Not School

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. -- Mark Twain

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Destroying summer vacation


    I ran across an opinion piece today, in the New York Times, which introduced me to the notion of "vacation homework" during summertime:

    Last summer, for example, students at one charter school in the Bronx were assigned 10 book reports, a thick math packet, a report on China including a written essay and a handmade doll in authentic costume, and a daily log of their activities and the weather.

    These were kids who'd just finished first grade.

    And that daily log of activities-- yeah, so the school can snoop on your family all summer long. I don't think I could stand it. Possibly I'd keep a parody of a log myself, and have my kid turn that in:

    June 23. Had a lovely breakfast with Father before he departed for work. Studied spelling words until 11am, tidied my room, made sandwiches for lunch. Took darling little brother out to the sandbox to give Mummy a bit of a rest. Jogged, did a few math problems, and set the table for dinner (delicious and healthy-- thanks Mum!). Read Dickens until 8:30 and then off to bed. Another blissful day!

    I mean, what happened to privacy? Do the parents all get to read the teacher's daily log for the summer, too?

    The NYT piece goes on:

    And what about high schoolers — just a little light reading to ease teenage angst? One ninth grader we know was assigned a packet of materials on the Holocaust. Another must read a 656-page book on genocide, on top of three chapters of a science textbook followed by a 15-page take-home exam, prepare a 20-slide PowerPoint presentation and complete an English assignment involving three books and essays.

    The authors point out that kids need vacation time to reduce stress, but even if we restrict ourselves to purely academic goals, kids still need down time for "consolidation." Consolidation is a psychologist's term for the period when recently acquired information gets woven in with what we already knew, linked up to our prior knowledge, and is therefore retained. If you never get a resting period where consolidation can occur, all you have is short-term memorization. In my opinion most of school relies on short-term memorization. Possibly this is why the "skills" students supposedly learn are so fragile and transient that they don't make it through the summer: because they keep you so ludicrously busy that there's no time to ever consolidate the new data. In any case, more homework isn't the solution.

    Actually, homework is highly dubious even during the school year:

    In fact, there's serious doubt about whether homework has any benefit at all. Most studies have found little or no correlation between homework and achievement (meaning grades and test scores) in elementary school or middle school. According to Harris Cooper of Duke University, the nation's leading researcher on the subject, there is a clear correlation among high school students, but he warns that "overloading them with homework is not associated with higher grades."

    . . .

    In fact, most experts believe reading is the most important educational activity. Yet a poll released last week by Scholastic and Yankelovich found that the amount of time youngsters spend reading for fun declines sharply after age 8. The No. 1 reason given by parents: too much homework.


    Yes, it's hard to get an education when you're living with ever-present schooling.

    It seems to me that parents should band together and refuse to have their kids do any of the summer homework. If even a quarter of the class did that, they'd have to make some radical changes, and those kids would get a real summer.

    A good old-fashioned work stoppage is what's in order.

    Monday, June 19, 2006

    You call that reform?


      I wandered over to the National Education Association's website today, and found this:

      NEA advocates for public school reforms that we know make a difference in boosting student achievement. Among them:


      • free, universal preschool
      • smaller class sizes
      • a qualified and caring teacher in every classroom
      • a challenging curriculum
      • ample resources for all public schools, including those that serve poor and minority students
      • involved parents

      Wow. That is the most gutless, uninspiring piece of milquetoast I've seen in a while. The only new idea is universal preschool, and here the alleged benefits are not supported by research data. Children in poverty do benefit from pre-kindergarten education, but that's why we have Head Start. Some middle-class children may experience a slight academic benefit, but also tend to be hindered in their social development. And kids with highly educated parents do better, on the average, when they don't attend preschool at all.

      The rest of the list are no-brainers. It's like a politician who says he supports More Jobs, Less Crime, and National Security. It's a pointless thing to say. It gets us nowhere in terms of real action. Sure, the NEA supports smaller class sizes. Who doesn't? The NEA supports ample resources-- what a novel goal!

      How about these ideas:

      • Stop using standardized tests.
      • Fire a third of all school administrators.
      • Use mixed-grade, mixed-age classrooms and lots of peer tutoring.
      • Eliminate token economies, de-emphasize grades.
      • Buy some houses, set up tiny neighborhood schools, stop spending millions on busing.
      • Give students more autonomy over pacing and scheduling of subjects.
      • Allow 10% of school time for kids to pursue their own academic interests.
      • Build, say, four-week apprenticeships into the high school calendar.
      • Stop making kids listen to other people reading out loud!!
      • Let kids read the books they want to read. Set them loose in the library.
      • Give parents and students some actual say in the classroom (not mere lip service).
      • Respect students' first amendment rights.
      • Make classrooms more comfortable. Don't tolerate bullying, allow healthy food/drink, let people take a piss without asking permission (for crying out loud!).
      • Stop using history textbooks. Throw. Them. Out. Replace them with real history books.

      At least that's an interesting list, even if some of the items would be hotly debated.

      The NEA is apparently just like the Democratic party. Presumably benevolent, and the vessel for a progressive person's hopes and expectations-- but, for the most part, an enormous rhetoric-spewing disappointment. I don't think these people could drop the management-speak if you held a gun to their heads.

      The amount of money spent on busing is absolutely ridiculous, and it's going to get a lot worse as we continue to run out of petrol. The problem is, you can't set up tiny little schoolhouses and maintain age segregation. And yet, eliminating age segregation is somehow too shocking a proposal to even be spoken aloud. People apparently believe that teenagers eat small children, if not closely supervised.

      Furthermore, the number of school administrators per teacher has doubled since the 50s. This is a reversible problem.

      Tens of millions are also spent in each state on constant standardized testing. So much is spent on the tests themselves and on the consequent additional administrators that I have to question whether it wouldn't be cheaper to forfeit federal funds, and just give the bird to NCLB.

      * * *

      A decade ago, I used to believe that there were simply an enormous number of morons out there. There were oodles of well-meaning idiots who would see the light if only we could sit them down and explain the truth to them. But now I think that when a system is failing, it is usually failing on purpose.

      The reason we have almost 50 million uninsured Americans is that then, no matter how hideously bad and absurd your HMO becomes, you remain grateful to have any insurance at all.

      The reason we don't have safe ports, safe nuclear facilities, safe subways, safe airports is that another 9/11 would benefit the glinty-eyed fascists within the current administration.

      The reason they didn't save New Orleans is that they didn't want to save New Orleans. They wanted to destroy the Democratic and black metropolis within the red state of Louisiana, and they did so through intentional neglect. This was not a failure. This was a hidden agenda.

      And the reason high school graduates are so ill-informed and unable to think critically is that K-12 education was designed by the robber barons to prevent true education and critical thinking. The schools aren't failing at all. They are succeeding in their historical mission-- in spite of the teachers who swim against that tide.

      And the NEA surely isn't going to change that.

      Tuesday, June 06, 2006

      The Sickhouse



        Someone needs to educate Connecticut educators on the concepts of infection and contagion (link):

        WATERBURY, Conn. --A doctor's note may not be good enough for city school children who are absent because of illness under a tougher attendance policy under consideration by the Board of Education.

        Routine illness, even with note from a physician, would no longer be considered an excused absence under the policy proposed on Monday.

        The policy would excuse health-related absences only if a student is hospitalized or presents proof of a "serious chronic illness," such as diabetes or asthma.

        The proposed policy was drafted by a committee of teacher, administrators and others, headed by Michael Yamin, an assistant principal at Kennedy High School.

        "We now are looking for school to be the priority," Yamin said.


        Best of luck next flu season.

        Sunday, June 04, 2006

        Thomas Jefferson on education: Part II


          I found a great short essay about Jefferson and public schooling, similar to my last post but considerably better. It begins:

          One advantage of interpreting the words of those no longer with us is that it is frequently possible to imply they said what we would like them to say. In that regard, no Founding Father is cited more favorably by the public school establishment than Thomas Jefferson.

          Probably the most often cited is his statement, "if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." That is not a statement about schools, of course. One can be educated without being schooled. One also can be schooled without being educated.

          In 1814, Jefferson made a clear distinction between the two as he said, "I hope our successors will turn their attention to the advantages of education. I mean education on the broad scale, and not that of the petty academies."


          I've been writing about Jefferson because I sometimes see it implied that homeschooling is unpatriotic and antisocial. This isn't something I hear personally, but it shows up in mainstream media articles on homeschooling, as in the Time article. "Well, the Founding Fathers were in favor of sending kids to school, so you must be wrong," is sometimes written in between the lines. Homeschooling research generally indicates that homeschooled kids enjoy superior academic and social growth, on the average. Therefore, barred from more concrete criticisms, journalists sometimes fall back on giving a sniff of disapproval and dragging the Founding Fathers into it, as if they too would have tsk, tsked about homeschools. In fact, Jefferson wrote in 1780:

          If it is believed that these elementary schools will be better managed by the governor and council or any other general authority of the government, than by the parents within each ward, it is a belief against all experience.

          If I went around claiming that Jefferson fought for state-funded voluntary homeschool co-ops in every five-mile square, where every kid would get a total of 36 weeks to learn, with some tutoring, whatever they felt like pursuing within the language arts or mathematics, I would not be far off.

          Furthermore, schooling is just one means of educating the public. A diverse and free press is also a very important mechanism (and one which we no longer have in this country). Jefferson wrote:

          No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. (In correspondence to to John Tyler, 1804.)

          The most effectual path to the truth is the free press, Jefferson wrote. Not schools. He also wrote that "The only security of all is in a free press," and "Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press." School might insure that all men could read, but it wasn't schooling that would protect American democracy. This is really quite obvious, since schools can't tell you about the latest referendum or political candidates. And nor do today's schools, with their "One Authority" approach to teaching, help graduates to decide what they believe when they encounter conflicting claims.

          Our public school system did not originate with Thomas Jefferson any more than atomic bombs originated with gunpowder. Some weak chain of historical events could be drawn back through the centuries, but it wouldn't mean much. The fact is, this really wasn't what Jefferson had in mind. And even if he would have approved of our K-12 system, all the schooling in the world won't help democracy one whit, in the absence of decent newspapers.