirements, no test scores to worry about, no Adequate Yearly Progress goals to meet.

The catch is, CEP is paid by taxpayers. The money which would have gone to the public schools for that pupil is instead sent to the corporation, with the remaining cost being picked up by state government.

I suppose this sort of rip-off was inevitable. After the military and social security, the next biggest governmental program is public education (though of course most of the money is from local and state governments, not the feds). The wealthy always want to know how to funnel some of that taxpayer money into their own coffers. On the military front this is increasingly accomplished by the likes of Lockheed Martin and Kellogg, Brown, & Root, while on the Social Security front, Bush has a plan to channel money straight out of our paychecks into Wall Street. The push to privatize public education is just another attempt at a straight money grab, from your property taxes to their executives' bank accounts. This is perhaps the real purpose of NCLB, to encourage privatization by punishing public schools while exempting alternative private schools. Coming from the "free markets" party, this is a bit rich, since it's obviously not a level playing field or a fair competition between public schools subjected to NCLB and publically-funded private schools.

But some folks would still find all this acceptable if the CEP schools were effective. Unfortunately, they are not. When CEP first started up in Houston, there was a period where they were using corrections officers as teachers (unbelievable...). Two different professional educators assessed CEP in Houston and found that student performance deteriorated the longer they remained in a CEP school. The Dallas school district broke its 5-year contract with CEP a couple of years early, citing the reliance on non-certified and unqualified teachers and poor student academic performance.

The CEP schools are filled with disproportionately black and Latino students, and I personally object to them because they are run as soft prisons, with students required to remove shoes and jackets and go through a security checkpoint each day. Students cannot bring money to school, have no opportunity to mingle or chat with one another, virtually never leave the classroom (often these schools are set up in former Wal-Marts or literal warehouses), are escorted to the bathrooms in small groups, cannot take school materials out of the school, and so on. A certain racism is involved here, as I have a hard time picturing a similar acceptance of white students being treated as criminals, mainly because they have poor grades in school.

In Atlanta, a grassroots objection to CEP schools has arisen:

CEP's Atlanta school was the target of community organizing in early 2005 after the Atlanta Voice, a black newspaper, ran a series exposing serious inadequacies at the CEP school. The articles were based on the accounts of former CEP principal Mitchell and of a former teacher. "It became a dump for human waste," Mitchell said....

Atlanta schools deputy superintendent Kathy Augustine called Mitchell "disgruntled." She said she was unaware that students could not take books home, that there was no homework or that there was a teacher shortage. "I think we're improving," Augustine said....

In Philadelphia:

In March Philadelphia released an evaluation of CEP's two schools conducted by researchers at Temple University.... In evaluating student academic growth, the report relied entirely on CEP's own Plato data, which claim astounding gains of three to four "grade levels" in reading and math for students who spend 180 days at CEP--but there's no indication of how many students actually stay that long. The school district itself partakes of the statistical spin. Paul Socolar, editor of Philadelphia Public School Notebook, an independent newspaper, noted that in 2004 the district issued a CEP fact sheet that excluded CEP scores on the statewide standardized test for eighth graders, which had gone down; in January of this year the district excluded results for CEP eleventh graders, which had gone down. "It's a total manipulation of data," Socolar said. And as for meeting the AYP standards, CEP's Philly schools don't.

So public schools not meeting AYP standards two years in a row begin to lose funding, while CEP schools continue to suck in $11,000 per pupil per year (that's the figure in Philly, where public schools receive $7,000 per pupil) with no accountability whatsoever.

State governments presumably pick up the tab for CEP schools because they insure that a greater proportion of public school districts can meet AYP and other NCLB requirements, insuring more federal funding. Without CEP to absorb poor test takers, lost federal funding could amount to just as much money (I have no idea, I am speculating here). In any case, individual schools in this NCLB climate of fear certainly have incentives to ship the worst students off to alternative environments.

NCLB is in fact the perfect privatization plan. It creates an incentive for alternative private schools, punishes traditional non-profit public schools, funnels taxpayer money to testing outfits (who also, frequently, produce corresponding textbooks and study materials), and ultimately channels more and more public money into private hands. Communities aren't necessarily up in arms that private schools pay teachers less, then suffer resulting staff shortages and unqualified instructors, and therefore do a disservice to their students. The sinister thing about NCLB is that it sweeps out the most disadvantaged students, with fewest resources and least visibility in the media, into these private warehouses where students' knowledge actually decreases over time.

Previous privatization efforts such as the Edison schools failed because they targeted children from middle- or upper middle-class families, and when they were shown to be no better than public schools, the whole idea sort of fizzled out. Now we have a situation where students can be pushed out by a hundred and one means (disciplinary action or the threat of such, for instance).

Round Two is privatization not through slick marketing, but through preying upon the disadvantaged.

Sudoku

A friend of mine introduced me to a game called Sudoku, a kind of puzzle which first became popular in Japan and is now quite popular in Britain. Sudoku puzzles are published along with crosswords in several British newspapers (e.g. Guardian, Times).

This is one of those misleadingly simple games which in fact can be fiendishly difficult. Your goal is to fill in the blank spaces on a board like this:




There are just three rules:

1. Each column must contain the digits 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9.
2. Each row must contain the digits 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9.
3. Each 3x3 block must contain the digits 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9.

If you begin by considering a 3x3 block, and asking yourself "Where could I put the 4? Where could I put the 6?" and so on, you eventually find numbers which can only go in a particular square. For instance, in the lowest right-hand block in the above example, the "1" can only go left of the 7; in any other square, you'd end up with two 1's in a single row or column.

As you fill in a few more numbers, you can look at rows or columns to see which numbers are still missing and where you might place them. It's easy to learn the basic idea, but a lot of logic enters into it. It's great exercise for the brain, let's put it that way!

This site has three games per day you can solve on-screen (or print out, I assume): one easy, one medium, and one hard. Check it out....

Reading my local paper

I was looking through a local community guide which comes out quarterly, and tends to be directed at families. It tells you all the fairs, swimming lessons, etc going on in the area, and has a lot of ads.

We live in an area where some folks think nothing of spending $10,000-$25,000 per year on private school for their 7-year-old. One ad for a private school had the banner "What's the most important decision you'll make in your child's life?" (Uh, not sending them to your school, where apparently life is defined by academics?) Another ad touted "multisensory learning," "SpectorPhonics," "strategies for language organization" and a host of things I'd never heard of. Another said "Come see why our kids are one step ahead!" (Don't people get weary of all this competition?) But hey, if you want to send your preschooler to a place that incorporates Tae Kwan Do into its daily activity schedule, you can find it in my area (seriously, that was another ad).

By far, though, the weirdest thing I read was this:

Therapaws Reading Session: [--] District Library.
September 16 and October 21.
All kids ages 5-10 (accompanied by a parent or guardian) are invited to read one-on-one for 10 minutes to a dog that's been trained by Intermountain Therapy to help improve kids' reading skills by behaving as if it is interested in being read to. Appointments required. 3:30-5pm, free.

I say to the private schools: top that!

I dunno where she got that....

I thought, when I started this blog, that I'd be writing more often about our actual unschooling experiences, about teaching and learning. The thing is, I don't feel like I'm really doing much, and what I am doing is so scattered it's difficult to summarize.

Phonics lessons occur about 30 times daily for 30-90 seconds each, and use, for materials: street signs, letter blocks, the TV show Between the Lions, the signs or letters or menus Anya is writing that day, the LeapPad, her software games, boring car rides, one reading primer, food packages, and refrigerator magnets.

Arithmetic is a little tough, because Anya does not like to be quizzed, nor to be taught in a really obviously educational way. We play the game Sorry! in which you can split up a "7" between two of your pawns, and I'm thinking maybe we'll introduce "house rules" that let you split 10's one game, 12's another time, etc. It seems to be one way to get addition into our daily lives. I should perhaps just buy one of those commercial arithmetic card games.

Speaking of Sorry!, I've been surprised how strategic Anya can be. We both think out loud while playing, and she's getting positively devious, I tell you. Similarly she is getting the strategy of Uno, pointing out, for instance, that she knows I don't have any green cards because I had to draw a card last time a green card was up. This isn't something they test in school, but learning "strategery" (to use the president's word) seems very important to me. It teaches you how to think ahead, make educated guesses, weigh the chances of future events, consider what someone else may be thinking, and make plans. It's incredibly useful, and yet no one will ever ask me, "So what grade level do you think Anya's at as far as strategizing?" Homeschooled kids probably learn loads of stuff that no one outside the close circle of friends and family would ever think to ask about, let alone give credit for.

I'm thinking that for "phys ed," in addition to occasional gymnastics lessons, membership at our rec center (for the pool), and backyard games, it would be cool to take up yoga, qi gong, tai chi, or similar with my kids. For me the point of phys ed is not to learn sports, it's to learn to use your body. Personally I think yoga teaches you far more control, balance, breathing, posture, and so on than standing by the wall praying you don't get slammed with the dodgeball (whoever invented that game must have been a miserable, bitter person). Of course we'll also be playing catch and badminton (although not with rules) to develop reflexes. I worry a little about the physical side because I am so sports-phobic myself.

Oh, and as for the title of this post-- a couple of days ago Anya was rolling a basketball around, and she put her finger about 3/4 of the way to the top and said "This is where we live," and then, moving her finger south a couple of inches, "...and this is Florida." We discussed where Santa Claus, penguins, and red-eyed tree frogs live, and that it is always summer at the equator. The thing is, I have no clue where she learned about the globe. I tried to explain it to her a few times when she was too young to really understand, and it made her mad. She claims she's known about the planet being round and where we live on this sphere "for years, Mom!" She hasn't, but naturally I didn't argue. It's yet another mystery.

She's quite interested in weather, which is great because I like being an amateur meteorologist and my dad actually took a training session so he could send in storm reports. (One time the National Weather Service even called him up to ask about a squall line that had passed through nearby... we were all geeked.) Anya and I sit down in front of the Weather Channel or the Weather Underground website fairly often, and Anya is learning the symbols, such as the tropical storm symbol vs. the hurricane symbol. We did not discuss Katrina, though. There is no way to explain an F-3 tornado 200 miles wide without inducing nightmares.

Anyway, if anyone has suggestions for strategy games you think a 5-year-old might be able to play, please drop me a comment! Chinese checkers is next on my list, we'll see how that goes.

Testing for what we cannot cure

[Any other bloggers out there feel like a kid who hasn't done her homework when you haven't been blogging? Here's my excuse: we got a new kitten, my husband sprained his back, and I got mastitis all in the past 2 weeks. Which I think tops "blogspot ate my posting".]

This morning I've been reading an article about New Jersey's decision to add grammar to its state-wide standardized testing. Among other things it quoted a school administrator saying that bad grammar was "rampant" and complaining that "impact" is not a verb, damn it! (While no doubt many of us are annoyed by the verbing of nouns, I have a hard time ceding oversight of the evolution of language to the New Jersey Department of Education. Take the word 'nice': it has meant, at various times: ignorant, foolish, timid, dainty, fussy, strange, requiring precision, minute, subtle, and most recently agreeable. And no doubt the aforementioned administrator would have fought every change tooth and nail.)

Anyway, putting aside the difficulty of coming up with a fair test of optimal sentence structure and word usage, what really caught my eye was this:

[N]ationwide polls show public opinion leaning in favor of the Bush administration's efforts to hold schools accountable through testing.

One parent who supports more tests is Inga Price of Amityville. Her daughter Raven, 11, starts sixth grade Tuesday in the district's Edmund W. Miles Middle School. "The earlier we can get a heads-up on what the kids' skill levels are, the earlier we'll be able to help them," said Price, an insurance underwriter.

It occurs to me that we have switched over to a medical model here. We no longer concentrate our energies on helping children to learn, but rather on diagnosing their learning deficiencies. Kind of like American "health care," which really ought to be called "disease care" since so little of it focuses on keeping us healthy.

Take"well" visits, which have that name for public relations purposes. These consist of a lengthy battery of screening tests for problems, and an absence of helpful advice on staying healthy. No one ever told me to take folic acid in pregnancy, nor iron, nor calcium. No one told me to take probiotics and give them to the baby following antibiotics in labor (and because they did not, Tristan went 5.5 months without properly absorbing calcium, zinc, magnesium, and other important minerals; my diet was very restricted; and he suffered from intestinal pains and eczema). No one explained to me that the baby needs omega fatty acids for brain development, and that babies whose mothers take fish oil and other supplements have cognitive advantages (on the average, of course) over babies whose mothers took placebos. No one explained that nursing moms should never eat trans-fats (partially hydrogenated vegetable oil) because it interferes with the fats which reach breastmilk, preventing the baby from obtaining the healthy fatty acids they need most. They knew I was breastfeeding-- how hard would it have been to mention this? I frankly don't get any health information at all from well visits, I have to find it all myself using Google. [/rant]

Standardized testing uses time and money in the diagnosis of learning deficiencies, while not, in itself, doing anything to improve education. The same arguments used to promote well visits, the same stories of unknown illness which thank god were caught in time, will be used here. "No one knew little Tommy couldn't read," will be the tale which is told to justify putting all children through hours of testing for problems.

Many people would be quite convinced by the screening argument, but in this case it falls flat because there is no guarantee of help for those identified as needing remedial help:

However worthy its aims, "No Child Left Behind" is creating what many school officials fear will become a logistical nightmare. Because of technical complications, results from next winter's tests won't be available until eight months later. That's too late, local officials say, for scores to be used in deciding which students should be offered remedial tutoring in summer school.

Nor will districts have an easy time finding the money for extra tutoring.

Starting in 2002, when "No Child Left Behind" was signed into law, there was a substantial jump in federal Title I money earmarked for remedial instruction. This year, however, the flow of federal aid has dropped off in response to other budget demands, including the fighting in Iraq.

Michael Mostow, superintendent of Patchogue-Medford schools, says his system is getting about 10 percent less Title I money this year than last -- a loss of $100,000. "We've diverted over a million dollars to testing in this year's budget," he said. "I think it's the tail wagging the dog."

Note that the remedial instruction budget dropped from $1 million to $900,000, while the budget for the testing itself is over $1 million. More money is spent on testing than is spent on remediation. This is like your insurance company covering the lab test for a diagnosis, but then not covering the prescription drug required to treat the problem. Meanwhile, somebody, somewhere, is making off like a bandit with profits from the growing testing industry. School districts are using books from the same company who makes their tests, for instance (in the above article, McGraw-Hill). The school curricula, materials, and tests are all being corporatized, and there is the hidden purpose of convincing students there is something wrong with them.

To go back to my medical analogy for a moment, tens of millions of Americans suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and autism. And for each of these diseases, the medical community says: we do not know what causes this, and we have no cure. We can only treat your symptoms.

Similarly, within the schools, millions of children are diagnosed with ADD or ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, speech disorders, developmental delays, and so on. And for each of these the schools say: we don't know what causes this, we can't cure it, but we can work with your child. Remember the TeenScreen program, designed to screen kids for psychological problems? It's got to be nigh impossible to get one's child through the school system these days without having them diagnosed with a problem.

I have to ask, on both the educational and medical fronts, whose interests are being served in convincing us all that something is wrong with us? There is the obvious capitalist side to this. I read that in 2002 the top 10 pharmaceutical companies made more profits than the other 490 companies in the Fortune 500 combined. Educational deficiencies will become a cash cow as well, for a different kind of corporation.

I know I've blogged that ADHD is imaginary. I tend to think now that there may be a biological basis for some of it, due to trans-fats (the government should not allow these in our food, period), lack of nutritional advice given by doctors, and mercury poisoning. But mainstream medicine maintains it's all genetic, so there's no point even discussing anything with them. You just have to go and do your own research.

To sum up this long and winding post, for me there is a certain parallel in taking charge of my family's health on my own, and educating my children on my own. I hate to see the schools adopting the medical model, prioritizing the diagnosing of problems over teaching, while too often being incapable of doing anything to ameliorate those deficiencies.

The management culture in action

One of my earliest posts was about "scientific management," in which autonomy and independent thought is taken away from workers, and replaced by incredibly detailed, step-by-step instructions written by management. I wrote about this because public schooling as we know it was designed during the era in which this idea was taking hold and fascinating the robber barons. The more perfect management of the masses was their goal, not merely the more perfect management of the assembly line.

We have that management culture now. We are stifled by sclerotic, pointless bureaucracy everywhere you look, and meanwhile many employees, having been thoroughly trained by over a decade of infinitesimal, tedious directions in the classroom, do not act unless specifically directed. The university nearby is full of managers (the administrative side of most universities has grown dramatically faster than the academic side)-- managers who are unable to comprehend what their employees even do, yet suck down well over $100,000 a year doing nothing but going to meetings and writing emails full of management speak. The supervisors do not come up from the ranks, they are instead imported from business school. And there are virtually as many supervisory personnel as there are employees in a lot of offices.

All of this has been floating around in my head while I watch CNN these past few days (via closed captioning and while distracting the kids elsewhere). Yesterday one of their anchors, who has been in Mississippi since the storm hit, interrupted Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana after she had been thanking various politicians. She was congratulating Congress for calling a special session to pass appropriations, in full management-BS Pollyanna mode, and the anchor stopped her. He said no, sorry, he hadn't heard about that, because he'd been walking past dead bodies lying in the street for the past 4 days, including one woman whose body was being eaten by rats.

I actually laughed when he said that, in the hysterical shocked way you do when something sounds like a joke, like a line out of a B horror movie, even while the rest of my brain knew that no, this was actually happening. But Senator Landrieu could not be broken out of her bubble. She nodded sympathetically and went on thanking her fellow Senators, thanking the President, talking about appropriations.

Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans is not, apparently, a 'manager' in this sense. Sample from an interview he did last night:

RN: I need reinforcements. I need troops, man. I need 500 buses. Man, they were talking about... you know, one of the briefings we had, they were talking about getting public school bus drivers to come down here ... I'm like, you've got to be kidding me! This is a national disaster! Get every doggone Greyhound busline in the country, and get their asses moving to New Orleans. That's them thinking small, man.... this is a major major major deal! ...

Interviewer: Do you believe that the President is serious, holding a news conference on it, but can't do anything until [Louisiana Governor] Catherine Blanco requests him to do it....

RN: I have no idea what they're doing, but I'll tell you this. You know, God is looking down on all this... and if they're not doing everything in their power to save people, they are going to pay the price. Because every day that we delay, people are dying... and they're dying by the hundreds....

We're getting reports calling in that are breaking my heart, from people saying, 'I'm in my attic...I can't take it any more. The water's up to my neck. I don't think I can hold out.' And that's happening as we speak....

I don't want to see anybody do any more goddamn press conferences. Put a moratorium on press conferences. Don't do another press conference until the resources are in this city, and they come down to this city, and stand with us, with their military trucks and troops that we can't even count. Don't tell me there are 40,000 people coming here, they're not here! It's too goddamn late!

Get off your asses and let's do something. Let's fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country!

Shortly after that the mayor breaks down crying and gets off the phone (listen to the interview here).

Let's be clear: those who stayed in the City stayed because they were poor. Nearly 1 in 3 New Orleanians is below the poverty level, which, for a family of 4, is under $20,000/year. An estimated 100,000 people there did not own cars. Thousands of them have died and perhaps hundreds or thousands more will continue to die, mainly because they are poor, and our destroyed military is apparently incapable of bringing them rescue or aid.

So far the politicians have held press conferences, taken tours, made speeches on the floor of Congress regarding a bill which should have been passed without discussion, organized a Joint Military Task Force, and written executive orders to suspend gas taxes.

But nobody took a fire-fighting helicopter over to the beach, picked up sand in its bucket, and dumped it into the levee breach. Apparently the Army Corps of Engineers couldn't drop their 3,000-pound sandbags, first because of confusion in the chain of command, and then because they didn't have some pulley they needed. (Hello-- they are engineers, they should fricking figure it out, there are hundreds of people who drowned because they did not plug the levee breach.)

Nobody, to my knowledge, has lowered a giant net full of bottles of water for the people at the convention center, who have received no supplies whatsoever even though they were directed to go there by the authorities. Women have given birth while waiting for food and water, and there are now over a dozen corpses sitting in the street. And no National Guard pilot has yet said "F--- the suits, we're landing at Wal-Mart, loading up on water and juice and formula, and dropping it off the back of the chopper." No one, even though their lack of common sense action has caused people to die.

Nobody, to my knowledge, has been landing C-130's on the interstates to bring in supplies-- why the hell not?

One man who brought his 20-foot boat downtown to aid with the rescue effort was told he'd have to buy his own gas, so he was unable to assist them (he had no money). Excuse me, but gas stations in New Orleans are still charging the police for gasoline? If that is the case, Governor Blanco needs to sign another executive order and just nationalize those stations.

Those Navy ships full of food and water? No sign of them so far.

Those supposedly plentiful National Guard in Louisiana? According to the mayor, there are 250 Guard members in New Orleans; the rest, though the federal government claims it has sent them, have not materialized in the city. The Pentagon appears to be fabricating imaginary National Guard members out of thin air, while simultaneously replying that no, they are not going to let the Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard members come back from Iraq one month early to aid in reconstruction. We are busy reconstructing the buildings we bombed into rubble in a far-flung land, we can't spare troops to rebuild an American city.

No firefighting helicopters have been seen dumping water on the buildings burning out of control in New Orleans. There is a hotel on fire near the Superdome -- near the Superdome, still home to 30,000 people -- and apparently nothing can be done. If it spreads the catastrophe is unimaginable.

What are these FEMA people doing? Sitting on their hands? Getting out maps and having long meetings over coffee, under the whir of the air conditioning machines, in some safe city like Baton Rouge? They say they are spending $500 million per day-- on what? My two guesses are: 1) subsidies to oil companies, and 2) Enron-style mismanagement (if not straight-up embezzling). The head of FEMA, after all, financially destroyed an organization while serving as its financial manager. He was fired and I think there were legal actions taken against him.

The international papers are in disbelief. Europeans are reported to be clustering around their TVs in horror, unable to believe this is the United States, and we are about to let several thousand more people die of dehydration and drowning, because still, still, five days in, virtually no one from the military has shown up to help.

This is the management culture in a life-and-death situation: anyone who cannot save themselves dies. Of course, it's not only that, part of the explanation resides in the fact that certain top members of this administration are sociopaths incapable of empathy or compassion. Condi Rice spent the past couple days shoe shopping in NYC and taking in a few shows. As for Bush, this is a picture of him on Tuesday, enjoying himself while 80% of the City of New Orleans lay underwater, falling into anarchy and despair:

















Whatever happened to the nation of able-bodied, autonomous, pioneering individuals? How did we get to be such cogs, led by such incompetents?

I'm not being totally fair, as there are instances of creativity. Doctors escorted by police went to a Walgreens pharmacy and seized all its medication. Many people have looted stores non-violently in order to get water, food, formula, and diapers. People have used their own boats to rescue people all on their own, and policemen have refused to wait for permission to use police boats, and have jumped into floodwaters in order to rescue people. Many individuals do take common sense action, but the folks being flown in from elsewhere, the ones with equipment, the ones with helicopters, they seem to be manacled by their superiors.

I mean, why can we not get water to thousands of dying people, not even after 5 days? They are supposedly flying Chinooks in the city. A Chinook holds a tremendous number of bottles of water. Somebody needs to decide which is the higher priority: maintaining the chain of command, or saving hundreds of people from dying.


Yeah, this post is another major detour, but all I can think about is New Orleans.