Guest post: Big Brother gets bigger

Chris here from ABlogAboutSchool. FedUpMom suggested that I might cross-post some of my thoughts over here from time to time, so here’s my first guest post.

Glenn Greenwald, probably my all-time favorite blogger, writes this week about “how children are being trained to give up all privacy, and to be good, dutiful Surveillance State citizens, through constant, pervasive surveillance in schools,” which are “[t]raining children from an early age to have no expectation of privacy -- to live on the assumption that their every move and even thought (which is what Internet activity is) will be monitored and recorded by authority figures . . .”

Greenwald cites this article:

Whether it is a district surveilling students in their bedrooms via webcam, conducting random drug or locker searches, strip-searching students, lowering the standard for searching students to “reasonable suspicion” from “probable cause,” disciplining students for conduct outside of school hours, searching their cellphones and text messages, or allegedly forcing them to undergo pregnancy testing, student privacy is under increasing threat.

The other day I mentioned a Connecticut school district that wanted to require students to carry an ID card with an RFID chip so that they could track their location. The surveillance capability included locating the student if they were off school premises and in town. . . .

It strikes me that schools are grooming our youth to simply accept being tracked and monitored wherever they go and that anything they do, anywhere, can be used against them in school or elsewhere. Is this really how we want to raise our children? . . .

It’s time for a national dialogue about student privacy, while there are still some remnants of it left.

Isn’t this of a piece with all the emphasis on being quiet obedient hard workers, with the treatment of children as objects to be manipulated, with the conception of children as future employees, with the use of recess as a coercion tool and parents as homework police, with the medication of kids who won’t sit still, with the devaluing of the humanities, with the neglect of qualities like curiosity, skepticism, and the ability to ask a good question -- that is, with all the things that follow from a system rooted in high-stakes testing? If you were trying to make America a more authoritarian, less democratic place, isn’t high-stakes testing exactly the educational approach you would choose?

(Cross-posted here.)

Recess: Whatever It Is ...

Words of wisdom from Groucho Marx: Whatever it Is, I'm Against It!

Hello, I Must Be Going

Harpo Speaks

Why Homework Takes Too Long

It comes as a nasty shock to a young child to get home after an exhausting day of school only to have Mom dig some assignment out of the backpack and try to force more schoolwork on him. Kids, quite rightly, resist, feeling that home should be a place where they get to unwind at the end of the day. Instead, they find that their own family has unaccountably become part of the oppressive school regime. The resistance, procrastination, and nagging that result add a great deal of time to even the simplest assignment.

Many assignments eat time because they're so boring. I have seen my daughter shut down in despair over the tedium of some of her schoolwork.

Other assignments eat time because no-one in the family can figure them out. They're so ill-formed that you can't tell what the child is supposed to do or how you can tell when they're finished. This is often true of assignments that the teacher thought would be "fun" or "creative" -- the posters, the dioramas, the "personal reflections".

"10 Minutes Per Grade Level" is Hogwash

Here's one teacher's description of the 10-minute rule, from a comment on I Hate Reading Logs:

Dr. Harris Cooper, Duke University, compiled data from 60 different research studies and concluded that some homework is beneficial for student achievement. His findings showed that the 10 minute rule worked best, 10 minutes for every grade in school. In other words, 1st graders should have no more than 10 minutes, 6th graders should have no more than 60 minutes, and so on.

And where did the sacred 10-minute rule come from? From a chance encounter with a teacher (Does Homework Really Work? Homework Help|Great Schools):

“The source [of that figure] was a teacher who walked up to me after a workshop I did about 25 years ago,” says Cooper. “I’d put up a chart showing middle school kids who reported doing an hour to an hour and a half were doing just as well as high schoolers doing two hours a night. The teacher said, ‘That sounds like the 10-minute rule.’" He adds with a laugh, "I stole the idea.”

And this is how a study that clearly showed NO advantage to homework in elementary school is now being used to justify homework for elementary school.

Why is the 10-minute rule a bad idea? Let me count the ways:

1.) It puts the focus on quantity, not quality. Discussions about homework tend to get mired in the quantity issue (because there is usually too much) and never get around to the quality issue. If the homework doesn't help the child learn, 10 seconds is too much, never mind 10 minutes.

2.) Teachers are told to assign something every night, so they assign busywork. In elementary school, public school teachers have a mixed-ability class, and they know that not all the kids will do the homework, so they really can't assign anything important. They just assign boilerplate junk, such as copying dictionary definitions and answering questions from mind-numbing textbooks.

3.) Teachers don't know how long it will take. In theory, filling out that word search might take a child 10 minutes. In practice, when a child is exhausted at the end of the day, it could take a half hour or more.

4.) It ignores childrens' natural development. It's not appropriate to expect a 6-year-old to come home after a long day of sitting still and doing what she's told, and then sit at the kitchen table and do more schoolwork. I don't blame the kids for the tantrums that result.

5.) It's really Momwork. It is an extremely rare elementary-aged child who can consistently remember, and carry out, all the assigned homework. Therefore, it becomes Mom's job to check the backpack for the assignment, nag the kid into doing the work, and make sure the homework is packed again. I resent this on the grounds that I resent people telling me what to do, but even if I was more agreeable, what message are we sending our kids? We're telling them that they can't possibly handle school on their own.

How much homework is appropriate for elementary school? None. That's the finding that's actually supported by Harris Cooper's research.

Some Thoughts about "L. A.'s Leaders in Learning"

As usual, I had a mixed reaction to L.A.'s Leaders in Learning.

I completely agree with this:

"We're measuring who is in schools rather than how effective the schools are," said Helen Ladd, a professor and testing expert at Duke University.

This portrait of a "high-achieving" school could have been written about my own school district:

Topeka Elementary in Northridge serves a community where one in four parents attended graduate school. Over the seven years analyzed, two-thirds of Topeka's students scored above grade level, contributing to its sterling API score of 879.

But the school is intently focused on bringing up those who score below. In part that's because the API, while not primarily concerned with students' progress, is designed to give more credit to gains by low achievers.

"It's where you get the most bang for your buck," said Principal Miko Dixon. "Everything we do is about getting those kids up."

Those low-achieving students made small but steady gains, the Times analysis found. The much larger group of high achievers was essentially flat in English and steadily falling behind in math. When ranked by student growth overall, Topeka was in the bottom 3% of district elementary schools.

The most common way for a child to get high scores on standardized tests is to be born to an educated, middle-class family. These kids will routinely get wonderful test scores even if the school essentially ignores them. I'm glad to see the L.A. Times shining a spotlight on this problem.

If you've got kids with low test scores, one way to bring their scores up is to "teach to the test". If this means ensuring that the kids have their math facts down, I'm OK with it. But if it means drilling the kids on the exact format of the tests, to the extent that they can fail a test on the same subject if the format is different, it's not OK. Take a look at Linda Perlstein's Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade for a scary example of test prep.

And where does that leave us? With a deeply troubled public school system, that's where. We've got bright middle-class kids bored and drifting in schools that benefit from the test scores they post, while ignoring their academic needs. Then we've got children of poverty enduring hours of test prep, which stunts their intellectual growth.

more from the L. A. times

I haven't had a chance to think about this yet, but here's the latest from the L.A. times:

L.A.'s Leaders in Learning

I certainly agree with their basic point that a school can look good because of its student body, even when it does very little useful teaching.

Looking Forward to School

In today's Answer Sheet, an incoming college freshman reflects back on his experience so far.

Summer doesn’t feel like a fleeting break between two grueling nine-month periods of drudgery.

...For the first time ever, I’m looking forward to school.

This is exactly what I don't want for my kids. I hope summer will always be more than a fleeting break, and the school year will never be a grueling nine-month period of drudgery. I hope they will look forward to school every year.