Year: 2014

Jeb Bush: Another Friedmanomic Devotee Redefines Public Schools

Deborah Duncan Owens charter schools, conservatism, corporate education reform, Cuomo, free market education reforms, Friedmanomics, local school districts, privatization of education, public school monopoly , ,

“The situation is wholly different with a socialist enterprise like the public school system, or, for that matter, a private monopoly.”  Milton Friedman

Jeb Bush is officially thinking about running for president. And, in case anyone is wondering, he has provided a video outlining his education policy agenda. Andrew Cuomo and Jeb Bush have one essential idea in common. They both think public schools are a monopoly and both want to bust that monopoly. Milton Friedman began his assault on public schools in the 1950s with his assertion that public schools were a socialist enterprise and the only solution was to privatize education and use public tax dollars to send children to private enterprise schools.

Jeb Bush has lost his patience. He just hasn’t seen the change he thinks is necessary in our education system. Of course, corporate reformers have been saying that for years. In 1995, former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner spoke at the National Governors Association and excoriated the governors for their lack of progress in education reform since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983. What was needed, according to Gerstner, was “a fundamental, bone-jarring, full-fledged, 100 percent revolution that discards the old and replaces it with a totally new performance-driven system” (in chapter 5, Origins of the Common Core). Lou Gerstner’s impatience brought us the Palisades summit of gubernatorial and corporate CEOs in 1996 — the birthplace of Achieve (who would bring us the CCSS).

Free market corporate reformers, like Andrew Cuomo, Lamar Alexander, and Jeb Bush know all too well that in order to completely free marketize our education system, we must be in a perpetual state of reform.  They also know that democracy impedes privatization efforts. Both Lamar Alexander and Jeb Bush asserted that local school boards represent a monopoly. Corporate education reformer Lou Gerstner would agree. In 2008, he proposed abolishing all local school districts, “save 70 (50 states; 20 largest cities).”

It does seem incongruent that the education policy of a purported Democrat like Andrew Cuomo would be so aligned with long time conservative Republicans like Lamar Alexander and Jeb Bush. However, as I explain in my upcoming book, we have been, at least since the Clinton administration, making policy through a third way of governance — in which corporate leaders are invited to the policy table to facilitate policy making decisions.

In New York, Zephyr Teachout and Mohammad Khan explain in a white paper how corporate free market rich billionaires are subverting America’s democratic process in their efforts to dismantle America’s locally controlled public schools, stating, “The 2014 effort, a kind of lightning war on public education, is important for many reasons: it is hasty and secretive, depending on huge speed and big money, and driven by unaccountable private individuals. It represents a new form of political power, and therefore requires a new kind of political oversight.”  This document is must read because it clearly demonstrates how corporate and governmental mutualism on a national scale impacts an individual state.

On a national scale, the efforts of these free market corporate reformers, cloaked in the disingenuous façade of saviors to American democracy, however, have not been all that secretive.  Rather, these reformers up to now have often been simply operating below the radar of public – and most importantly – media scrutiny.

What these corporate reformers and their political operatives are doing is first and foremost an exercise in distorting the democratic nature and definition of locally controlled public schools.  They do this by perversely explaining that America’s locally controlled public schools are actually a monopoly.  However, this is a distortion of history to the extreme.  As Diane Ravitch points out, America’s institution of locally controlled public schools actually reflects the true essence of American democracy.

Radically changing the historic definition of public schools and ignoring the true democratic nature of these schools is the height of chicanery.  However, all citizens who support America’s institution of public schools need to realize that this political ploy when used by individuals such as Jeb Bush, Andrew Cuomo, and a raft of others such as Lamar Alexander, is essential in realizing the education agenda of corporate free market education reformers.

 

Lamar Alexander’s Old/New Ideas for Education Reform

Deborah Duncan Owens charter schools, corporate education reform, free market education reforms

Senator Lamar Alexander will soon assume leadership within the U.S. Senate on the committee that oversees public education.  It seems like a natural fit. After all, he served as the Secretary of the Department of Education under President George H.W. Bush.  He is also a former governor of Tennessee and former president of the University of Tennessee.  Kimberly Hefling explains his plans for updating No Child Left Behind.  With the Republicans now in a position to lead efforts in the education arena, Alexander has plans to address “excessive regulation of local schools by Washington. …”   He plans to address questions … “about whether all the federally mandated annual tests are appropriate and whether states should decide how to assess their students.”

Sounds good so far, right?  He seems to be offering a glimmer of hope to those who seek to ease the testing burden on America’s school children.  That’s a good thing.  But, beyond simply promoting the conservative cause of moving education policy decisions to the states and out of the firm grip of the federal government — and addressing questions about federal mandates and standardized testing — what can we really expect of Lamar Alexander?

To answer that question, all that is required is a look back at the education policies proposed by his former boss — President H.W. Bush.  And the answer is loud and clear:  choice, choice, choice — vouchers and charter schools.  In January, 2014, Alexander spoke at an American Enterprise Institute gathering and laid out his plan for education reform quite clearly.  If you want to know what his agenda for education actually is, watch the video.  You’ll think it’s 1992 all over again.  Here are some themes that emerge from his discussion at the conservative think tank gathering:

Lamar Alexander thinks:

  1. public schools are awful;
  2. local school boards operate a monopoly over education;
  3. the federal government should offer a GI Bill for K-12 school children (H.W. Bush’s failed legislative attempt to privatize education);
  4. K-12 schools should be a “marketplace” of choice;
  5. the legislature should provide an amount comparable to 41% of the federal money for K-12 education in the U.S. to pay for a voucher plan to send children to private or public schools of their choice.;
  6. it’s perfectly acceptable to invoke the plight of low-income children as a rationale to further efforts to privatize the public school system in the U.S.;
  7. it’s a good idea for schools, under choice and voucher plans, to simply kick kids out if parents question school policy.  Public schools can’t do that; they have to work with kids and parents to resolve problems (and Alexander apparently thinks that’s a bad thing);
  8. there is a price on the head of every child in America and, therefore,  he is surprised that there isn’t more competition to get the money children bring with them to the privatization arena in education.  Don’t they see the additional money children have, as Alexander explains, “attached to their blouse or their shirt?” – and –
  9. we should all believe that teachers in charter schools have more freedom to be innovative because the children they teach “choose” to be there.

So, let there be no mistake.  Lamar Alexander is not a champion of public schools in America.  He is a champion of free market policies.  He is a champion of corporate reformers who want to capitalize on federal dollars to use in their quest to make a lot of money in the education arena.  To be sure, Milton Friedman’s ideas are alive and well!  And, let me once again reiterate the last short paragraph in my book:

“For American citizens, if there is only one thing to remember about their public schools it is this: Public schools are not government schools nor are they corporate free market schools.  Public schools belong to the public.  Public schools are citizen schools, and it is now up to citizens to reclaim what is theirs!”

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For Poor Children, “It is the Economy, Stupid”

Deborah Duncan Owens children and poverty, education reform , ,

As I concluded the research for my upcoming book, The Origins of the Common Core: How the Free Market Became Public Education Policy, I was left with the conviction that untangling and dismantling corporate free market education reform policies requires a citizen mass willing and able to speak truth to power.  Topping my list of recommendations for reclaiming our public schools in the U.S. is the following:

“When politicians or pundits begin a discussion with an assertion that the entire American public school system is a failure it is a clear indication that … they would rather target public schools for reform than engage in a meaningful discussion about how to eliminate poverty and larger social issues that are at the root of low academic achievement in some communities in America” (p. 210).

You see, for children, education reform should and must begin with efforts to eliminate poverty.  Those of us who have taught in high-poverty schools and worked with children who are the victims of our nation’s allegiance to free market economic policies know all too well that simply reforming schools and blaming teachers for low achievement doesn’t target what is really at the heart of low achievement.  A number of years ago, as I was interviewing an excellent veteran reading teacher in the Mississippi Delta, she made a poignant statement that I will never forget.  She was talking about her efforts to provide reading interventions in a school that served children living in extreme poverty.  She felt defeated and frustrated and, on this day, she was sad.  She said, “I’m trying to teach these children to read, and they’re trying to survive.”

Brett Dickerson, too, understands how high poverty rates impact students and teachers.  In August, he wrote “… schools with high poverty rates tend to wear down the best teachers and burn them out from the relentless pressures of poverty-related issues in their students.”

In my years in Mississippi working in high poverty schools I was keenly aware of how vulnerable and isolated children are when they live in impoverished communities — both urban and rural.  They are, indeed, trying to survive.  They are highly motivated to learn, but sometimes life just gets in the way.  It’s hard to concentrate when you don’t know if you’ll have anything to eat at home or you don’t know where you’ll be staying that night.  It’s hard to concentrate when your neighborhood is not a place where you can safely play.  So many of the children I taught talked about violence they’d witnessed first-hand and they were too knowledgeable about the drug culture that surrounded them every day.  On two separate occasions I saw children pick up freshly sharpened pencils and use them to pretend they were injecting themselves with drugs in the crooks of their little arms.  It broke my heart. These were very young children.  And they didn’t ask for the opportunity to be so worldly wise.

James Carville, President Clinton’s campaign manager is attributed with developing the slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.”  It was a successful strategy and helped Clinton get elected.  However, four years later Clinton enacted his welfare reform strategy, prompting Clinton appointee Peter Edelman to publicly resign his position and write a scathing critique for The Atlantic entitled “The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done.”  The nation should have listened when Edelman stated, “I am afraid … that along the way we will do some serious injury to American children, who should not have had to suffer from our national backlash.”  But the nation didn’t listen.  And children have suffered.  Peter Edelman’s wife, Marian Wright Edelman, is the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund.  The Edelmans met in 1967 when Peter accompanied Senator Robert Kennedy to the Mississippi Delta and witnessed first-hand the devastating poverty in the region.  Marion Wright, then working for the NAACP, accompanied Kennedy and her future husband, Peter Edelman, as they toured impoverished communities and homes.

Marian Wright Edelman has been a stalwart voice for poor children in the United States.  The Children’s Defense Fund ceaselessly advocates for children, publishing annual reports on the state of childhood poverty in our country.

Because, of course, for children, “it is the economy, stupid.”  And for Black children, the situation is dire.  In September, 2014, the CDF provided the following analysis of childhood poverty in the U.S.:

“Poverty data released by the U.S. Census Bureau on September 16, 2014 reveal that child poverty dropped significantly for the first time since 2000, from 21.8 percent in 2012 to 19.9 percent in 2013. While child poverty decreased for Hispanic, White and Asian children, Black children saw no decrease and continue to have the highest child poverty rate. Despite some decreases child poverty among all children remains at shamefully high levels. Nearly one in five children – 14.7 million – were poor in 2013, and children remain the poorest age group in the country. Although 1.5 million fewer children were poor in 2013, there were still 1.3 million more poor children than in 2007 before the recession began.”

No amount of education reform initiatives, grit studies, or no-excuse charter schools can overcome the unwieldy noose of poverty that strengthens its grip every day on the lives of poor and vulnerable children.  Peter Edelman began his article for The Atlantic with the statement, “I hate welfare.”  I do, too.  Most of all, I hate the need for welfare and I hate the fact that it is the children who suffer the most.  For one of the wealthiest nations in the world to have nearly 20% of its children living in poverty is a national disgrace.

I am sad, too, that our politicians and education policy makers continually point to teachers and schools as the institution that has the power to overcome childhood poverty.  We cannot.

Walton Family: Don’t Worry about Walmart Employees — Just Focus on Free-Marketizing our Public School System!

Deborah Duncan Owens charter schools, corporate education reform, free market education reforms

Chris Lubienski shared an article in Forbes Magazine via Twitter about one of Sam Walton’s grandchildren who has made charter schools and the free market privatization of public schools her mission in life.  And she certainly has the financial resources to have a strong impact.  Carrie Walton Penner is the daughter of Wal-Mart company chairman, Rob Walton, and is an heir to the largest family fortune in the entire world ($165 billion — and I’m sure growing).

Of course, the Walton family would like for the world to ignore all the problems and lawsuits associated with their chain of retail stores.  Workplacefairness.org documents Wal-Mart’s dubious employee practices.  But that’s okay.  The Waltons are going to save our public schools through free market strategies and competition between charter schools and traditional public schools.  Maybe Carrie Walton Penner can invite all the governors and and big CEOs to Arkansas to set an agenda for our next phase of systemic education reform — like IBM CEO Lou Gerstner did at his headquarters in Palisades in 1996!  That meeting brought us Achieve — future creators of the CCSS.


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Obsessive Testing and Data Collection One Step Further — Genetic Testing for Children

Deborah Duncan Owens corporate education reform, education data systems, education reform, grit and education, high stakes tests , ,

I’ve been thinking and writing about our nation’s obsession with grit  and big data recently.  I almost couldn’t believe it when I read Jay Belsky’s article in the New York Times entitled “The Downside of Resilience” in which he advocates for genetic testing of young children to decide issues of disposition and, specifically, resilience.  What if it isn’t true, says Belsky, that positive interventions like preschool education have the power to help all children?  What if, instead, we were able to identify certain alleles of genes linked to seratonin and dopamine early on to decide which children are “at risk” for being less gritty?  Belsky suggests that, ethics aside, this would enable us to target “scarce intervention and service dollars” toward “at risk” ungritty “delicate orchid” children who are genetically predisposed to “whither if exposed to stress and deprivation.” Other children, who “are more like dandelions,” … “prove resilient to the negative effects of adversity” and “do not particularly benefit from positive experiences.”

Anthony Cody wrote an insightful commentary about Belsky’s article, pointing out that, if Belsky’s ideas are correct, then the education community’s belief that resilience and grit can be taught is, indeed, incorrect and any instruction in these areas is a waste of time.  And there is a darker side to the use of genetic testing to determine resource allocation.  The eugenics movement thrived in the years prior to WWII as societies looked to science to produce a better human race.  The Nazis wholeheartedly embraced eugenics and we’ve lived with that legacy ever since, vowing to never forget.  But it seems that we are forgetting.  And now, we want to impose ethically challenged ideas on our youngest members of society.

However, isn’t this a natural extension of our nation’s obsession with testing, measuring, and data collection? Genetic testing at birth is merely another form of data collection.  This truly, however, harkens back to Huxley’s Brave New World —  schools for Alphas, different schools for Betas, and Epsilons can mop their floors (no need to waste money trying to education them).

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No-Excuse Charter Schools and Racism

Deborah Duncan Owens charter discipline policies, charter schools, charter schools and racism, KIPP, no excuse charter schools ,

I read two interesting articles this weekend that seem to speak volumes about the inherently flawed notion that charter schools are the panacea for students, overwhelmingly of color, living in urban areas.  The first is Sarah Carr’s article in The Atlantic entitled “How Strict is too Strict? The backlash against no-excuses discipline in high school.”  The second is Antonia Darder’s op-ed published on the Truthout website entitled “Racism and the Charter School Movement: Unveiling the Myths.”

Carr’s article sheds light on the discipline policies associated with the no-excuses charter schools that are increasingly becoming the norm within inner cities across the U.S.  Her examination of some of the charter schools in New Orleans, a city that has served as the vanguard for other urban cities, raises some interesting points.

When the KIPP franchise opened their Renaissance High School in 2010, many parents were eager to enroll their children.  Far from being concerned about the myriad of rules outlined for the no-excuses charter school, parents cheered.  Carr reported that after one administrator “noted that the Renaissance staff hadn’t been vigilant enough about preventing the students from rolling up the sleeves of their uniforms, a mother shouted, ‘Get even stricter, Mr. Dassler! Do it!’ Another chimed in, “You have to be hard and strict. You can’t be soft, because you know how these kids are.”

In no-excuse charter schools like KIPP, the rules are numerous.   Rules dictate how students walk, how they talk, how they sit in their desks, how they respond to teachers in the classroom, how they dress (down to the color of the undershirt they were), where they look in the classroom (tracking the teacher or other speaker), and the list goes on and on.  The school environment is so rigid that students often jokingly refer to the KIPP school as the Kids in Prison Program.

While parents may have applauded the strict discipline policies at first, as Carr points out, there is a racialized aspect to the discipline policies within many charter schools:

“…  the zealous disciplinary tactics at the paternalistic charters that are overrepresented in poor urban districts contribute to persistent racial gaps in students’ experience. Starting in preschool, black children are suspended and expelled at far higher rates than white students are, despite little objective evidence that they behave any worse. The discrepancy persists as children get older and the number of overall suspensions rises. In high school, black students are more than three times as likely as white students to get suspended at least once. Untangling causation and correlation is obviously no easy matter, but one statewide study in Texas reported that students suspended or expelled for a “discretionary violation”—having a bad attitude, for example—were nearly three times as likely to come into contact with the juvenile-justice system the following year.”

At the Carver Collegiate charter school in New Orleans, 69% of the students were reported to have been suspended and at the Carver Prep charter school, 61% had been suspended.  Although school administrators explained that 80% of the suspensions were for a single day, several students claimed that they were sent home from school “off the books” so that their disciplinary dismissal  was undocumented.  According to Carr, some charter school operators are attempting to temper their stance on discipline and be more responsive to their students.  However, this may very well simply be a response to the negative press about suspension rates that can impact the public relations campaign engineered to promote charter schools.  And, in fact, the American Psychological Association reported in 2008 that there is no evidence that suspensions and expulsions have any positive impact on student behavior or school safety.

Why, then, do so many parents in inner cities readily embrace the no-excuse behavior policies of charter schools? Carr quotes one New Orleans parent as saying, “The margin for error is much smaller in black communities, especially for black boys.”  The statistics seem to support his assertion.  For example, as one study found, marijuana use is slightly higher among whites than blacks.  However, blacks are four times more likely to be arrested.  Carr cites another reason for parents’ acceptance of strict discipline policies:

“For generations, the New Orleans public schools have graduated countless students straight into low-paying work in the tourism business. With only a few exceptions, the industry’s dishwashing, housekeeping, and other positions are nonunionized and come with little job security. Employees who make even a small misstep can be speedily replaced with new hires who don’t show up late, forget their uniform, or talk back to customers—as anxious parents are well aware. ‘If you mess up once at Harrah’s [a New Orleans casino], you are going to be fired!” a parent called out during the KIPP Renaissance meeting.’”

Antonia Darder explains that charter schools, as well as public schools that implement no-excuse strict disciplinary policies, reflect the ideology of the dominant elite.  She asserts that “attitudes toward poor and working class students of color and the structural conditions that result within many public and charter schools more correctly reflect deeply authoritarian disciplinary and surveillance tactics which closely mimic the culture of incarceration.” Thus, students who nickname KIPP schools as the Kids in Prison Program may not be too far off the mark.

And just what is the value of a charter school education for poor children?  Are strict codes of conduct designed to enable them to enter a non-unionized and low-paying job market prepared to follow the rules, accept the status quo, and never question authority?  Is that what is meant by being college and career ready?  Is that what we really want from our education system in the U.S. — one system of education for poor children that will enable them to fulfill their predestined roles in society by being compliant followers and a different system for the middle and upper middle class children who are prepared to enter society as innovators, creative thinkers, and leaders?

Darder explores the myths that are associated with the charter school movement.  One of these myths is the innovative practices supposedly employed by charter schools.  The pedagogical reality, however, is far from innovative.  Like traditional public schools, charter schools live and die according to standardized test scores and, therefore, employ all available strategies to raise student achievement — even when that means “disappearing” students through suspensions and expulsions who do reflect the mission of the charter school to demonstrate the movement’s assertion that they produce a superior product in the form of higher student achievement.

The roots of the current obsession with school choice and privatization, as Darder explains, can be traced back to conservative efforts to avoid the Brown decision in the 1950s when “freedom of choice” campaigns were employed to maintain segregated schools.  Choice, whether under the guise of school voucher programs or charter schools, cannot be delinked from the conservative assault on public education or from its endorsement by racist societies as a way to use public tax dollars to maintain segregated schools.  Therefore, it is not possible to discuss the charter school movement without broaching the often uncomfortable and unpopular topic of race and class.  To do otherwise is to ignore the history of school choice and to run the risk of repeating a history in which segregated schools were an accepted, and too often preferred, norm in the United States.  This is why I thank the NAACP for their position on charter schools.  As always, they speak for the rights of all children.

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Stopping the Corporate Raid on America’s Public Schools: Local Control Over Education

Deborah Duncan Owens corporate education reform, education reform, free market education reforms, local school districts, Uncategorized ,

Britt Dickerson wrote an insightful essay entitled “Investors Ready to Liquidate Public Schools” about the corporate raid on America’s public schools.  Dickerson writes:

“Plans are under way for investment corporations to execute the biggest conversion – some call it theft – of public schools property in U.S. history.

That is not hyperbole. Investment bankers themselves estimate that their taking over public schools is going to result in hundreds of billions of dollars in profit, if they can pull it off.”

Much has been written about the free market corporate plans to cash in on the public dollars associated with RTTT policies and the exploitation of children as profit producing capital.  However, less has been written about how to stop the freight train loaded with venture capitalists hell-bent on reaching the destination of a totally unfettered free market of education in the U.S.

Dickerson succinctly distills the solution.   Who has the power to stop the corporate raiders?

  1. Educators, parents, and concerned community members who “rally to maintain local, democratic control of public schools” … who understand that “any degree of standardization that comes from beyond the state only serves large, nation-wide investor interests.”
  2. Educators who “successfully counter the investor propaganda that parents are the only true stakeholders in a child’s education.” Only “then raiders can be opposed successfully. The oldest to the youngest and richest to poorest members of every community are the true stakeholders in public schools and public education.”
  3. Democratically elected school boards that “stay empowered to make decisions for the local public schools,” … able to resist the raider process.”
  4. Stakeholders who “successfully press legislators to listen to them instead of paid, professional lobbyists hired by large, investor-owned charter corporations… .”

The total destruction of our nation’s public school system is predicated on the elimination of local control over public schools.  Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM and current advisor to the Carlyle Group, who served as a chief architect of systemic education reform in the 90s, understood the need to wrestle control away from local school boards in order to push forward free market corporate education reforms.  Gerstner’s legacy among corporate education reformers was cemented in 1996 when he brought together the corporate world with state governors at the IBM headquarters in Palisades to establish the education reform agenda for the nation.  This meeting brought us Achieve — the organization that is credited with the development of the Common Core standards.  In 2008, Gerstner summarized what he had learned over the years as a leading voice in education reform for the The Wall Street Journal.  One of his recommendations addressed the issue of local control over public schools:

“Abolish all local school districts, save 70 (50 states; 20 largest cities). Some states may choose to leave some of the rest as community service organizations, but they would have no direct involvement in the critical task of establishing standards, selecting teachers, and developing curricula.”


Need I say more?

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The Brave New World of Big Data

Deborah Duncan Owens education data systems, education reform, grit and education

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World)

Why is the U.S. so enamored with big data?  Perhaps the entire concept of big data fits nicely with a consumer society, like the one portrayed in Huxley’s 1932 novel.  Today, consumerism is the soma.  And while we rail against the government for engaging in the mining of personal data for national security, we don’t seem nearly as bothered by the mining of our data by private corporations.  As a matter of fact, we love the convenience of having our internet searches and ad pop-ups tailored to our tastes as consumers.  But we live in an age in which the data and our internet footprints never go away and we’re not quite sure what will become of it.  Think about radioactive nuclear and chemical waste.  Remember Love Canal, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl.  The original products associated with these locations was not bad and considered beneficial to the region, bringing jobs and energy to the population.  However, what was left behind was far more toxic.

What happens to all the big data after its original use has been thoroughly exploited?  It has an incredibly long shelf life and it highly and easily marketed to another entity who can re-purpose the data for further exploitation.  While education data machine makers offer benevolent reasons for gathering, storing, and reporting all the available data on children from preschool through their college years, this data will never go away.  What other entities will find this data useful and worth whatever price or manipulation to get it.

Will data become destiny for children?  Will it become convenient to sort people according to the data we are accumulating?  Again, we can look back to Huxley’s proposition that social stability will ensue from the acknowledgement that people can become very comfortable with their respective roles.   One of the characters in A Brave New World explains why it is better to be a Beta:

“Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I’m so glad I’m a Beta.”

Is grit something we can teach children — or — is it an immutable quality?  Will we conclude after all the grit studies that the quality of a child’s grit level is genetically predetermined and will we decide not to waste too many resources on gritless children?  Will we decide to have them wear a different color or type of Gates’ inspired data collecting biosensor bracelet to continually monitor their attentiveness?  And when they are finished with school, that data can be provided to prospective employers.  They can decide whether or not they can afford to hire a person who, during the 2nd and 3rd grade, was rated as inattentive, unable to focus on academic tasks, and just plain not very gritty.  If they were less gritty for those two years, what’s to say that pattern won’t return at some point?  Best to employ a person with no interruptions in their attentiveness level.

And let’s always remember that poor children are the ones being targeted for explicit grit instruction.  Grit is the magic bullet that will enable them to succeed in spite of the odds.  In 2008, former politician and lingering conservative talking head, Newt Gingrich asserted that “poor kids have no work ethic — unless it comes to doing something illegal. … they have no habits of working and nobody around them who works …”  What they need is the opportunity, even as young as nine years old, to be given paying jobs such as mopping hallways in school.  In a brave new world, Epsilons can mop the floors.  Maybe if they can earn a few shekels, they can develop at least a little grit. But will they ever become Betas or Alphas?  You tell me.

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ACT, Data, and Grit: Don’t You Want to Know if Your Kindergartner has the Right Stuff?

Deborah Duncan Owens ACT, children and poverty, Duckworth Lab, Grit, School Data , , ,

ACT wants to ensure that teachers have access to “actionable” data to improve instruction.  Apparently, access to actionable data means longitudinal P-16 data systems to track students from preschool through college so that students are prepared for the 21st century.  Teachers, schools, and districts need to “closely monitor student performance at every stage of the learning pipeline.”  It’s not enough to follow students’ academic success, either. According to the ACT, it is equally important to monitor behavioral habits that will ensure later postsecondary success.  These behaviors include “motivation, social engagement, and self-regulation.”  And it’s not enough to begin instilling these virtues in students as they enter middle or high school; the ACT asserts that it is necessary to begin as early as possible — in preschool.  Certainly, if ACT begins collecting data in preschool, by kindergarten it can be determined if students need remediation in the areas of motivation, social engagement, and self-regulation.  There’s a growing body of research to enable schools and teachers to begin the process of making sure that children — at the same time they are learning to tie their shoes, share toys, correctly name the letters of the alphabet, make a swing go back and forth without the assistance of another person, ride a bike, and speak in complete sentences — are prepared for college and careers.

Leading the charge of developing the research base to enable schools to gather the data to be used in these endeavors has been the Duckworth Lab at the University of Pennsylvania.  This is the lab that has developed the Grit Scales celebrated by Paul Tough in his widely popular book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.  I read Tough’s book a few months ago.  The first few chapters of the book were compelling.  However, by the end of the book I realized that what he really learned from his research in the area of education, grit, and the hidden power of character was a contradiction in itself.  The reality is that children who come from money and comfort, who attend elite private schools, in fact need no grit at all to succeed.  On the other hand, children who come from poverty and insecure communities need all the grit available to overcome all the obstacles that are commonplace features in their lives.  And even then grit may not be enough to succeed academically — their grittiness may be channelled into other areas in order to make life bearable.  Tough’s book didn’t leave me so much in a state of dissonance, but with a level of discomfort at the obvious contradictions in his book.  Tough’s conclusions on one hand are so obvious — poor kids are trapped in a world not of their making and, therefore, will face extreme odds in their efforts to succeed.  The solution to disparities in academic achievement, according to Tough, is to overtly teach grit-oriented skills and behaviors to poor students.  On the other hand, it is clear that money and privilege create a world for some in which the world is full of possibilities.  These kids don’t need grit; they just need to follow their parents’ lead as they enter the world of college and careers.  So, does grit really matter?

The Duckworth Lab, under the leadership of Angela Duckworth, provides the road map for organizations like the ACT in developing a plan for measuring college and career readiness behaviors among young children.  While researchers at the lab may claim that they are simply continuing in the research already championed by psychologists for more than a century, their research agenda reveals the potential for misuse of their findings to impose on teachers, schools, and children practices that may very well be problematic and even harmful.

First, there is the very real potential for students to not only be labeled deficient based on their academic record, but also labeled as deficient for not being sufficiently motivated to learn and unable to persevere in tasks.  This is already happening at KIPP schools, whose leaders have partnered with Angela Duckworth in developing a report card for “predictive character strengths that are correlated to leading engaged, happy, and successful lives: zest, grit, optimism, self-control, gratitude, social intelligence, and curiosity.”

A second potential problem with the Duckworth grit notion is a sense that the inferential statistics that the grit scales are based on are reliable in predicting success.  It positions the individual, and in this case children, as having the power to direct their own lives solely based on their possession of these traits.  While these character traits may be very good things to possess as an individual, I think it is clear that adults make policy decisions about economics, healthcare, employment, education, and national security that inhibit an individual’s ability to succeed.  Just ask college graduates who have amassed an average of nearly $30,000 in student loan debt and are having difficulties finding jobs if their level of grit has ensured their success.  They certainly had the grit it supposedly takes to earn a college degree, but that sometimes doesn’t make their entree into the career world any easier and doesn’t reduce their financial constraints as they try to being an adult life.  The Duckworth approach to success and happiness ignores the power of cooperative and collective action in making the world a better place.  Where on the KIPP report card is there any mention of cooperative action?  The only trait that moves beyond the individual is social intelligence and even that is defined in a way that doesn’t necessarily reflect a sense of shared community.  According to KIPP, social intelligence is measured as the ability to “find solutions during conflicts with others,” to show that “s/he cared about the feelings of others,” and to adapt “to different social situations.”  It is about individual actions, not about the health and well-being of the whole.

Third, and perhaps most troubling, is the potential of grit research to lead to stereotyping, bias, and racism.  The application of Duckworth’s research to children attending schools in low socioeconomic communities, schools which predominantly serve children of color, exacerbates discussions of how to improve the outcomes for these children.  It provides a convenient tool for blaming the children and their families for the social problems that inhibit their ability to succeed.  It diverts attention away from the structural factors that have left entire communities without jobs that pay a living wage, with crime and violence and a police state ready to counter with violence, and with the vestiges of a racist society that too quickly judges people based on the color of their skin or the language they speak.  The Duckworth Lab’s research statement should be a harbinger for all who care about education and children.  The research of Francis Galton, the father of the eugenics movement, is cited as providing a theoretical foundation for the lab’s research.  In the world of research, I suppose, all research is relevant in that it can be expanded upon, confirmed, or negated.  It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that Galton’s research formed the basis for the Nazi regime’s actions toward Jews and other ethnic groups, homosexuals, and those suffering from genetic and mental disorders. Angela Duckworth expands upon Galton’s research and, therefore, resurrects his name in the arena of research in human development. Whatever value the researchers at the Duckworth lab may find in Galton’s research, it is clear that his research was misused and had a catastrophic impact on humanity. So, why resurrect it now?  And why apply it to our most vulnerable citizens — the children who have no vote or voice in education policy decisions?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll continue to say it again and again.  Data is not destiny.

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