Thinking about educational paradoxes, the purpose of education, and engagement.

I get a little preoccupied sometimes because I don't really know what education is for. No. Really. I'm not sure I have a cogent understanding of what our system of education is intended to accomplish. I'm not sure I understand what it means to be educated on an individual level or as a society. Let me be clear, as well, that I understand there are a lot of answers to this question and I know what many of those answers are but find them unsatisfactory.

Paradoxes

In part, my inability to understand education comes from some serious paradoxes which society and policy create surrounding education. A good example comes from a commenter on Arnold Kling's blog.

People in education tend to believe two things:

1) School is America’s great driver of social mobility. School lifts up the poor. Without our education system, we would be a terribly unequal, unjust, “rich get richer and the poor stay poor” society.

2) It is not just grudgingly acceptable but good and just that the more education you have, the better you are treated.

Arnold Kling is a libertarian blogger and it's important to note that a lot of his commenters probably share a skeptical view of the usefulness of public education. That's not to say views critical of "government education" are right or wrong but to point out that there's a particular bias here. In this case, I don't think that bias negates the usefulness of the critique.

Anyway, the comment above gets to one of the paradoxes about education that keep me up at night. On one side we have the typical argument that education is a great equalizer and adequate levels of education will decrease economic and social inequality. However, what the commenter seems to be pointing out is that education increases inequality. The returns on completing college and getting a degree are higher than ever and higher relative to the non-college educated population than ever. Kids who go to college (a typical 4-year university type education, not 2-year associates degrees or private ITT-Tech type colleges) earn more and have significantly better lives in almost every measure we can apply.

'James, wait,' you might be saying, 'the problem is that not enough kids go to college.' Or something like that. Essentially, this boils down to education not being evenly distributed enough. I don't buy that argument for two reasons. First, it's not feasible to premise our education system on the idea that 100% of people should attend a 4-year college and receive a bachelor's degree. We tried that. It's called No Child Left Behind and one of its goals was literally that every kid would be college ready. Go read up on how well that worked.

Second, educational attainment is climbing. Fewer students are dropping out of high school than ever before. More students are entering college than ever before. More students are completing college than ever before. Advanced degree attainment is also huge and has grown significantly since the mid 2000s. Yet, wages are stagnant and inequality is growing. Upwards of 40 million Americans live in poverty, the highest number since at least the 1950s. As a percentage of all Americans, the number living in poverty has been relatively flat (~12-14%) since about the 1960s. The relationship between education attainment, poverty, and inequality is unclear. Why, then, do policymakers and society at large insist on a view of education as the only (or at least the primary) pathway to fixing inequality?

There is a related paradox which is very well stated by Fredrik deBoer:

9. Education is both a system for creating broad societal equality and for separating individuals into rigid tiers of relative performance. The tensions between these functions are to remain unexamined.

I highly recommend reading the whole post because he gets to the "dogma" that underpins education discourse in the United States. Here, he points out that you can't really have a system of education which accomplishes both of these stated goals. On one hand every student is supposed to come out of school and be able to attain some average quality of life and earn a living. On the other hand, schools and colleges rank and sort students into hierarchies which effectively limit their opportunities. SAT scores play a big role in what kinds of colleges kids access. A degree from Yale and a degree from the University of Georgia differ greatly. A kid graduating from Spiderman's High School, the Bronx High School of Science, has vastly different opportunities than a kid graduating from Herbert H Lehman High School, 5 miles away, where only about 52% of students graduate. Within schools there are class ranks and grades and various honor societies which all have criteria for determining which students are better than others at something (or everything).

In reality, we know that this ranking and sorting matters for students' futures but we pretend like that's all some kind of odd byproduct and the real purpose of education is to fix inequality. It can't be. Schools are a major driver of inequality by design. Our economy, higher education, and pretty much every social institution in the US require ranking and sorting students according to their relative performance on a bunch of metrics. We should stop pretending like it's not something we expect from our schools.

I think both of these paradoxes lead to a third: we think every single student is completely and 100% capable of accomplishing each and every educational challenge set before them. If you take the view that all of schooling is for producing vast amounts of equality, it's really easy to want every kid to accomplish similar levels of learning. The thing is, I taught special education. I know that every kid is not capable of attaining the exact same level of learning. I had students with significant impediments to their learning which placed them at a 1st grade reading level. I had students with behavioral disorders which eroded their productive class time and guaranteed they weren't going be learning that day/week/month. What I learned, among a great many things, is that not every kid is going to learn every thing. Some kids will learn some things. Some kids will learn many things. Zero kids will learn everything. AP Calculus is not the bar by which we ought to measure every child. Neither is AP British Literature.

And yet, when society and policymakers begin considering education, they want every kid in the most advanced and most challenging courses. They want to create a system where the most advanced opportunities are available. And, crucially, they place blame on schools and teachers for not achieving these goals. It's never a question of inappropriate expectations, it's a question of how a school or teacher failed to help that student. Never mind that 14% of our students have IEPs. Never mind that 9% of our students are learning English as a second language. Never mind all the other factors that play into a student's performance. All students have the same ability and are required to meet whatever arbitrary standard is set in some education task.

The Purpose of Education

It should seem pretty clear that I don't think the purpose of education is to solve poverty, inequality, or other social ills. Both the way we've built our educational system and the outcomes which actually occur lead me to believe that the rhetoric surrounding education doesn't match the reality of what our system does. Somehow we prefer to be paradoxical rather than to try and examine these contradictions and make changes.

So what do I think the goal of education ought to be? I don't know exactly. I don't have a complete answer but I'm going to take a stab at a few ideas. Try them on. See if they fit. That kind of thing.

Being a student in a whole new social context has exposed me to the idea of educating for social justice. I wish we had a better word because social justice is a very loaded term these days. Honestly, I'm having a bit of anxiety just typing it because I expect the internet trolls will descent upon me and obliterate me from the earth. If I could condense the ideas I'm encountering to a short statement, it would be that the purpose of education is to make students socially responsible members of society. They should go to school to learn about how they should make the world a better place through alleviating poverty, eliminating prejudice, and being generally the kind of people who care deeply about their fellow human beings.

It's the kind of thing that seems somewhat unobjectionable at the surface. Indeed, I don't think it's really that problematic on principle but rather is highly problematic in practice. I find myself feeling luckier and luckier to have grown up in the South. Being a Southerner gives me a very different view of institutions and their role in the world than I think I would otherwise have had. It's a worldview I'm only just beginning to realize I had.

You see, back home in Georgia, teaching social justice would end your career. People here look at me like I'm an insane person when I say that. They can't comprehend a world in which teachers cannot advocate, say, protesting the president over climate change. They don't see how a teacher advocating same sex marriage might lose her job or how a teacher posting in support of a women's march on Washington might land in hot water.

I attribute part of this to a lack of union protection (yes, they have good uses!) but also to a fundamentally different concept of the role of schools as an institution which the New Yorkers and costal academic types I encounter don't seem to understand. As an example let me quote my good friend Jason Jones:

Children who come to us don’t get a choice, so the least we can do is be careful in how we proceed with their education.  After all, when you have government representatives telling citizens how to think, we call that propaganda.

... High schoolers are mostly minors.  Minors are supposed to have special protections specifically because they aren’t yet mature enough to act as fully responsible persons, and one of those protections is not being overwhelmed with a specific, government sourced narrative.

I don't think this line of thinking even exists up here. I've never heard a single student or professor address an understanding of education as an exercise of power. They like to mention using power in all sorts of other social contexts. They love to mention that, before our more modern and enlightened times, educators and government exercised power to segregate and disenfranchise the poor and minorities. Somehow, they fail to see how educating for social justice is still an exercise of power. Sometimes people don't like institutions having the power do certain things, no matter how noble or justified.

Jason is not some reactionary conservative voice shouting down the system of public education. He's a committed public schoolteacher and an open, accepting humanist. But, like me, he grew up in the South and that context gives us a very different view of the role of government and of public education. Any curriculum and any "purpose" is always an exercise of state power. If we forget that lense, if we simply assume schools are now altruistic arms of the best elements of society, we blind ourselves to potential overreach and abuse. I also wonder how much assuming the institution is altruistic creates the paradoxes above? Social Justice at the beginning of the 20th century differed greatly from social justice in the 1950s and differs greatly from social justice now. That alone makes me skeptical of social justice as the purpose of education.

Is educating for social justice a bad thing? No. I think it's fine but I don't see how it could exist outside of very selective areas of the country. How great is your social justice education if it's only happening in New York and San Francisco? How can you endorse a system of schooling that half the country would reject? My opposition to social justice as the purpose of education is practical rather than theoretical. I would love to be able to have open and engaging conversations about LGBTQ issues with students in every state. I think being frank about it and examining the issues critically would make people more open and more accepting. I also think it would get me fired in about half of those states.

I've had a few occasions to explain this to people and most tell me the same thing: just go teach somewhere that would accept this. It's tough because I do want to return home to Georgia as my family and Lisa's family age. It's tough because the South offers significant cost of living advantages over New York and the Northeast. Moreover, I don't like the solution of ignoring some (most?) of the country. "Just don't teach them" is not a valid answer when considering the purpose of education. Social justice shouldn't leave people out just because they hold inconvenient views. Perhaps that should be another paradox I list: social justice education for some based primarily on the luck of geographic location.

Other often cited purposes for education also seem unlikely when you actually examine them. I hear many people concerned that education isn't doing enough career training. The assumption here is that education's purpose should be career preparatory. Mostly this is directed at STEM careers because those are well paying and in demand. While schools are rushing to push kids toward coding classes and advanced math and science AP placement, 40% of schools don't have any AP courses, much less AP STEM courses. Plus, who is going to leave a 6-figure programming career to teach computer science for $40k a year?

All the above assumes we even want every single kid moving into STEM careers and that school is the best way to prepare them for those careers. People should have some degree of freedom in choosing their life's work and not feel pigeonholed by well-meaning initiatives. Plus, a lot of these careers change rapidly but the curriculums in schools don't. When I worked as a Career and Technical  Education para professional in 2011, the web design course I worked in used methods and software that were 5-6 years out of date. They were learning industry standards which had ceased being industry standards three or more years prior. Schools, as an institution, aren't well equipped to manage this task. Now, there are other moves to make here, like redesigning schools completely and putting all the curriculum in a live-updating digitally delivered "personalized" platform. I have other problems with that approach but, again, is that the purpose of education? Should schools be redesigned to turn every kid into a programmer or physician's assistant? What does the workplace look like when there is an oversupply of these professionals?

We can also dispense with the illusion that the purpose of education is to make children into good citizens, a favorite of social studies teachers I have known. Invariability this purpose appeals to the need of each child to learn how their government and civic society function. First, I don't think anyone understands how any of it works anymore and our system of government is a train gone off the rails. Second, there's a lot of disagreement about this, see social justice education above. The role of government is envisioned differently depending on who is teaching and where they are teaching it. Third, it is not clear how, say, a good chemistry class builds civic virtues. Fourth, schools cut civics and government classes because they're not on the high stakes tests. It seems clear that this isn't the purpose of our educational system.

The signaling model of education is an interesting if depressing one. The signaling model of education is simply that acquiring education is a means of showing some group that you're a part of the group. The skills and knowledge, while important, are secondary. That's why a BA at Harvard often gets you more money and connections than an advanced degree in the same field elsewhere. That's why our CEOs and Presidents and other Very Serious People all went to the same schools and live in the same places.

If you can't tell, I have a little bit of belief in the signaling model. It seems to explain some of the "bubble" that has developed in the country. It is not, however, a good purpose for education. It's inherently exclusionary. It's inherently classist. It's inherently anti-meritocratic. Accurate, perhaps, but not what the purpose of education should be.

Engagement: my current koolaid

Recently I've decided to dig into the idea of "engagement." Prior to doing a little learning, I always felt like engagement was a gimmick. Maybe it was a gimmick for many people who talked about it. My principal used to dress up like a little blonde cheer leader and barge into classrooms shouting school cheers in the name of engagement. Gimmick. Also, not engagement. Engagement isn't fun. Engagement isn't making school some kind of enthusiastic and desirable environment. Those might be good things to do but they're not engagement.

My current understanding of engagement is that it is basically the self-motivated followthrough to interest. If a student is interested in a topic and that student takes it upon herself to seek out more information and deepen her understanding, that is engagement. Engagement is intrinsically motivated and only something that a person can accomplish for herself.

So why is engagement interesting to me? Well, I think engagement may be a good purpose for education. This is a bit of an Aristotelean idea but bear with me. Ultimately teachers and society want schools to produce students capable of accomplishing things. As I noted above, those things are varied and inconsistent. What if, rather than focusing on the "accomplishing things" we focused on the "capable". To me engagement is the primary capability we should be seeking to help our students cultivate (see, totally Aristotelean). We want kids to leave school knowing that they can pursue their interests and develop further in whatever areas they choose. We want to equip them with the skills to handle the new content but we also want to help them realize that they are ultimately the agents of their own education. Engagement places the responsibility for learning on the child and tells her that she needs to pursue what is interesting using what tools she has available. Engagement also means that student may need to develop new tools to further refine her ability to engage.

Now, I'm still trying to wrap my head around what a pedagogy focused on engagement would look like but I think this is a great way to address the various cross purposes and paradoxes we find in the educational world. If a kid is interested in programming, let her become engaged in learning about it. Give her books and activities and practice and turn her loose. The same goes for social justice or civics or anything else.

Hopefully I can refine and better explain engagement as I learn more but I'll summarize with this: I feel like the best thing a good education can do for a child is to build in them the desire to never stop learning. That's engagement. Next I need to learn how to teach it.

Next up: Disciplinary Literacy

I'm beginning the second summer semester and my only course is Disciplinary Literacy. Essentially, the course is going to be a consideration of how literacy plays out across non-ELA and non-reading classes. (Non-reading as in the class is not titled 'Reading' but Math or Science or something like that.) This should be an interesting course as I don't know much about what teachers in other subjects do. Yes, I did teach Algebra I during half of summer school but that was mostly the result of an incompetent and possibly intellectually disabled administrator just parking warm bodies in a classroom full of 40 remedial math students. It wasn't pretty.

Anyway, the overall gist of the class is that every discipline has it's own culture. A scientist, mathematician, computer programmer, or engineer (see, those are the only acceptable careers so they're all anyone talks about) each work within a discipline that expects certain things of them. Some of what's expected is explicit and that's generally what is taught in the classroom: scientific method, pythagorean theorem, object oriented coding, and whatever the hell an engineer learns. The problem is, there's also a lot of stuff that's not communicated.

A good example of this is the differing citation systems. While we teach that every discipline has a different way of creating citations (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc), we don't ever explain why. In the grand scheme of things this particular why is small beans but there's a lot of disciplinary weight placed on how citations are written. Each discipline features dozens if not hundreds of similar signifiers which show someone as either participating in a discipline or not. Added together, these start to make the culture of that discipline.

Now, I don't know much about other disciplines and I can't think of many from, say, science to fill this post with examples but I hope you catch my meaning. It's not enough to take a kid into science class and have them work through a bunch of science information without giving them the inside scoop on the culture that is academic science. Part of the reason scientists think like scientists is that they've been trained in the culture of science. Students don't automatically have that culture unless they're lucky enough to have parents who make that their home culture. Even then, they will lack some other disciplinary literacy.

I'm interested to see what methods the class brings up to support better teaching of disciplinary literacy. I can already see that student discussions and debate are going to feature heavily but I would like to know how structured those are. Just because kids talk about plant biology doesn't mean they're in the discipline. How explicit do I have to be to help them learn to participate in science like a scientist would? And what about math?

Reflection

Happy Saturday, happy July, happy summer!

Today's post will be a bit of stream-of-consciousness reflecting on the last week and some of what I've started to think about regarding myself as a teacher. I've decided to give these ideas some categorization so it's not too confusing. You also have my sincere apologies for not posting more often. Despite being lighter than a normal course schedule, these summer classes really scaled up the workload for the last week of classes and that coincided with attending a big professional development conference all week. TC's Reading and Writing Project are surprisingly good and I'll mention my experiences in the Reading Institute below but if you are interested, check out their website. While it's probably not going to adequately explain everything, it's a good view into the kind of education I'm about to be involved in.

Honored to share this beautiful space & time with these middle school teachers for the week! @TCRWP pic.twitter.com/XN7iXOVWMb

— Kathleen Schechter (@kat_schechter) June 29, 2017

Cameo!

New York City Commuting

Prior to this week, I was commuting into the city twice weekly for evening classes. It was nice. It was leisurely. It wasn't really commuting so much as a fun train ride.

This week I needed to be at Columbia by 8am every day which necessitated being on a train at 6am. I was squarely in the middle of peak rush hour and got to see the city as most commuters probably see it. My trip includes a train ride and then taking the subway from Penn Station up to the university so I see a decent chunk of the NYC commuting experience. Trains were rerouted due to "track conditions." Subway cars derailed (thankfully I was not on it at them time). The governor of New York declared a state of emergency for the entire transit system. (Also, can we talk about animals on the subway?)

It is amazing. I love it. Sure, delays and cancellations suck but this is very different than driving. You have redundancies built in. There are multiple train lines and multiple subway lines intersecting at numerous locations throughout the city. When one thing breaks, you have options. When my train was rerouted from Penn Station to the much further away Atlantic Terminal, I was able to hop off and change trains to get where I needed to go. Maybe it's my perspective as an Atlanta native but I felt the transit system was very flexible at responding to major problems. Perhaps it should have responded better. Perhaps the problems should never have occurred. Either way, I was able to move myself, on transit, to wherever I needed to go with a minimum of fuss or delay despite both of the transit lines I used daily being shut down. Even dysfunctional mass transit is a revelation for someone like me who is used to mass transit being nonexistent.

Being in New York City

Spending every day in the city from about 7:30am to about 9:30pm (Friday was shorter, but I'll claim it!) really made me feel closer to the city. Sure I have 4 hours of commuting, but I spent most of my time in the city. I took the time to walk around when I had breaks between classes to get a feel for the area around Columbia. It's really the southeast edge of Harlem and there's a lot on offer. Mostly food. I was able to eat from from a different ethnic tradition each day and I consider that a success in and of itself.

Walking through the area was painless and fun because I could observe the variety of people and businesses. It's amazing to me that it all works. There's so much density and so many people that you'd think little screw ups and failures would lead to big screw ups and failures and the whole place would quickly become dangerous and dysfunctional. By and large, it's not. I attribute a lot of that to New York City being so large that it creates it's own social and economic ecosystem. You could become a successful business just serving a need on a single block. You could become a millionaire serving a need on several blocks.

I also spent a lot of time outdoors. No, it's not the Great Outdoors of nature and national parks, but I wanted to be outside of buildings and in the urban environment. Sure, my tune would change if it rained, if it was a hundred degrees, or if it was snowing, but still, I spent a lot of time outside. In fact, I think I spend more time outside here than I did in Atlanta going through similar circumstances. I attribute much of that to using mass transit. Although the trains themselves are steel tubes, often underground, I would be walking to and from subway stops and train stations. Compared to walking to my car in a parking lot, this is probably more time spent outside. I would also prioritize some transit stops so I could enjoy the city more. For example, I'd hop off at 110th street instead of 116th street just so I could crest a hill at a particular spot and look all the way up and down Broadway Ave. for miles in both directions.

It's also more time spent with other people. Maybe I don't communicate with most of them but you don't exactly feel alone on a crowded subway car with someone's face in your armpit (sorry lady, it's just how it is.) I can see why migration to urban centers is typically a liberalizing force - in the classical sense of promoting individual rights and responsibilities, not the current American liberal traditions. When you're one in the crowd, you start to realize that your needs have to be advocated for or you're left out. This isn't some purely libertarian bend either. It's more of a realization that you all have needs, you all have to meet those needs, and we're all in that boat even if your needs differ from mine. While I know that in a technical sense, I think experiencing this kind of environment really helps you feel that connection. You're going to help the lady with the walker get through the subway turnstile because, dammit, we're all waiting here and helping her helps us all. Yes, I consider that liberalism, ha!

Schools

I'm four years out of the classroom and I'm starting to feel it. Technology is everywhere but maybe not as widespread in the ways I was worried about. Teachers have access to many many many more tools than I had access to despite being in a fairly affluent school district. I think that's largely a byproduct of both the slow acquisition process for a large district and that I was teaching in a very transitional moment in education. Almost every teacher I spoke with this week had access to droves and droves of technological teaching aids and their students did too. Many had one-to-one programs in their districts. None lived in the top-down-algorithmic-learning dystopia I am terrified of. In fact, most just use tech as a tool but relied heavily on physical media too. The Institute and its partnered schools use numerous physical books. I found myself jotting down all sorts of websites, apps, and other tech things which would make my life easier once I landed back in classrooms.

I've also started to reconsider my thinking about what schools look like. Obviously my only in-classroom contexts are drawn from the pair of Georgia districts I was in as a teacher and student teacher. While tutoring gave me a window into some classes, I don't know a lot about the schools. That also means I can't assume the schools function similarly to what I remember. Indeed, they don't. One example would be the role of professional development. In my school, I taught a professional development session. Now, as a 2nd year teacher I didn't have a whole lot to offer but I wasn't expected to offer anything. Professional development was basically the principal picking teachers at random and telling them to teach a session on the next teacher workday about, well, anything. In other words, there was no expectation that anyone would learn anything and we were merely doing this to meet some PD requirement.

Here, professional development is typically a school or district-wide initiative. Often they partner with schools of education who send advisors to many classrooms (or probably all of them, if possible) for weeks on end. Observations are done. Data is taken. Scores are evaluated. And at the end of it, those developers stick around for months to help improve and change curriculum, the school environment, or whatever else they're brought on board to change. It's collaborative and done to support the teachers and schools. I had no idea this kind of thing even existed.

The Reading and Writing Institute is basically the professional development arm of the MA program I'm in. My professors and dozens of development staff have been embedded in schools nationwide, sometimes for years, working on improving reading and writing. A number of the attendees I met this week weren't ELA or reading teachers, they were professional development staff and administration for districts in Seattle, Philadelphia, and Indianapolis. They came to the Institute to evaluate its practice and methods to see if they were a good fit for their districts. They would likely go back and recommend hiring developers from the Institute to come work with their elementary or middle schools to improve reading and writing instruction. I just couldn't fathom a district that would bring in any outside help to revamp and improve their schools. It'd be tantamount to admitting you'd been fucking up kids all these years. I think it's a major cultural difference that's at the root of this problem.

How is this a thing? How is it not a joke played on teachers? It's really exploded my idea of what a career in education could look like.

I found myself struggling to answer questions asked by my peers:

What kind of grading did your school do? Uh... the kind where you uh... give grades. It turns out there's a kind of standards based grading that's very intriguing to me but I never considered that there were numerous methodologies to grading. Also, I think I may have been mostly grading things for compliance, especially in my general ed classrooms.

What was your district's literacy plan? Did we even have one? Maybe I don't know that because high schools don't teach literacy.

How did your school approach ESL and ELL students after they exited their ESL/ELL programs? Umm, we didn't?

How have you used students' prior test scores to plan and improve your instruction? Well, see, we weren't actually allowed to see their scores. We instead got a score report which summarized their overall performance in Math/Reading/Writing. I also remarked that the tests scored each standard on a 1-4 scale but the reports used a 1-3 scale to report overall performance. We didn't see what the breakdown on each standard was. It may have actually been illegal...

Me In Schools

Since I was attending the Institute for course credit, I also spent time working with some of the university faculty and planning out my upcoming school placement options. I think it revealed a lot of the shortcomings I had in recognizing that there are a lot of ways to do school. I couldn't adequately explain to them what I was looking for in a placement school because I didn't really know what a school with a reading teacher looked like. I ended up babbling something about how I was okay with being placed in a difficult school because I had experience in a Title I school and with students with behavioral problems. This was to Lucy Calkins, the woman running my MA program and the institute. She's one of those people who answers emails in three separate emails, each kind of staccato, and then admits she was writing them at stop lights while driving home from work. You know the kind of person I mean.

Lucy looked at me for a minute and asked what that meant. Again, I struggled. I meant that it was okay if you placed me in a school that faced a lot of challenges stemming from race, poverty, urban blight, whatever. I'm a cool guy. I want to save the world. Throw anything at me. I can handle it. My mentor teacher skipped town for the first three weeks of my student teaching. I was in that class alone with different substitutes each day. I could handle whatever the school would thrown at me.

I'll paraphrase her response. I think part of the impact comes from the way she said it so think of a person talking very quickly and in a tone somewhere between scolding and pity.

James, why is that your concern? Why do you think we are placing our students in schools that don't promote training our students? Do you want to be in a school which isn't going to help you learn about teaching reading and writing? I think you need to ask yourself why you think two things: why don't you expect to be placed in schools for your benefit and why don't you advocate for being placed in schools for your benefit? They're related and you need to think about how you see yourself in schools.

Fuck, she's right.