With Common Core, "You start to see entire ecosystems of investment opportunity lining up…It could get really, really big."

How does the growth of charter schools depend upon the Rotten Common Core?  See below.

Thanks to Stan Karp:

Latest Newark ‘performance report:’ blueprint for more closures/charters?

A new report & presentation from Newark State District Supt. Cami Anderson may lay the groundwork for more school closings, charter expansion, co-locations and staff firings. Anderson has already closed twelve schools during her 18-month tenure, leased district facilities to charters over the objection of the local school advisory board, and negotiated a new teachers contract that provides for “turnarounds” in up to 10 schools in each of the next three years. According to an NJ Spotlight story, Anderson said the new school performance report, “didn’t change any of her own reform strategies for the district, but rather helped ‘sharpen our goals.’

The new report was developed by the Parthenon consulting group, a Boston-based global management firm that identifies investment opportunities in education. Last summer, Parthenon executive Rob Lytle made a presentation on "private equity investing in for-profit education companies” to an elite group of investors in NYC. He told them the coming implementation of the common core standards and assessments would create a lucrative opportunity: “Think about the upcoming rollout of new national academic standards for public schools, he urged the crowd. If they're as rigorous as advertised, a huge number of schools will suddenly look really bad, their students testing way behind in reading and math. They'll want help, quick. And private, for-profit vendors selling lesson plans, educational software and student assessments will be right there to provide it. You start to see entire ecosystems of investment opportunity lining up…It could get really, really big."

Anderson is scheduled to present the Parthenon report to the Newark Advisory Board tonight.

Newark Schools Chief Pulls No Punches in Depicting Challenges

Superintendent presents new study’s data in bid to make case for major reforms

NJ Spotlight

Court Refuses To Dismiss Newark Local Control Appeal

Education Law Center

The Mental Health Issue Not Being Discussed: Doping of Children and Young Adults

With Fox News now fronting for the NRA's misleaders on the horrific child killing in CT, we can expect to see a new push to identify any child that may be suspected as problematic and to "treat" them with prescription drugs.

In fact, Dr. Nancy was on NBC News last evening talking about the lack of mental health care.  Indeed.  What Dr. Nancy did not mention is that most of the young shooters from the past 15 years of gun-crazed carnage had received what passes now for mental health care: a prescription drug cocktail supplied by Big Pharma.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

What I fear is that this latest incident, when combined with search for any solution other than gun control, will exacerbate the doping of children, rather than having us examine what we have already done to kids in order to keep them compliant in schools that allow nothing else.

The piece below was posted in July 2012 at psychiatricfraud.org:

On this 12-year anniversary of the shooting rampage at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, let us not forget the real lesson of Columbine:  psychiatric drugs induce violence.

Shooter Eric Harris was taking the antidepressant Luvox at the time he and Dylan Klebold opened fire at Columbine High School, killing 12 students and a teacher and wounding 26 others before killing themselves.  At least one public report exists of a friend of Klebold who witnessed Klebold taking the antidepressants Paxil and Zoloft and urged him to come off them.  Officially, Klebold’s medical records remain sealed.

Luvox, Paxil and Zoloft are in a class of drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).  Among the international regulatory agencies issuing warnings on these antidepressants, the FDA issued a Public Health Advisory in 2004 warning that “anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, impulsivity, akathisia [severe restlessness], hypomania [abnormal excitement] and mania [psychosis characterized by exalted feelings, delusions of grandeur and overproduction of ideas] have been reported in adult and pediatric patients being treated with antidepressants.”  (For further information on international studies and warnings about antidepressants, go to CCHR International’s psychiatric drug side effects search engine.)

Luvox, Paxil and other antidepressants also made the top 10 list of violence-inducing prescription drugs in a report from the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, which was based on data from the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System (see “Study Reveals Top Ten Violence-Inducing Prescription Drugs [– Eight Are Psychiatric Drugs]”).

Dr. Ann Blake Tracy, executive director of the International Coalition for Drug Awareness and author of Prozac: Panacea or Pandora? – Our Serotonin Nightmare, is an expert consultant in cases like Columbine in which antidepressants are involved.

Columbine shooter Eric Harris

Dr. Tracy says the Columbine killers’ brains were awash in serotonin, the chemical which causes violence and aggression and triggers a sleep-walking disorder in which a person literally acts out their worst nightmare.  Harris became obsessed with homicidal and suicidal thoughts “within weeks” after he began taking Zoloft, according to Dr. Tracy.  Due to his obsession with killing, Harris was switched to Luvox, which was in his system at the time of the shooting, according to his autopsy. However, the change from Zoloft to Luvox is like switching from Pepsi to Coke, Dr. Tracy said.

A growing number of school shootings and other shooting rampages were committed by individuals under the influence of, or in withdrawal from, psychiatric drugs known to cause mania, psychosis, violence and even homicide. Consider this list of 13 massacres over the past decade or so, resulting in 54 dead and 105 wounded – and these are just the ones where the psychiatric drugs are known. In other cases, medical records were sealed or autopsy reports not made public or, in some cases, toxicology tests were either not done to test for psychiatric drugs or not disclosed to the public. But this is what we do know about the mental health “treatment” of those who committed these acts of violence:

• Dekalb, Illinois – February 14, 2008: 27-year-old Steven Kazmierczak shot and killed five people and wounded 16 others before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University auditorium. According to his girlfriend, he had recently been taking Prozac, Xanax and Ambien. Toxicology results showed that he still had trace amount of Xanax in his system.
• Omaha, Nebraska – December 5, 2007: 19-year-old Robert Hawkins killed eight people and wounded five before committing suicide in an Omaha mall. Hawkins’ friend told CNN that the gunman was on antidepressants, and autopsy results confirmed he was under the influence of the “anti-anxiety” drug Valium.
• Jokela, Finland – November 7, 2007: 18-year-old Finnish gunman Pekka-Eric Auvinen had been taking antidepressants before he killed eight people and wounded a dozen more at Jokela High School in southern Finland, then committed suicide.
• Cleveland, Ohio – October 10, 2007: 14-year-old Asa Coon stormed through his school with a gun in each hand, shooting and wounding four before taking his own life. Court records show Coon had been placed on the antidepressant Trazodone.
• Blacksburg, Virginia – April 16, 2007: 23-year-old Seung Hui Cho shot to death 32 students and faculty of Virginia Tech, wounding 17 more, and then killing himself. He had received prior mental health treatment, however his mental health records remained sealed.
• Red Lake, Minnesota – March 2005: 16-year-old Jeff Weise, on Prozac, shot and killed his grandparents, then went to his school on the Red Lake Indian Reservation where he shot dead 7 students and a teacher, and wounded 7 before killing himself.
• Greenbush, New York – February 2004: 16-year-old Jon Romano strolled into his high school in east Greenbush and opened fire with a shotgun. Special education teacher Michael Bennett was hit in the leg. Romano had been taking “medication for depression”.
• El Cajon, California – March 22, 2001: 18-year-old Jason Hoffman, on the antidepressants Celexa and Effexor, opened fire on his classmates, wounding three students and two teachers at Granite Hills High School.
• Williamsport, Pennsylvania – March 7, 2001: 14-year-old Elizabeth Bush was taking the antidepressant Prozac when she shot at fellow students, wounding one.
• Conyers, Georgia – May 20, 1999: 15-year-old T.J. Solomon was being treated with antidepressants when he opened fire on and wounded six of his classmates.
• Columbine, Colorado – April 20, 1999: 18-year-old Eric Harris and his accomplice, Dylan Klebold, killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 26 others before killing themselves. Harris was on the antidepressant Luvox. Klebold’s medical records remain sealed.
• Notus, Idaho – April 16, 1999: 15-year-old Shawn Cooper fired two shotgun rounds in his school, narrowly missing students. He was taking a prescribed SSRI antidepressant and Ritalin.
• Springfield, Oregon – May 21, 1998: 15-year-old Kip Kinkel murdered his parents and then proceeded to school where he opened fire on students in the cafeteria, killing two and wounding 22. Kinkel had been taking the antidepressant Prozac.

Filmmaker Michael Moore, who directed the documentary “Bowling for Columbine,” has said this, following his extensive look at the Columbine tragedy:

“In Bowling for Columbine,” we never really came up with the answer in terms of why this happened. I think we did a good job of exposing [that] all the reasons that were given were a bunch of B.S. ….And none of it really made any sense. That’s why I believe there should be an investigation in terms of what…prescribed pharmaceuticals these kids were on….

“It just would be shocking…to the millions of parents who prescribe this for their kids if it was finally explained to them, if this is the case, that this perhaps occurred for no other reason other than because of these prescriptions. “Imagine what that would do, imagine how people would totally re-think things – grasping for every little straw they can to explain why something like Columbine happens, when in fact it may be nothing more than this. How else do you explain two otherwise decent kids, very smart, no history of violence to other kids in the school – why them, why did this happen? It’s an extremely legitimate question to pose, and it demands an investigation.” (See the video clip of Michael Moore here.)

Given the growing list of shooters who were on psychiatric drugs, given the fact that 22 international drug regulatory agencies warn these drugs can cause violence, mania, psychosis, suicide and even homicide, and given the fact that a major study was just released confirming these drugs put people at greater risk of becoming violent, CCHR International asserts:  “Any recommendation for more mental health ‘treatment,’ which [inevitably] means putting more people and more kids on these [psychiatric] drugs, is not only negligent, but considering the possible repercussions, criminal.”

If you or someone you know has been harmed by psychiatric drugs, you can contact us privately by clicking here or by calling 303-789-5225.  All information will be kept in the strictest confidence.   We welcome your comments on this article below.

Related posts:

1. Study Reveals Top Ten Violence-Inducing Prescription Drugs [– Eight Are Psychiatric Drugs]

"I Seen You Do It!"

Today, on our walk to school, my son started to grumble a bit about some kids in his class who don't use "proper" grammar ("not that I do all the time, Dad!") and use words like "ain't" and say "seen" instead of "saw."

I asked why it mattered to him.  He couldn't really say.  I asked him if he thought it made a difference at all.  He said it mattered in school.  How?  "They'll get test questions wrong."

"But you understand what they're saying, right?  I mean, you're not confused by their grammar, right?"

Guess not, he said.

Is "I saw you" different than "I seen you?" I asked?

He didn't know but he thought it was.

Well it is I guess, but only if used with "have" or "had".

So, "I saw you" is tied to a specific time event--"I saw you yesterday" for example.  And so it IS different than "I have seen you" as this does not imply a specific time event and rather generalizes the time of possible occurrence (or occurrences as the number of times is also not specific).

BUT it is not different, really, to say "I saw you yesterday" and "I seen you yesterday."  They say the same thing.

We simply do not use that form of the verb that way "properly."  It is "wrong" but it does not fail to communicate the same thing.

What does it mean then to say that this form of speech is improper?  It means that we will class you by your usage as "poorly educated" or the "product" of a poorly educated home.

My son then observed that these particular kids used grammatically correct speech for added emphasis.

Accusatory--"You took my cookie!"
Response--"I did not!" (emphatically spoken)

Why, he asked, do they use proper grammar in this way?  (I suppose he meant why did they not use a contraction.)

A good question.  I don't know.  Because the emphasis and the assertion of innocence require a clear and unindictable phrasing.  Perhaps it is understood that they're defense be emphatically "respected" and conventionally proper to provide it with a kind of offended credibility.

As you can imagine, my son had stopped listening to me.

NEA, AFT should be helping us resist, not comply with, the common core

My comment on: “NEA, AFT Partner To Build Common-Core Tools,” (Education Week, Dec 17).

From the article:
The two national teachers' unions have won $11 million to build an online warehouse of instructional tools for the Common Core State Standards. Student Achievement Partners, whose founders led the writing of the standards, is also a grantee. It will work with the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association and their teachers to build the tools and post them on Student Achievement Partners' website.
(For the rest: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2012/12/nea_aft_to_build_common-core_w.html)

My comment, posted on http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2012/12/nea_aft_to_build_common-core_w.html)

This is all wrong. The unions and the Helmsley Foundation should be helping us resist the Common Core. Are they aware that the common core state (sic) standards mean a massive increase in testing and will be very expensive, at a time when money is very tight? My estimate is that the common core will require about 20 times the amount of testing that NCLB requires, with more subjects and grade levels tested, interim tests, and maybe even pretests in the fall.

Are they aware that there is no evidence that increased testing will boost achievement, and that there is no justification for the common core in the first place? There is strong evidence that the major reason for low school achievement is poverty. According to UNICEF (Innocenti Report 10), the US child poverty rate is now 23%, the second highest among 35 “economically advanced” countries. Poverty has a devastating impact on school performance.

The billions to be spent on unnecessary and excessive testing could be used to protect children against the effects of poverty.

Rahm and the Fat Cats

Guns Don't Kill People--Crazy People with Guns Kill People

From Kristof at NYTimes:

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

IN the harrowing aftermath of the school shooting in Connecticut, one thought wells in my mind: Why can’t we regulate guns as seriously as we do cars?

The fundamental reason kids are dying in massacres like this one is not that we have lunatics or criminals — all countries have them — but that we suffer from a political failure to regulate guns.

Children ages 5 to 14 in America are 13 times as likely to be murdered with guns as children in other industrialized countries, according to David Hemenway, a public health specialist at Harvard who has written an excellent book on gun violence.

So let’s treat firearms rationally as the center of a public health crisis that claims one life every 20 minutes. The United States realistically isn’t going to ban guns, but we can take steps to reduce the carnage.

American schoolchildren are protected by building codes that govern stairways and windows. School buses must meet safety standards, and the bus drivers have to pass tests. Cafeteria food is regulated for safety. The only things we seem lax about are the things most likely to kill.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has five pages of regulations about ladders, while federal authorities shrug at serious curbs on firearms. Ladders kill around 300 Americans a year, and guns 30,000.

We even regulate toy guns, by requiring orange tips — but lawmakers don’t have the gumption to stand up to National Rifle Association extremists and regulate real guns as carefully as we do toys. What do we make of the contrast between heroic teachers who stand up to a gunman and craven, feckless politicians who won’t stand up to the N.R.A.?

As one of my Facebook followers wrote after I posted about the shooting, “It is more difficult to adopt a pet than it is to buy a gun.”

Look, I grew up on an Oregon farm where guns were a part of life; and my dad gave me a .22 rifle for my 12th birthday. I understand: shooting is fun! But so is driving, and we accept that we must wear seat belts, use headlights at night, and fill out forms to buy a car. Why can’t we be equally adult about regulating guns?

And don’t say that it won’t make a difference because crazies will always be able to get a gun. We’re not going to eliminate gun deaths, any more than we have eliminated auto accidents. But if we could reduce gun deaths by one-third, that would be 10,000 lives saved annually.

Likewise, don’t bother with the argument that if more people carried guns, they would deter shooters or interrupt them. Mass shooters typically kill themselves or are promptly caught, so it’s hard to see what deterrence would be added by having more people pack heat. There have been few if any cases in the United States in which an ordinary citizen with a gun stopped a mass shooting.

The tragedy isn’t one school shooting, it’s the unceasing toll across our country. More Americans die in gun homicides and suicides in six months than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

So what can we do? A starting point would be to limit gun purchases to one a month, to curb gun traffickers. Likewise, we should restrict the sale of high-capacity magazines so that a shooter can’t kill as many people without reloading.

We should impose a universal background check for gun buyers, even with private sales. Let’s make serial numbers more difficult to erase, and back California in its effort to require that new handguns imprint a microstamp on each shell so that it can be traced back to a particular gun.

“We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years,” President Obama noted in a tearful statement on television. He’s right, but the solution isn’t just to mourn the victims — it’s to change our policies. Let’s see leadership on this issue, not just moving speeches.

Other countries offer a road map. In Australia in 1996, a mass killing of 35 people galvanized the nation’s conservative prime minister to ban certain rapid-fire long guns. The “national firearms agreement,” as it was known, led to the buyback of 650,000 guns and to tighter rules for licensing and safe storage of those remaining in public hands.

The law did not end gun ownership in Australia. It reduced the number of firearms in private hands by one-fifth, and they were the kinds most likely to be used in mass shootings.

In the 18 years before the law, Australia suffered 13 mass shootings — but not one in the 14 years after the law took full effect. The murder rate with firearms has dropped by more than 40 percent, according to data compiled by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, and the suicide rate with firearms has dropped by more than half.

Or we can look north to Canada. It now requires a 28-day waiting period to buy a handgun, and it imposes a clever safeguard: gun buyers should have the support of two people vouching for them.

For that matter, we can look for inspiration at our own history on auto safety. As with guns, some auto deaths are caused by people who break laws or behave irresponsibly. But we don’t shrug and say, “Cars don’t kill people, drunks do.”

Instead, we have required seat belts, air bags, child seats and crash safety standards. We have introduced limited licenses for young drivers and tried to curb the use of mobile phones while driving. All this has reduced America’s traffic fatality rate per mile driven by nearly 90 percent since the 1950s.

Some of you are alive today because of those auto safety regulations. And if we don’t treat guns in the same serious way, some of you and some of your children will die because of our failure.

• Heavy science, math, technology focus in education: A good idea?

Posted in Dallas Morning News, Dec. 13, 2012: http://letterstotheeditorblog.dallasnews.com/index.php?s=Krashen&submit=Search

Re: “Science, math are paving the way – Schools chief using model to set district on positive course” (Dec 10).
The announcement that the “Lancaster superintendent is shaping his district to be a science, math model,” with a focus on science, technology, engineering and math from pre-K to grade 12, is based on the assumption that this kind of focus will prepare students better for the workplace. Maybe, maybe not.
According to research done by Rutgers Professor Hal Salzman, there is no shortage of science and technology graduates. In fact, Salzman has concluded that there are two to three qualified graduates for each science/tech opening.

Stephen Krashen

Sources:
Salzman, H. & Lowell, B. L. 2007. Into the Eye of the Storm: Assessing the Evidence on Science and Engineering Education, Quality, and Workforce Demand. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1034801
Salzman, H. and Lowell, L. 2008. Making the grade. Nature 453 (1): 28-30.
Salzman, H. 2012. No Shortage of Qualified American STEM Grads (5/25/12) http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/should-foreign-stem-graduates-get-green-cards/no-shortage-of-qualified-american-stem-grads.
See also:
Teitelbaum, M. 2007. Testimony before the Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation. Committee on Science and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, DC, November 6, 2007

Original article: http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/desoto-lancaster/headlines/20121210-lancaster-superintendent-is-shaping-his-district-to-be-a-science-math-model.ece

How about another test?!

Comment posted on bloomberg.news
Stephen Krashen

Mark Bauerlein wants to add still another test to the already overwhelming load of tests the common core will inflict on American students: A literature test covering “best works of American civilization.” Bauerlein says it should feature questions “that will make students draw on Twain, Shakespeare, ancient myths, Edith Wharton and so on.” In other words, the test is designed for college English majors.

Bauerlein’s suggestion is sure to stimulate lots of debate over what the best works of American civilization are (should Shakespeare be considered American literature? Are ancient myths part of American civilization? Why include this author and not that one …?).

Such a debate is a fine way of distracting us from the larger questions: Should we have national standards and national tests when so much evidence shows that the biggest problem in American education is our high rate of child poverty? The common core standards will be enforced by tests, more testing than has ever been seen on this planet. Why are we allowing this, in light of the finding that there is no evidence that it will improve student achievement?

Original article: Mark Bauerlein, How to Keep All of Huck Finn in the Classroom
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-14/how-to-keep-all-of-huck-finn-in-the-classroom.html#disqus_thread

"I Built This [Lie]"

As the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) virus spreads throughout the United States like a pre-apocalyptic seed of World War Z, I recognize that it is no longer cool to recommend fiction and poetry, especially classic fiction and poetry, as texts we might cull some sense from. [1]

While my literacy scholarship has strongly recommended creative nonfiction and multicultural works as well as nontraditional texts such as comics/graphic novels and film, I stand firmly beside my colleagues Susan Ohanian and Stephen Krashen who have worked tirelessly [2] to protect the sanctity of rich textual experiences for children in classrooms dedicated to student and teacher autonomy—that is, voices raised against the CCSS virus.

First, let me offer the premise:

The Free Market America mantra "I built this" possibly best captures the naive faith the public and its leaders have for market forces in the U.S., along with the no less powerful disdain embraced for the public, the commons.

What is often absent from such a claim is that the so-called free market works on the foundation provided by the commons; the truth is that the slogan should be "I built this lie."

In education, two darlings of free market competition, Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) and Teach for America (TFA), are promoted and celebrated as evidence that the public has failed where the entrepreneurial can succeed.

Sounds compelling, especially within the "I built this" mentality. But, wait, if you look and think carefully, KIPP and TFA exist on the foundations of the commons. [3] KIPP and the entire charter school movement (along with all school choice initiatives) exist because public education serves as their safety net, especially for marginalized students, the students lost in the charter school shuffle by attrition, parental choice, and gatekeeping/weeding out policies. TFA is a competitive alternative to traditional teacher certification, but TFA rakes in huge public subsidies and feasts on the charter school movement (see above).

"I built this" is a lie in the sense that it perpetuates the mythology that private trumps public, and that private flourishes without public—whereas the rightful tensions that exist between private and public are far more accurate explanations of when, why, and how either works.

Neither private nor public is a universal paradigm, but without maintaining the essential commons, the private would never succeed.

So for a little context, consider the following:

"Ozymandia"

Percy Byssshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: [4]
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Or how about the wonderful allegory of privatizing the commons, RoboCop?

Or the ultimate examination of consumerism, Soylent Green? [5]

Ironically, I think I have just cobbled together a little required reading list for free market education reformers. What do you think?

----------------

[1] I also recognize I ended that sentence with a preposition.

[2] For a masterful use of the word "tirelessly," read Joyce Carol Oates' tour-de-force short story, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"

[3] Thanks to @philipkovacs for this idea when he and I discussed TFA recently on Twitter.

[4] Insert Wendy Kopp, Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, et al.

[5] Imagine retooling "Soylent Green is people!" as the consumption of "other people's children" by charter schools.

KIPP, Chemical Reactions, and Character: Mapping Out the New Eugenics Agenda

A slightly different version of this review was published yesterday at Substance News.

Paul Tough, KIPP, and the Character Con: A Review of How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character
Jim Horn 

When we look at these kids and their behavior, it can all seem so mysterious….But at some point, what you’re seeing is just a complex series of chemical reactions.  It’s the folding of a protein or the activation of a neuron.  And what’s exciting about that is that those things are treatable.  When you get down to the molecules, you realize, that’s where the healing is.  That’s where you’re discovering a solution” (p. 26).  Paul Tough quoting Nadine Burke Harris

Two days before the 2012 presidential election, Rachel Maddow ran a clip from an interview with uber-conservative, Paul Ryan, who not so long ago had plans, you might recall, to be Vice-President of the U. S.  The interview was conducted by a local reporter in Flint, MI, one of the poorest and most violent urban areas of America.  Ryan offered this suggestion for solving the crime and violence problems of Flint:

            the best thing to help prevent violent crime in the inner cities is to bring opportunity in the inner cities, is to help people get out of poverty in the inner cities, is to help teach people good discipline, good character. That is civil society.

Maddow and most other progressives were aghast when they heard an Ayn Rand conservative like Paul Ryan say such a thing.  Oddly, however, when a New York Times writer/reporter draws the same conclusion, as Paul Tough does in his bestseller, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, the “progressive” establishment is either silent as church mice or ready to throw contributions (tax deductible) into the corporate offering plate to actively support school programs like KIPP that are aimed to do just what Paul Ryan had the temerity to admit, and for which we are rightfully indignant. 

Tough’s liberal framing of Paul Ryan’s goal to teach America’s urban poor good discipline and character is imbued with a thinly-veiled social engineering urge that is growing stronger by the day.  It is based on a messy collection of far-fetched extrapolations from a science-seeming psychological intervention that is now being employed in the education reform schools by non-professionals who haven’t the foggiest notion of what kind of damage they are doing to the children of the poor who are, otherwise, being “cured” of the ill effects of poverty. Tough is a good writer, too good to have written such an implausible promo for the kinds of neo-eugenic ministrations that he supports in this book as a solution to the “character problem” and the “executive functioning” problem of those among us who are now viewed by elites in much the same way that the grandfathers of Tough’s generation might have viewed the “culturally deprived” version of the “white man’s burden” during the 1950s and 1960s. 

There are significant differences between then and now, however, and the most obvious one has to do with money.  In the 1960s, the War on Poverty poured billions into job training programs and educational interventions like Title I, all aimed to ameliorate some of the grosser educational inequities with programs that left in place structural inequalities like segregated housing that were viewed by liberals as too entrenched and controversial to garner support for changing. Today poverty rates are higher than when President Johnson declared the War on Poverty in 1964, but the preferred solution over economic intervention is a thoroughly unproven and un-researched form of psychological programming for children that hopes to excavate new roadways in the cognitive maps of young brains in order to inoculate them from the effects of poverty, which remains a problem too expensive to fix for the elites who advocate this new form of eugenics.  Today’s concentration of social efficiency goals would make the advocates of scientific management a hundred years ago blush, with even the charity by the rich, now called venture philanthropy, turned into tax-sheltered investments with immediate returns as well as a big future payoff.  Cashing in down the road will come as a result of the systematic indoctrination of a whole generation of urban poor, to be accomplished through corporate reform schools that are given free rein to run their psychological experiments on America’s most vulnerable children.

The old eugenics of our great-grandfathers advanced the belief that those deemed a threat to the health of society, by way of inheritable behaviors, mental disorders, character malfunctions, and physical disabilities, had defective “germ plasm” that could not be improved but, rather, needed curtailing from further reproduction in offspring. That “crisis” led to 30-plus states passing mandatory sterilization laws that produced over 60,000 individual sterilizations.  The unfinished legacy of that dark episode lives on, with victims even today hoping to be somehow compensated for their sexual maiming during another “progressive” era that eagerly embraced social steering based on a crackpot pseudo-science over the rights of its most vulnerable citizens. 

The new eugenics is not nearly so pessimistic about changing the defective character of the poor.  In fact, today’s equally arrogant and misguided scheme to save poor children from their defective character is full of positivity, you might say, from the guru of positive psychology, himself—Dr. Martin Seligman.  Seligman’s pioneering work on learned helplessness and learned optimism are central, in fact, to the carving of new cognitive tracks in the malleable brains of elementary and middle school children, whose structural plasticity lends itself well to alternating jolts of learned helplessness and learned optimism—the mainstays of the new and improved post-New Age version of breaking ‘em down to build ‘em up.

And what kind of character flaws is Tough trying to find scientific justification for altering?  Well, it’s not children’s moral character that the white missionary girls from TFA are trying their darnedest to improve in these charter reform schools like KIPP; it is, rather, something Tough calls “performance character,” which is a distillation of the more expansive list of traits developed by Seligman and Peterson that, if developed fully, will create an unending psychological drip of happiness memes.  Think of it as if the power of an invisible hand had writ these qualities on every poor child’s digital tablet to carry around with them and apply as each situation demands:  grit, self-control, zest, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism, curiosity (p. 76).  Gone are those old-school character traits such as honesty, integrity, loving thy cubicle companion, etc.  Tough, in fact, attempts to make the case that moral character is based on moral law that, by necessity, is imposed by some higher authority.  In following Seligman and Peterson, Tough claims “moral laws were limiting when it came to character because they reduced virtuous conduct to a simple matter of obedience to a higher authority” (p. 59).

Moral character is traded in, then, for “performance character.”  The new “performance character” traits that KIPP co-founder, David Levin, has boiled down for child consumption focuses first and foremost on “grit,” which is to say the individual possession of a kind of crusty abrasiveness or personality pumice that may turn any barrier into “zest,” we might suppose.  According to Tough, Levin believes his approach stands far above any charge of cultural colonialism because “the character-strength approach is…fundamentally devoid of value judgment” (p. 60).  Tough doesn’t bother to explain how Levin’s derived values of grit, self-control, and gratitude are any less of an imposition than, let’s say, wisdom, justice, and temperance.  We may only surmise that Levin’s blindness to his own imposition of corporate ethics is intended to cloak any sign of force feeding for the children who are imposed upon daily to view their own mistreatment as an indicator that they, themselves, are not working hard or being good enough to be treated with dignity.  The drawing below is a copy of a worksheet that Seligman disciple, Angela Duckworth, has used in developing the performance character curriculum for poor kids in Philadelphia schools.  Note that children are taught to swallow and digest the abuse handed down by authority figures whose verbal assaults are to be viewed as sure signs of their care for children who must do better in order to avoid what children believe is deserved denigration (click image to enlarge).

Tough’s book is out to promote an abusively-deployed variety of moral colonialism disguised as character building, even if he takes the most roundabout way to reach the conclusion from which he started, which may be stated thusly for those disinclined to read the book:  KIPP and the education reform schools like it are doing the necessary work to save non-privileged, defective cultures from their own defective character, by making their children salable commodities in the future job market through a psychological regimen we would call brainwashing if it were used by a drug-crazed preacher in a faraway jungle like Guyana.   Tough’s defense of the new eugenics is built upon a shaky collection of scientific tidbits and inappropriate analogies to other more humane interventions that Tough apparently believes are not unalike the pedagogical brutality and mind alteration practices that occur in the corporate reform schools such as KIPP.  For instance, Tough analogizes from his experiences reporting on New York City’s chess champion school, IS 318, and through a number of examples of single-minded obsession paying off in the world of chess, suggests there is some lesson that may be transferred to understand KIPP’s 10,000 hours of total compliance test preparation and psychological throttling.  As in other examples that Tough employs in his book, there are more differences between KIPP’s academic rigor mortis and becoming a chess champ than there are similarities. 

The first and most glaring difference has to do with a significant word that Tough advocates for and uses a good deal in the book—volition.  Now while the great chess champions do, indeed, choose at some point in their lives to be champions, as Scottish grandmaster, Jonathan Rowson, exemplifies in Tough’s retelling, the children of KIPP do not choose an education based on an unyielding behavioral catechism enforced by non-psychologists imposing behavioral-cognitive treatments to produce total compliance and complicity by children in their own subjugation.   Secondly, if the single-minded pursuit of becoming a grand master allows one to conclude that “chess is a creative and beautiful pursuit” and a “celebration of existential freedom,” what does the manipulative pursuit of scholar dollars teach, or years of enforced silence, or the thousands of hours of lockdown test prep accompanied by endless reams of mindless worksheets?  Is there some celebration of existential freedom in this “productive” performance of KIPPsterism?

Thirdly, if 10,000 hours of chess practice makes one a master, what does 10,000 hours of KIPP provide?  A slave who has learned how to accept her bondage, along with a mediocre score that earns a seat in a third-tier university where the odds are 5:1 of washing out?  This college outcome remains a stubborn fact, even with KIPP’s river of tax-sheltered cash to provide counselors, college academic coaches, and other interventions to raise the KIPP college graduation rate. Fourthly, the “joyousness” that results from chess is produced by the analysis of a problem and application of a solution from a repertoire of proven solutions or novel ones.  How is this at all analogous to the entirely rule-bound and low-level imitative and rote anesthesia of KIPP learning?  Tough offers no clues but seems to believe that sitting these two very different phenomena side by side will somehow lead readers to assume they are similar.

Tough does something similar at other places in the book.  For instance, the subject of stress reduction among children of impoverished families occupies a significant section in the first half of the book.  Stress levels are closely tied to “executive functioning” among children, and stress overloads are predictive of low executive functioning.  Since the improvement of “executive functioning,” as defined by increased memory skills, is the Holy Grail of the education reform industry, the industry has to pay attention to stress.  According to Tough’s interpretation of the research literature, however, it is not really stress that is the problem but, rather, the body’s response to stress.  Just as poverty is not the problem, but the stressed reactions to poverty:  “It wasn’t poverty itself that was compromising the executive function abilities of the poor kids.  It was the stress that went along with it” (p. 20). Now if this distinction seems too stupid for words, stick with me for a moment.  Since poverty is not the problem but, rather, the stress that goes along with it, and since the stress is not the problem but, rather, the body’s reaction to it, it stands to reform industry reason that changing the body’s reaction may now be viewed as the way to short-circuit the effects of poverty. And, of course, to change the body, we must change the mind, which is to say, we must change the brain: 

The reason that researchers who care about the gap between rich and poor are so excited about executive functions is that these skills are not only highly predictive of success; they are also quite malleable, much more so than other cognitive skills. The prefrontal cortex is more responsive to intervention than other parts of the brain, and it stays flexible well into adolescence and early adulthood.  So if we can improve a child’s environment in the specific ways that lead to better executive functioning, we can increase his prospects for success in a particularly efficient way (p. 21).

In the pursuit of “better executive functioning,” Tough appears totally oblivious to the fact that KIPP adds another form of stress atop the ones already at work on children living in poverty.  It seems, too, that Tough finds nothing breath-taking about the neo-eugenic agenda of these new 21^st Century efficiency zealots, who prefer child brain tinkering to the more expensive structural interventions and resource reallocations required for addressing poverty.  If KIPP and the KIPP wannabe reform schools can “improve a child’s environment in the specific ways that lead to better executive functioning [better memorization skills], then who needs to be concerned, it would seem, that these new environments are segregated, total compliance reform “families” run by young, white missionary types who have been treated generously, themselves, to Seligman’s performance character regimen during their six weeks of TFA teacher training. The quote above certainly clears up what Tough meant back in the Introduction when he waxed poetic about using “the tools of science to peel back the mysteries of childhood” (p. xxiv). 

In this entirely creepy form of scientific reductionism practiced on children deemed defective by their poverty, the sociological and psychological manifestations of poverty are boiled down from actions to behaviors to neuronal reactions to molecular and protein interactions.  And these most basic interactions are, then, alterable with the right “cognitive control system” that can re-regulate anti-social urges by altering the brain chemistry that controls them.  If you think this sounds too much like a variation on Clockwork Orange, you would be right, and if you think that Paul Tough surely could not be promoting such a system, I invite you to read the book.

In the end, Tough’s zeal for pseudo-scientific psychological experimentation on children by non-professionals is driven by his own misplaced anger on behalf of poor children.  As the angry do-gooder, then, he represents the liberal element of the coalition in support of the new eugenics.  He is joined by the college presidents such as liberal ethicist and president of UPenn, Amy Gutmann and over twenty other Ivy League presidents who share Tough’s misdirected anger and who have created a special category of affirmative action for former KIPPsters.  For conservatives who support KIPP and the other learning chain gangs that emulate them, the goal of social control is as transparent as was Paul Ryan’s calloused comments in Flint, Michigan.  For liberals like Tough, however, who blame parents, teachers, and schools in these poorest neighborhoods for failures that the inequitable system of schooling has guaranteed and its high stakes testing perpetuates, the goal becomes masked by a technicist indignation and a privileged arrogance that is used by liberals to set themselves apart from the racist and classist system from which all of us privileged folks benefit.  And if Tough could make the case that he, indeed, acknowledges his own role in the system that we, the privileged, perpetuate, which would create the moral necessity to change things for the better, he fails to keep in mind that children’s brains are not things that are to be changed so that our economic privileges may be kept inoculated from the required financial sacrifices that could help us avoid, perhaps, the further rotting away of our moral fiber. 

Teachers who have taught at KIPP and who are sharing their stories know why children refer to KIPP as Kids in Prison Program.  They know about enforced silence that keeps them from getting to know and connect with their students.  They know about their screaming colleagues who rant and rave to maintain order, and they know about the humiliation children are made to feel at even minor infractions of the rules.  They know about barking orders to “Track Me,” and  they know about the constant surveillance that leaves no peace for students or teachers. They know about the special education children whose IEPs are ignored.  They know, too about the management methods that always made them feel as if the 70-90 hours they were giving each week was not enough, and they know about the sense of personal weakness they felt on those rare occasions when they had to use a sick day.  They know all about the guilt they felt for having a life outside KIPP.  They know about children who have been mistreated and abused, and they know about administrators and teachers who lost jobs because their humanity got in the way of rule enforcement to subdue children and to make them as hard as the psychological catechism they are brainwashed to live by.  They know about the children whose emotional family histories kept them from making it through the KIPP gauntlet, and they know those children blamed themselves, rather than the draconian “no excuses” school model that provides millionaire investors with tax breaks to fund the cheapest of all solutions to the problems that arise from poverty.

I think that Paul Tough is probably ignorant of all these things that teachers know, but I am not at all sure he has any curiosity to find out what teachers, children, and parents know.  I do hope the next book that he is paid to write about education reform schools goes beyond the search for evidence to support some hare-brained theory meted out upon poor children in ways that thoroughly displace the humane responsiveness and humility required to help any children, poor or otherwise, to become whole adults, rather than emotional eunuchs trained to perform, and not to think and feel.

Reference:

Tough, P.  (2012).  How children succeed: Grit, curiosity, and the hidden power of character.  New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.