Personalization or Profiling? Childhood in the Ed-Tech Era

from Wrench in the Gears
October 30, 2016

As states pull together their plans for ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act) it's important for parents and teachers to understand what the next phase of education reform looks like. This slide share presented at the Movement of Rank and File Educators' Social Justice Curriculum Fair in New York City recently provides a good introduction. Click on the graphic above for the slide show and be sure to explore the links that are included.

SEL a Hard Sell in TN

The big sell of SEL (social emotional learning) just got a little tougher for the elite paternalists whose new school mission it is to create and track docile hard workers who are immune to the effects of poverty. 

Following a backlash from some critics and only a month after joining, Tennessee has pulled out of a multi-state initiative meant to help teachers support students’ emotional well-being.

In August, Tennessee was selected from a field of more than 20 states to work with leaders from seven other states to draft standards focused on students’ emotional well-being and mental health in grades K-12. The initiative was spearheaded by the Chicago-based nonprofit Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, also known as CASEL, which also awarded Tennessee $5,000 for its work.

The announcement was followed by a flurry of complaints from Tennessee lawmakers charging that the standards were an overreach by the state, even though they would have been voluntary and never would have been assessed. Some groups and bloggers also joined in, charging that the federal government is seeking to track and manipulate kids’ feelings and relationships. . . .

Selling SEL (Social Emotional Learning)

By the late 1960s, James Comer had begun to implement public school interventions in New Haven, CT that focused on the social and emotional needs of children living in poverty.  This was the beginning of the modern social-emotional learning movement. 

Principals, parents, teachers, and social services professionals worked together to evaluate and alter school programs that these stakeholders deemed to be exacerbating behavioral problems among poor children in New Haven.  To the surprise of no one, student attendance and achievement improved as a result, as did overall school climate and relationships among students and between students and staff:

In the late 1960s, during his early days at Yale School of Medicine's Child Study Center, James Comer began piloting a program called the Comer School Development Program. It was, as he wrote later in a 1988 Scientific American article, centered on his speculation that "the contrast between a child's experiences at home and those in school deeply affects the child's psychosocial development and that this in turn shapes academic achievement."

The School Development Program focused on two poor, low-achieving, predominately African American elementary schools in New Haven, Connecticut, that had the worst attendance and the lowest academic achievement in the city. With help from the program, the schools established a collaborative-management team composed of teachers, parents, the principal, and a mental health worker. The team made decisions on issues ranging from the schools' academic and social programs to how to change school procedures that seemed to be engendering behavior problems.

By the early 1980s, academic performance at the two schools exceeded the national average, and truancy and behavior problems had declined, adding momentum to the nascent SEL movement.

Then with the birth of the "no excuses" movement and zero tolerance policies in schools during the 1990s, the focus of social-emotional learning shifted away from attempts to alter school environments to take into account the effects of poverty on children.  Instead, the new social-emotional learning began to shift toward altering children so that become immune to the effects of poverty, thus capable of high test scores without the need for expensive social interventions or time-consuming community input. 

Soon thereafter there began the incessant glorification by the media of high test scores from the KIPP Model charter schools, which served to accelerate the effort to alter children's behaviors to fit the segregated authoritarian corporate model of schooling.  This turning of social-emotional learning on its head set us on a track that continues to gain political traction today, even as skepticism and resistance grow among child advocacy groups, civil rights organizations, and education rights activists. 

What began with Comer as a humanitarian impulse to better fit schools to the needs of impoverished children has become a kind of behavior sterilization craze for poor children that we have not seen since the physical and mental alteration programs of the eugenics movement a hundred years ago.  What was once a collaborative process among parents, health care personnel, principals, and teachers to develop humane education programs to fit the needs of children has become a small menu of canned indoctrination programs aimed to fit children to the needs of corporate reform schools.

As a result of increased awareness of the oppressive and abusive conditions of KIPP Model charters, the callow positivity wrapped in civil rights rhetoric by privileged TFA recruits in the charter chain gangs grows more stale by the day, and the brash, insensitive preaching by Barack Obama on the virtues of "no excuses" ideology sounds more and more hollow. 

Even the NAACP has started to awaken to the educational genocide taking place in the corporate hell schools that are offered poor parents as choice schools.

With the coming of the new federal ESSA, we see that a new generation of neoliberal policymakers are now incentivizing states to come up their own measures of non-cognitive skills for social-emotional learning.

Maurice Elias, a psychology professor at Rutgers University and director of the university's Social-Emotional Learning Lab, describes SEL as the process through which we learn to recognize and manage emotions, care about others, make good decisions, behave ethically and responsibly, develop positive relationships, and avoid negative behaviors.

Rather than modifying school environments or programs to address the needs of children living in poverty, the onus now is on changing the students, themselves, to fit corporate needs of Common Core testing factories.  And, of course, making these children and their teachers "accountable."

What about that tricky issue of measuring social-emotional learning? The controversial approach has been heavily discussed lately because the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, requires states to add an "additional indicator" to their school accountability systems in addition to traditional factors, like student test scores. While the law lists examples like school climate and student engagement, some have suggested that including social-emotional learning in accountability might be an effective way of spreading it to more schools. A group of California districts, known as the CORE districts, have already experimented with the concept.

At present, eight states have signed up to work with the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) to develop SEL standards. Eleven states are standing by to use those standards, once developed. 

Will we end up with a Common Core of behavioral and character standards that all children will be subjected to?  If NEA, AFT, NPE, Lamar Alexander's team, and the Clintonians have their way, that is where we are headed.

Poverty Solutions: Psychological Immunization and Neurological Alteration

The "No Excuses" charter school operators prefer school locations in poor urban areas, rather than socioeconomically mixed areas.   There are a number of reasons for preferring segregation: 1) cheap real estate deals for charter operators are easier to come by in the most depressed areas, as public schools are often combined or closed for performance or efficiency reasons, thus leaving empty buildings that can be leased or purchased cheaply; 2) heavy concentrations of students in nearby low-cost housing provide potential charter customers who do not require large outlays for transportation costs; 3) poor parents are more likely to be occupied with basic life needs and less likely than other parents to question how their children are treated or to seek involvement in curriculum and instruction decisions and discipline policies.  Once parents and students sign KIPP contracts, their participation in schooling decisions is relinquished to the school leadership team.

In short, No Excuses operators operate beyond parental and public oversight, this allowing practices that would never be allowed in schools that serve middle class students.

Operating in high poverty areas presents serious challlenges, however.  Because expansion of the "no excuses" charter chains depend upon high test performance by the children in their testing factories, in order to secure new contracts, worker children in high poverty areas where charters operate need every performance-enhancing intervention that can be applied to maximize production.  If hungry children are going to have test scores that can compete privileged children in the leafy suburbs, which is a prime political selling point of the "no excuses" schools to begin with, then the charter industry needs some way to make children immune to the effects of poverty, which has always been the best predictor of test performance.  

Enter the positive psychologists aimed to solve an economic problem related to increasing "human capital."  Add a few learned helplessness shrinks who inspired the CIA following 9-11.  To that bizarre mix, add the social-emotional learning (SEL) disciples and the motivational experts like Carol Dweck, and you get a potent combination of forces now aligning themselves to do battle against the costly productivity drag that results from children and their parents living in poverty.  A new field is emerging, in fact, that is aimed to psychologically and neurologically alter children and their parents so that they become immune to the debilitating effects of the impoverished and dehumanizing lives they live.  As Paul Tough explained in his 2012 book, How Children Succeed . . ., “character strengths that matter so much to young people’s success are not innate; they don’t appear in us magically, as a result of good luck or good genes. And they are not simply a choice. They are rooted in brain chemistry, and they are molded, in measurable and predictable ways. . ."

The effects of long-term psychological and neurological manipulations of children, for whatever reason, can only be guessed, but the potential seems particularly devastating when we know that these interventions will be carried out in total compliance schools by non-professionals who are under the gun for increased production of test scores to furnish burnish brand names.

The dire possibilities, however, do not seem to be at all visible to psychologists like Carol Dweck, who is engaged in building her own little empire to mold the minds of the poor.  She recently appeared at a Gates-funded Education Week meeting in Washington, DC, to make her case for immunizing children against the effects of poverty with her "growth mindsets."



Below is a brief clip from my new book, Work Hard, Be Hard..., which provides some context for understanding the, um, motivation behind the emerging SEL fixation by Dweck and others. 

            Among the teachers interviewed for this book, there was a shared anxiety with regards to what KIPP’s lockdown environment will eventually produce.  As student success entails a sense of empowerment, or the ability to not only control but to affect or transform one’s world, these former teachers understood the danger that the KIPP Model poses to that purpose or aim.  The resulting anxiety is represented by the statement below, which expresses concern that the KIPP influence would continue to reach beyond the 183 KIPP franchises:

I am worried that if the KIPP motto starts to spread that it will end up going into public schools as well and then because KIPP is so test-focused, other schools are going to be that way. I feel like we are just going to be creating robots, like people who aren’t really able to think for themselves and be creative and expressive and be able to have their own personalities. I am just worried that it is just going to create a society of people who are going to be complacent and just kind of do whatever people tell them to do because that is what they have learned their whole life.

            Growing interest among corporate foundations and their think tanks (Center on Children and Families at Brookings, 2014) for “character” building through social-emotional learning (SEL) interventions suggests the KIPP Model is likely to be repackaged for another generation of No Excuses schools. Once again, psychologists of the developmental variety are coming to dominate this social and emotional learning (SEL) niche (Steinberg, 2014; Farrington et al, 2012), and they are joined by new paternalists who are fixated, as they always have been, on instilling self-regulation and self-control.  

As a solution to the character deficiencies among the disenfranchised, SEL will likely have a dominant role in the next phase of the crusade to fix the poor.  In a recent research review (Dweck, Walton, & Cohen, 2014) sponsored by the Gates Foundation, the authors examine studies that support the Duckworth thesis that non-cognitive, or motivational, factors like “academic tenacity” can have more effect than “cognitive factors” on “core academic outcomes such as GPA and test scores” (p. 2): 

At its most basic level, academic tenacity is about working hard, and working smart, for a long time. More specifically, academic tenacity is about the mindsets and skills that allow students to . . . look beyond short-term concerns to longer-term or higher-order goals, and withstand challenges and setbacks to persevere toward these goals (p. 4).

                   The philanthrocapitalists and their think tank scholars quote liberally from the work of Walter Mischel (1989, 2014), whose experiments with delayed gratification among preschoolers provide the dominant metaphor for another generation of paternalist endeavors.  In Mischel’s experiments, children were offered a single marshmallow immediately or two marshmallows later if they could delay their reward.  The test, which came to be labeled “The Marshmallow Test,” represents the potential to delay gratification in order to gain a larger reward later on. 

                   At many of the KIPP, Aspire, Achievement First, and Yes Prep schools, children wear t-shirts emblazoned with “Don’t Eat the Marshmallow.” Mischel’s (2014) latest work, The marshmallow test: Mastering self-control acknowledges KIPP’s prominent role and places it within the context of recent research on improving self-control.  David Levin has made Mischel’s book a central component in his Coursera massive open online course (MOOC), Teaching character and creating positive classrooms, which was first offered with co-instructor, Angela Duckworth, in 2014. 

                   Levin and Duckworth are two of the co-founders of Character Lab, which uses Duckworth’s experimental work at the Upper Darby School District near the University of Pennsylvania to fine tune the character performance interventions that Levin initiated at KIPP schools in the early 2000s. Interestingly, much of the research that is used to justify the use of the Seligman-Duckworth resiliency improvement methodology is the same data offered to justify the Seligman deal that cost the U. S. Army $145 million (see Chapter 1) for interventions that brought no benefit to GIs suffering from the stresses of war.  We may wonder how much these alleged remedies for children might cost federal and state education departments, whose bankrolls are much smaller than those at the Pentagon.

            A related character approach that operates under the trade name, Brainology, claims that 1,000 schools are now using its “growthmindset” based on Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset(2006).   Dweck’s work is included on the suggested reading list used by Levin and Duckworth for their online course mentioned above.  Brainology cites unpublished research that shows teaching the growth mindset “boosts motivation and achievement” and narrows both the gender and racial achievement gaps (Mindset Works, Inc., 2008-2012) A license for 300 students is available for $5,250, or the program may be purchased for $79 per student.  A separate site license for professional development is sold for $1,500.

The Brainology website has links to a handout that summarizes finding for a short list of preliminary studies showing Brainology’s effectiveness in increasing motivation, although none of the findings has appeared in refereed journals.  Even so, the enthusiasm among reformers is strong and growing stronger as the debilitating stresses from poverty rise, and the spread of educational austerity measures calls for the ramping up of strategies that might mollify those affected children whose promised rewards become more and more uncertain.

References

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Center on Children and Families at Brookings.  (2014).  Essay series on character and opportunity.  Washington, DC: The Character and Opportunity Project of the Brookings Institution.  Retrieved from http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/multimedia/interactives/2014/ccf_characterseries/characterandopportunityessays.pdf

Dweck, C.  (2006).  Mindset: The new psychology of success.  New York: Ballantine.

Dweck, C., Walton, G., & Cohen, G.  2014).  Tenacity: Mindsets and skills that promote long-term learning.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Retrieved from https://web.stanford.edu/~gwalton/home/Welcome_files/DweckWaltonCohen_2014.pdf

Farrington, C.A., Roderick, M., Allensworth, E., Nagaoka, J., Keyes, T.S., Johnson, D.W., & Beechum, N.  (2012).  Teaching adolescents to become learners. The role of noncognitive factors in shaping school performance:  A critical literature review.  Chicago: University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research.

Mindset Works, Inc.  (2008-2012).  Mindset works: Spark learning. Retrieved from http://www.mindsetworks.com/webnav/whatismindset.aspx