Education conflicts

View 775 Monday, Thursday, May 09, 2013

Today’s LA Times has two education essays. One is “Closing the Education Gap” by Michele Siqeiros. It’s on the editorial page, and it’s a pretty standard exhortation . “The state must develop a comprehensive strategy for public K-12 education, adult education and higher education systems for addressing remedial education.” We have to spend more money, and we have to pick up where the schools have left off or are leaving off, etc. etc.

Apparently they admit that the schools are awful and probably unfixable so we need to set up a second education system for remedial education. That will certainly hire a lot of teachers.  It beats the Mexico system where a bunch of education students in one of the colonies are holding 8 state policemen hostage demanding that they all be employed on graduation.  I hope I am imagining having read that is happening, and even more I hope it was in Mexico and not somewhere in the US. So we need to fix the system with remedial education at all levels.  Apparently we just write off the enormous sums being spent on the present failing system,.

The second essay isn’t supposed to be an essay but a front page story. My edition of the paper has it as “A Milder Way to Fight Defiance” by Teresa Watenade http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/12/local/la-me-adv-lausd-discipline-20130513 and it appears above the fold on page one.

“Damien Valentine knows painfully well about a national phenomenon that is imperiling the academic achievement of minority students, particularly African Americans like himself: the pervasive and disproportionate use of suspensions from school for mouthing off and other acts of defiance.

The Manual Arts Senior High School sophomore has been suspended several times beginning in seventh grade, when he was sent home for a day and a half for refusing to change his seat because he was talking. He said the suspensions never helped him learn to control his behavior but only made him fall further behind.

"Getting suspended doesn’t solve anything," Valentine said. "It just ruins the rest of the day and keeps you behind."

But Valentine, who likes chemistry and wants to be a doctor, is determined to change school discipline practices. He has joined a Los Angeles County-wide effort to push a landmark proposal by school board President Monica Garcia that would make L.A. Unified the first school district in California to ban suspensions for willful defiance.”

The rest is about the same. And of course it’s another attack on the notion of schools as places of opportunity to get an education. They’re not that: a school is a place you are entitled to be at, whether you belong there or not, whether you behave yourself or not, whether you are capable of learning or not; and Damien Valentine has as much right to be there, and to talk in class, and defy the teachers, and make it impossible for those around him actually learn something, as anyone else. The fact that Damien’s presence is one reason for the failure of the schools doesn’t seem to impress anyone.

The answer it seems is “restorative justice” in which the teacher spends a lot of time “working with” Damien and those like him. Teachers “exchange letters” with disruptive students, “each taking some blame and pledging to better cooperate.” Of course time spent with Damien and his ilk is taken from the students who just want to learn and who don’t insist on their right to be disruptive, and don’t insist on “restorative justice” if they are disciplined.

So long as the voodoo “education science” insists on transferring educational resources from those who can and want to learn, to Damien and others who are more concerned with their rights than their education, and who render themselves pretty well impervious to actual education, we are never going to have schools in which all but a very few learn to read, write, cipher, learn some civics, and generally have an educational foundation that helps them go out and find jobs or go to college. We need remedial education, not for Damien, but for those that Damien robbed of the chance to get an education in the regular system. 

We must pour more money into the schools so that there can be restorative justice for Damien and others like him; we must no have enforcement of discipline and teacher control of the classroom; and of course it is senseless to question what the results of all this will be. We don’t need to. We can see what the results are.

One result is increased class rigidity. There are those who go to good schools with hard discipline – they are the children of the rich, and a favored few who manage on some sort of charity or scholarship. There are those who live in the parts of town where the students tend not to talk in class and tell the teacher to shut up when they are disciplined, and who manage to get through a public school, so that they can now go to a college where they acquire a lifetime debt. And those whose parents can pay or work the system so that the kids can graduate without those crushing debts.

For a while it looked as if we were working on a system that paid attention to The Bell Curve and did trend toward a meritocracy; but now apparently we are to dismantle all that. The way to be sure that no child is left behind is to make sure that only the rich kids get ahead. The rest are to be subjected to Damien Valentine, who was wronged by the system and must be rendered restorative justice; and the teacher needs to spend time exchanging letters with those who won’t accept classroom discipline, or else must support the union which protects her from that stuff, and whatever the union’s faults it at least doesn’t make her spend her scarce free time in T-groups and sensitivity training, but can just get on with teaching those who want to learn. Given those choices I’d support the union. I don’t want to exchange letters with Damien. But Damien wants to be a doctor, and all those suspensions “never helped him learn to control his behavior but only made him fall further behind”, and he wants to be a doctor, and surely there are patients who deserve him?  So it is time for retributive justice.

The well disciplined kids who want to learn might actually learn something: but they better want it pretty badly, because the teacher is busy apologizing for disciplining the defiant.

Apologies for the rant. I presume that those who are in this crazy movement really believe the voodoo social science garbage they have been fed. Alas, I suspect that some know perfectly well what they are doing. If teachers are evaluated on actual results – how many students can actually do calculus when they graduate high school – then a lot of teachers aren’t going to be given the bright students to work with. But that’s another story for another time. Apologies for the rant. But not many.

If you want your kids to get ahead, learn about the Kahn Academy lectures, and learn more about Art Robinson’s education programs. Make sure they can all read, and by read I mean read anything including nonsense words like montheoretics and polydodmanite by the time they are in second grade. If they can’t read those words they can’t read. And note that they won’t know the meaning. Learning the meanings of words is important, but first you need to be able to READ words you have never seen before. If you want to be sure of it all, start them at age five on Mrs. Pournelle’s Reading Program http://www.readingtlc.com/. But it’s your job: don’t rely on the school system, because the goal of the schools is retributive justice, whatever that is, not teaching the kids anything at all.

I’ll have the California Sixth Grade Reader ready as an eBook shortly. It will help; the notion is to show what all California sixth graders were expected to read in 1914 – and with luck get out 10^th graders up to that level. But for your kids, you’d best be able to get them up to that level in 5^th grade. Which you can do, you know. Our modern protoplasm isn’t inferior to that of rural Florida or California back in the days of World War One…

The pledge drive ended reasonably well. For those who don’t know what that is, this place operates on the Public Radio model. It’s free but it needs to be supported if it’s going to stay in business. I run my pledge drives when KUSC the LA Classical Music station runs theirs. I don’t bug you about money much except at those times. The drive is ending, and thanks to those who subscribed or renewed. If you haven’t subscribed yet, this would be a great time to do it; and if you haven’t renewed in a while, it is never too late. And that’s enough about money for a while.