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.

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.