Is there a War on Parents?

We’ve got a War on Terror, which has persisted for 13 years. Fox News trots out claims of a War on Christmas every year (that’s about due to begin soon, I guess). But lately, I’m seeing what I think might be a War on Parents.

* A mom arrested for standing next to her car to smoke while her kids were in the car (http://reason.com/blog/2014/08/07/mom-gets-out-of-car-to-smoke-is-arrested).

* Another mom arrested for swearing in front of her kids (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/15/mom-arrested-for-swearing_n_5681837.html?utm_hp_ref=parents&ir=Parents).

* A dad arrested because his son snuck away from the church bus (http://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/warren-county/blanchester/jeffrey-williamson-dad-arrested-after-son-8-skips-church-to-play).

* A mom arrested when her daughter played at the park (http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-arrested-son-park/).

I know you can probably think of more, perhaps many more, just from recent months. It’s starting to seem that the slightest situation in which a witness feels uncomfortable with a parent’s choice will result in 1) calling the police and 2) an arrest of the parent, often right in front of the child(ren). As a mom of two, I can’t help but wonder when my next less than stellar parenting moment will be viewed by someone who decides the only solution is to involve police, who in turn have a pretty blunt instrument (arrest) to resolve issues.

What do you think? Is there a war on parents?

Who Needs a Makeover?

I was so happy to read this piece, recently published in the Washington Post. As a former elementary classroom teacher and mother of two young boys, I have experienced a great deal of frustration over schools that are not built for kids. Instead, we keep trying to makeover kids in school’s image, medicating and punishing and demeaning them into compliance.

The idea that a well-managed classroom means all students (even the youngest, at 3 or 4 or 5) are sitting in a chair, studiously bent over their papers and working for hours on end goes against everything we know from child development, academic achievement, growth, maturity, and health. Even in the workplace, we’re realizing that people (of any age) can’t just sit and work and work and work without moving. This article in the New York Times outlines why people “hate” work and steps that can improve one’s health and happiness in the workplace. If we’re recommending adults at the office get up every single hour and spend time walking/moving, why would we do any less for children? If we’re pushing for standing and walking desks at the office, how can we be forcing quiet sitting time for our kids?

My favorite teaching moments happened when kids were moving and smiling and (yes) making noise. When I was teaching second grade, my students had to learn about the concepts of predator and prey in their science lesson. The bulk of the lesson was outside, with some students acting as predators (making their eyes look straight ahead) and others as prey (moving their heads side to side to get as much of a 360 degree view of their surroundings as they could). We commenced a form of freeze tag in which the predators tried to freeze tag the prey, and the prey tried to keep away. Years later, those children are nearly finished with their bachelor’s degrees, but I still use that as an example of one of my most effective lessons ever.

Lip service is paid to the underperformance of boys in school, but can we really be surprised that boys (in particular) are struggling to conform to an institution in which they are not allowed to move and explore and demonstrate curiosity? My oldest son spent five days in Kindergarten before we gave up and enrolled in a distance learning/homeschooling program. Each of those five days, the teacher’s lesson centered around forcing the children to sit in quiet and still circle on the floor while she stood off to the side and created a tiny origami crane that she’d give to the student who demonstrated the most quiet and still behavior. Could you win that prize? Could you sit still, on the floor with no cushion/padding, without moving or squirming at all? Even for 5 minutes? How about 20? 30? That’s what she was demanding of 20 five-year-olds every day during the first week of their first year of school.

It’s about time we made school for kids, rather than trying to remake our kids for school.

Be Intentional? Yes, Please!

Fans of the Song of Ice and Fire book series and/or HBO’s Game of Thrones will know that that various Houses have “words.” For House Stark, “Winter is Coming.” If my family’s House had our own words, they might be “We Do What We Say We Do.” We consistently communicate our future plans and follow through with them. Along those same lines, we don’t make promises/projections that we aren’t sure we can keep.

So, when I recently read Colleen Flaherty’s piece about a recent symposium about the faculty models used in higher education, the main thrust of the symposium’s outputs resonated with me. According to Flaherty, the big takeaway from the symposium was that the purpose and role of higher education in the 21st century needs to be better defined and institutions’ missions clarified in order to drive the best faculty model to support those purposes/missions. In other words–choose the faculty model that best helps you “do what you say you do” as an institution.

This is something I believe my own institution has done well. We have a mission to ensure students can access the higher education they need to reach their professional goals and be productive members of their respective organizations. Since students need knowledge and skills relevant to their professional goals and organizations, the faculty are practitioner faculty. The large bulk of our faculty members are current practitioners in their respective fields who share their knowledge, skill, and expertise from their day jobs with students in our classes. Students gain up-to-the-minute examples of the ways that course concepts and research-based theories are applied in real-world settings. I regularly have students tell me that they gain something from class today that they use in their jobs tomorrow. For a school whose mission is to connect so closely to the profession, I don’t see how it gets any better than that.

What strikes me, though, is how other institutions aren’t being so intentional about their selection of faculty. Articles abound describing the lot of adjunct faculty members who are piecing together an existence in academia by teaching a few classes at several different institutions because full-time (let alone tenure track) positions are not the norm. If the main takeaway from this symposium about faculty models was “we’re not ready to select a faculty model,” what does that say about the way institutions are doing it now? For me, it says they are in a constant “stop-gap” mode, just being sure that classes are covered by someone, but without attention to either getting the best person for that role, or ensuring there is a corps of faculty-employees who can devote sufficient time and attention to their teaching jobs.

Not Enough IRBs…

Apparently there are not yet sufficient numbers of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) in this country. While doctoral learners and other researchers are busy completing hours and hours of ethics training from organizations like the CITI Program, submitting and resubmitting (often in numerous iterations) to their institutions’ (IRBs) just to ask a few survey questions, grossly unethical government-funded medical research goes forward, targeting some of our most vulnerable populations.

It’s recently come to light that a research study published in 2010 about oxygen treatments for prematurely-born infants used unbelievably unethical approaches to target poor minority populations in places like Alabama, gain parental consent for participation with nothing that even closely resembles informed consent, administer a purely randomized oxygen treatment to preemies that disregarded the patients’ medical indications, and even misrepresented patient information to medical personnel so they would not discontinue inappropriate treatments in response to the babies’ reactions.

“It’s not unethical when the government does it,” wrote Glenn Reynolds sarcastically. Sharyl Attkisson shared a number of anecdotes from parents whose children were likely negatively affected by their participation in this study. Her piece provides a strong analysis of this egregious situation. The parents report the ways that the study’s “SUPPORT” name misrepresented the intent, how they were never informed of the true nature of the study, and how they were encouraged to participate as a means of gaining better treatment for their babies, even though the study had very little connection to providing improved care to those particular study participants.

While I was going around and around with my institution’s IRB over extensive confidentiality requirements for a 5-question email survey to fully informed, consenting, volunteer adults about school practices, this study was going forward doing real harm to the most vulnerable in our society, on the taxpayer dime (to the tune of $20.8 million). Apparently the Federal government needs a better IRB.

More on the Value of Going to College

The value of a degree is becoming a daily topic in the media. Data on the earnings differential for baccalaureate grads versus college drop outs versus high school grads is sliced and diced in countless ways, with most analyses demonstrating that there is at least some financial benefit for earning a college degree, all other things being equal. Setting aside the problem that past performance may not be a good predictor of future outcomes, advocating for any one individual to base a university enrollment decision on such data analyses is always a bit fraught with difficulty. Ben Casselman recently crunched a different, but related, set of numbers. In his analysis, Casselman examined graduation data to provide some insights into which students who attend college are most likely to graduate.

The data shows a graduation gap for certain types of college students. Casselman wrote, “Part-time students have an even lower completion rate [than the average], as do racial minorities and older and low-income students.” This suggests that students in such situations might need to examine their circumstances and make a realistic determination of their drive for degree attainment. Starting but not finishing is a recipe for potentially staggering debt without the benefits of the better-paying positions that might come with a complete degree on the resume.

I’m left wondering where institutions of higher education should be focusing their energy, as they provide educational opportunities. Energies spent in the admission/enrollment processes get students in the door. But this data suggests that institutional energy would better be spent on helping students to commencement, in particular providing structures and supports for populations of students with lower attainment rates. 

Current efforts at my institution include academic diagnosis at admission, course tracks designed with higher supports for lower-performing students, individualized academic and financial advisement for the duration of the program of study, and class availability on a rolling basis. Ongoing course and program revision include attention to smoothing points of friction in the course of study at which students often withdraw. But in light of the data shown in Casselman’s analysis, better help for students to examine their circumstances to help them determine their overall chances for persistence to graduation might be in order. Because there is good evidence that starting college and dropping out may leave most students worse off than not starting at all.

Create Your Own Bubble

The “Baby On Board,” “helicopter parented” Millennial Generation strikes again, according to a recent article. In it, Medina describes a growing trend on traditional college campuses, in which students are calling for “trigger warnings” in course syllabi. These warnings are similar to the ratings/sub-ratings on movies and video games, or spoiler alerts in articles about TV/movies, in which viewers/readers are warned about the types of objectionable material that led to the assigned rating (e.g. the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone PG rating was for “scary moments and mild language”). In syllabus trigger warnings, the professor would alert students to any potentially troubling or objectionable content that may be found in the literature, film, or other required course material.

A trigger warning in the course syllabus would, at minimum, give students the heads up to be prepared for what they may find in their course readings. Alternately, some students may use such warnings to refuse to take part in course content altogether, ostensibly to avoid a perceived trauma or memory or emotion they’d rather avoid. I’m led to wonder, though, if students are better off for avoiding content. What opportunities for learning and growth are missed when students refuse to participate? Would instructors be right to grade accordingly, considering that students typically base their non-participation on an attempt to avoid troubling emotional reactions based on difficult life experiences?

Students can effectively create their own individualized bubbles to protect from any material they might find challenging or troubling or otherwise objectionable.

I find this trend similar to two other phenomena we observe in society today:

1) Media everywhere seems to have a spoiler alert or content rating

2) So many people are only reading or viewing media that support their own views/experience

It’s been a long time since I’ve consumed media in which I didn’t find one or more spoiler alerts. Newspapers, magazines, news programs, talk shows, and podcasts all let me know if there is even the slightest chance that a plot point may be revealed about a media production. I even see this for descriptions of productions that were released years ago, in case there are consumers who haven’t yet watched a movie or TV series and plan to watch it for the first time on their favorite streaming service. Consumers are protected in their very own spoiler zone bubble from learning anything they might rather avoid about media they may or may not be planning to consume.

Likewise, every movie, TV show, and video game has some type of content rating, with sub-ratings to let me know not just who the media was designed for, but why a given rating was assigned. Consumers can be highly selective about their media, based on these ratings and sub-ratings, and ostensibly avoid any type of material they might find objectionable. On top of that, a really serious consumer can refer to websites and blogs in which similarly-minded individuals provide further recommendations about media, just in case the content ratings alone are not sufficient to determine if one should be watching a given show or movie.

The rise of partisan news media provides further bubbles, even echo chambers, by which consumers only have to experience viewpoints that match their own sensibilities. Conservative- and progressive-minded individuals can get their news from 24-hour news outlets, newspapers, magazines, and websites that cater to their points of view.

It’s not surprising that in a society where all these media consumer protections are available, students might seek similar alerts in their higher education experiences. But, as Medina points out, requests for trigger warnings face off against faculty members’ academic freedom to select the course materials and instructional methods they believe will best support students’ mastery of learning outcomes. Some faculty may find their academic freedom and instructional authority threatened by a demand for trigger warnings and refuse to add them. Even in the case where faculty members add trigger warnings, if they overlook something students may be empowered to take action with a claim of discrimination or harassment because their particular brand of objection was not considered while others were.

This trend raises a number of challenging questions for students and faculty members:

• How much pedagogical value would trigger warnings have for reducing students’ emotional reactions to challenging content, to allow for more effective analysis?
• What threats to mastery of learning outcomes might trigger warnings pose, if students use them to opt out of course materials?
• What threats to academic freedom do trigger warnings pose, particularly in cases where students push for university policies that require them?
• Would either the presence of, or lack of, trigger warnings create circumstances that open faculty members to charges of discrimination?

What are your thoughts? If you’re a faculty member, would you add trigger warnings about potentially challenging content? Why or why not?

Federal Education Dollars: Are We Content with a “D”?

The federal government continues its decades-long interventions into public schooling. In the past few years, one of its programs has been billions in funding under a School Improvement Grant Program. The Department of Education has released a report of the performance of schools who received the grants, as measured by the states’ testing program in reading and mathematics. The results are underwhelming: Over 30% of the schools did the same or worse in the testing outcomes after implementing programs using the grant funding. A related blog included this analysis.

For me, this report begs a few questions:

1)    Are there other ways to measure success than state-specific testing programs for reading and mathematics? Could children be benefiting in other ways by these funds that aren’t measured on these tests?

2)    Was lack of funding an actual cause of these schools’ difficulties in the first place? In other words, was it reasonable to expect improved testing outcomes through the application of funding?

3)    Are schools reporting on responsible and effective use of the grant funds? How much goes to actual student-facing interventions, as opposed to administrative overhead?

4)    Who is best positioned to determine what goes on in schools: the federal government, state governments, or the local school stakeholders?

5)    Should federal grants of these amounts continue in the face of evidence showing limited to no to even negative impact? To whom is the U.S. Department of Education accountable when their program outcomes are so poor?

As a tax-paying citizen and educator, I am troubled by a society in which a far-removed central government agency chooses funding winners and losers amongst school programs. I’m further troubled when their own reporting shows such anemic results of those choices. Congress’s legislative mandates that give this type of responsibility to an executive branch agency need to be reviewed—hard-earned tax dollars should have greater impact than we’re seeing here, if they are to continue being spent in this way.

The Hidden Mission

In business (and organizations more generally), much is touted about mission statements. Every organizational entity seems to have one (see examples here and here). Departments within organizations often have them. Individual leaders even create them for their particular teams. Popular business magazines like Forbes, Inc., and Entrepreneur offer how-to articles to help business create them in just a few “easy steps.”

Having a mission is one thing. Expressing it may be quite another. Perhaps organizations express a mission statement through the goods/services offered. Some may express it through customer services practices. In other cases, the mission is demonstrated through the treatment of employees: which are retained, promoted, and given raises versus those who are ignored or laid off. My guess is, in most cases it’s some combination of all of these, and more.

This week I find myself wondering: must the stated mission and expressed mission align? What if they don’t? What if the goods/services, customer services practices, and/or treatment of employees indicate a true mission that differs in stark contrast with the organization’s stated purpose?

In curriculum development work, educators speak of the hidden curriculum. I suggest there is also a hidden mission statement: the underlying (and perhaps true) mission that comes through an organization’s actions and behaviors. As a member of the organization, one has the choice to buy into the mission and align professional outcomes with the organizational outcomes. One has a similar choice to buy into the hidden mission as well.

What would you do if your organization’s “hidden mission statement” doesn’t match the stated one? What if that hidden mission statement is so far from your own professional goals and needs that you find yourself in conflict with the organization? 

Teachers Bully, Too

Bullying and anti-bullying campaigns are everywhere. The U.S. government has declared October Bullying Prevention Awareness Month. Wikipedia has an entire category devoted to pages about a host of anti-bullying initiatives. The national teachers’ unions, NEA and AFT, have efforts to raise awareness about bullying. Most of these organizations spend energy, time, and money to address situations where children are bullying other children. While there is evidence that these efforts may be counterproductive, they also miss what might be an even more serious issue: teachers as the bullies.

While not as prevalent as the news proclaiming all of the anti-bullying initiatives, there are media reports of teacher bullying. In one, a teacher was caught on video joining with child bullies to attack a 13-year-old boy. This post highlights several other instances of teacher bullying. Parenting and medical sites offer advice to parents who suspect their children are being bullied by teachers. My own son, at his first experience in a formal school setting, experienced five days of bullying at the hands of two Kindergarten teachers. Other children physically attacked him as well, with the tacit and outright approval of these teachers. Needless to say, the fifth day of this was his last in the school.

Dr. Stuart Tremlow researches this phenomenon. In one study, he found a correlation between prevalence of bullying teachers in a school and the rates of behavioral problems among children in that school. In another, he found that teachers who were victims of bullying during their youth were more likely to engage in bullying behavior as adults. Other teachers serve in the role of bystander, witnessing bullying but doing nothing.

Perhaps instead of raising awareness of bullying, or declaring a bullying prevention month, we demand that teachers stop being bullies and bystanders. Perhaps we expect teachers’ dispositions include active support of all students rather than than victimizing children.

PTO Mom Lasted 5 Days

My son got into the Montessori program. I signed up for the PTO and attended Meet the Teacher night. He started Kindergarten the first week of August. He went to school, and every evening shared disturbing tales of children stepping on his hands, making punching motions at him, and, most frightening, he was being set out of class. By the morning of the fifth day it was clearly not the right place for him. His teacher and her teaching partner were outright bullying him and encouraging the other children to do the same. With all the attention on child to child bullying, a lesser-told story is teacher-driven bullying. More to come on that topic.

Long story short: when the school day was over on Day 5, we stopped at the office to withdraw my son’s enrollment. He’s now in the district’s distance learning program, working through the home-school curriculum. We’re looking at the possibility of Tae Kwon Do or dance to give him opportunities to learn with other children and build his group dynamics skills.

Stay Tuned…