The Recovering Teacher

Is DC playing fast and loose with numbers?

No, this isn't about the federal government shuffling statistics to make things look better - although that would not be surprising. This is about a report in USAToday about the District of Columbia Public Schools having some very questionable results on standardized tests. Now, if a district can help students improve their scores, that's great. The problem is that some of these "gains" are looking very suspect now.

Maybe one of the first red flags should have been when one school went from 10% of its students scoring at the "proficient" or "advanced" levels in math on standardized tests to 58% in only two years.  It would be nice to think the students could improve this much this fast, but realistically it is unlikely to happen. But then, when district scores dropped by an average of 4% the scores in this one school dropped over 20% in the same period. The school showed what the article calls a "roller coaster" ride from 2006 to 2010.

The biggest red flag, however, is a report from the testing company that many of the DC schools have much higher than expected numbers of erasures on tests - as many as 80% of classrooms. And these were not just erasures, they were what is called "wrong-to-right" erasures where an incorrect answer is changed to correct. It makes you wonder just what might have been going on. And this was not the only district school that showed alarmingly high erasure rates.

To top it all off, the chancellor of the district gave big bonuses to teachers and the principal at the school for their "success." As the article points out, when you tie big bonuses in to test scores, you increase the chances of cheating. And how is the district handling all this controversy? It's DC, so you figure that one out.

Read the entire article at USAToday.

A Bill of Goods - The Problem

Last time I said that I was going to ruffle a few feathers. Well, I’m not sure if I have yet, but I’m going to try again to get things stirred up. After all, isn’t healthy debate what it’s all about? And I think that for far too long we have been without healthy debate on what really works in schools.

I entitled this posting “The Problem,” but actually there are many problems. There is no argument that we have a major problem with student failure (yes, I’m using the “f-word” here). People don’t want to use the word “failure” with children – something about it hurting their precious self-esteem. Well guess what, folks – a lot of these kids have no self-esteem to begin with. They’re smart enough to know that we’re just playing word games. They have already figured out that most adults don’t expect anything out of them. Oh, we say we do, but then what happens? We coddle them, we tell them that it’s not their fault they can’t read – that some other bad teacher or system, or whatever, did it to them. They are victims of their environment, of the system, of “the man” – whoever that is. And then what do we do – we pass them on to the next level where they are even farther behind. “You couldn’t handle seventh grade, so we’re going to promote you to eighth grade where you can really bomb.” I ask you, does that sound like a good program to you?

Let’s put things in perspective. If you had a job and you couldn’t cut it, would your boss promote you? Okay, let’s say you’re not in a government job – would the boss promote you? More than likely, the boss is going to tell you to get up to speed or you’re gone. This is the “real world” that we’re supposed to be preparing kids for. And then we wonder why so many young people seem to have an “entitlement” mentality. Hello! Does anyone see a problem developing here? It’s a similar situation to the problem that communist societies faced – if I can get the same thing doing nothing as I can doing something, why should I do something?

That should make some people happy – I’ve just compared our educational system with communism. But I’m just getting going. Wait until you see where I’m going next.

In a Corner?

In his fourth installment of “The Cho Factor,” Robert Ringer takes a look at a series of shootings over the past decade, to show a pattern of taunting and bullying.  And it is true, that all of the examples he gives of students who shot multiple victims, the shooters had been bullied and harassed before – sometimes for years.  He indicates this exercise in comparing shooters is to show how perhaps it was not that Cho was evil, only his actions.  But it also seems to be a way of setting up his later “big point” – of preparing his readers to think his way.

Let’s look at this idea – of getting people to think your way.  I’m not knocking it – after all, don’t we all try to persuade people about different things?  Maybe we want to go to a certain movie or restaurant, or we want to paint the bathroom a certain color?  And politicians and advertisers are always trying to persuade us to their view.  “Buy this car!”  “Vote for me!”  So there is nothing intrinsically wrong with trying to persuade people.  My argument will be later with what he is trying to persuade us on.

One other point that Ringer brings up about several of the shooters is their attitude that they were “made” to do what they did – that they were “forced…into a corner” (Cho), or that it was their “only option” (Robert Hawkins, who killed 8 shoppers in an Omaha mall before killing himself).  Why is it that these young people feel they have been forced into their actions?  Ringer asks this question as well, but he has a different core reason than I do.  But on one thing we both can agree – whatever the core reason (or reasons), we need to try to get a handle on what is happening to our young people.

Are People Born Evil?

In his third installment of “The Cho Factor,” Robert Ringer discusses the topic of “evil.”  He was inspired to this topic by a broadcast of “CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute” that he saw.  He talks about how he tuned in just in time to see the presentation of an award to a young man who helped barricade a door to a classroom at Virginia Tech during the Cho shooting spree.  In the presentation a comment was made about how this student had “confronted evil and won” – and this got Ringer to wondering about evil versus human action.

This is a very interesting subject to talk about.  So often we tend to talk about abstract “evil” rather than the person who does the evil act.  As Ringer points out, it’s easier to talk about an abstract than about a real human with inner motivations – motivations that might make it harder for the rest of us to simply dismiss the entire action as being something “evil” that we had to face but can now go past.

Even now, as I write this, the news programs are showing coverage of a new shooting – the fourth this week – at Northwest Illinois University where a friend of mine is enrolled.  No doubt we will be hearing of how these students also had to “face evil” in the shape of an apparent former graduate student.

So, we have Cho, this new shooter, and a litany of other names of young people who made the decision to take multiple lives, including their own.  If we take Ringer’s definition of evil – “a purposeful intent or act…to do harm to others” – then these have all been evil actions.  But, as Ringer points out, what about the people themselves?  Is it, to paraphrase Shakespeare (as Ringer hints at), a case of “Some are born evil, some achieve evil, and some have evil thrust upon ’em”?

Continuing the Discussion: Debating Cho - 2

Last week I began a series of responses to Robert Ringer’s series called “The Cho Factor” in which he discussed the Virginia Tech shooting in April 2007 and the possible issues behind it.  In his second installment, entitled “A Soul Without Purpose,” Ringer more or less prepares his readers for the following installments.  In my opinion, he over-sells this series here, going on about how these “issues” “feed our frustrations and fears,” and attributes to them the failure of marriages, the glorification of school athletics, ignorance of learning disabilities, and a host of other societal ills.  Quite a bit to dump on some as-yet unnamed “issues.”

He also goes on to “warn” his readers that his exploration of these issues “promises to be a long, and often uncomfortable, journey.”  This is all well and good, and I applaud him for preparing readers for the rocky road ahead.  But what bothers me most in this post is that he then pretty much tells readers that they had better agree with him, or else they will fall into one of two categories of readers – those with closed minds or those who are “knee-jerk-reaction folks.”  So, unless you agree with his observations (i.e. what he has to say will “go down well” with you), you are either closed minded or reaction-prone.  Either way, you must not be “open minded” enough to read what he says and agree with him.  Well, I consider myself open minded, and I am not given to knee-jerk reactions, but there are some very big parts of his argument that I cannot agree with.  Perhaps this has to do with my own personal experience in life.

I did find it interesting that Ringer reprinted a comment from someone questioning his use of Cho to refer to these issues.  The reader was concerned that he was “elevating” Cho by using his name in the series.  Ringer replied that he felt Cho was a symbol of the problems that Western society is facing, and that we need to look into the causes of Cho’s actions in order to understand and deal with these problems.

Ringer continues this installment with a comment from another reader about our society’s focus on quick fixes rather than real answers.  “J.G.” is entirely correct on this – we want to solve the problem today, even if it means slapping on “a fresh coat of false security.”  Now, is that a great image or what?  In our world of fast food, microwaves, and sound bites, the tendency is to look for the fastest way to get it out of the way so we can go back to our reality shows and celebrity sightings.  The sad thing is, in my opinion, this is, to some extent, what Ringer ends up doing.  He has his own agenda/axe to grind, and he ends up focusing on that only to the exclusion of everything else that could be discussed.  But we will come to that in a future blog.

Beginning a Discussion

Yes, I’ve been gone for a while, but I have not been idle.  I won’t bore you with most of the details, since they don’t really matter at this time.  But one thing I have been doing is reading a series of blogs by Libertarian writer Robert Ringer called “The Cho Factor.”  These are in response to the shootings at Virginia Tech by Seung-Hui Cho in April 2007 (thus the name of his series).  He talks about certain “underlying causes” of the assault, and gives his suggestions as to how we should go about preventing further Cho-type events.  He wants to have a discussion, however all of the comments that seem to have come in have been pretty much supportive of his opinions.  Now this could be because of the general readership of his blog, or it could be a case of pick-and-choose – I don’t know.  But since I have a blog and I don’t agree with all of his opinions, I thought it would only be right to take his posts one-by-one and respond to them.

Now, I will set up my background by admitting to being a liberal Republican (no, that is not an oxymoron – it just means that I am basically moderate with some more “liberal” ideas).  I am also a former teacher of English and history, and this colors my opinions as well.  So, with those disclaimers out of the way, on to the discussion.

The first point that Ringer makes is that the Cho event, like many other violent events, had an underlying cause.  No argument there, nor will I argue with his assertion that the so-called “experts” and other talking heads have pretty much ignored the underlying cause(s) for Cho’s rampage.  And these underlying causes need long-term solutions rather than quick fixes.  Unfortunately, we are a nation in love with the “quick and easy,” as can be seen by the spread of fast-food and other “quickie” establishments (no, not that kind of “quickie” – sheesh).  I also completely agree with his suggestion that we each need to take deeper looks at the things that frustrate us in life and find the underlying causes.

He also suggests that the Cho incident is part of a much deeper problem in society, one that needs immediate and long-lasting attention.  Again, I have no argument with this opinion, but it is the problem that he raises later in his blogs that I have a serious problem with.  But I will leave that to later when I reach that installment.

His final point in this first of the series is that people tend to see “every discussion as an argument, and every argument as a battle that must be won at all costs.”  We only need to tune in to the presidential debates to see this in action – and these are all people on the same “team” right now.  But I do plan to point out where he seems to take this very attitude on certain of his opinions.

This covers my thoughts on his first installment of “The Cho Factor.”  If you want to read them for yourself, you can always check his blog out at: RobertRinger.com