Girl Scouts

Yeah, I know, it's been a long time. So long that I've forgotten what my default font is, so I apologize if this doesn't match my previous posts. 

Anyway, yesterday I'm minding my own business surfing the web when I get an email from Lucy's Girl Scout leader, who is actually a lovely person and, it must be said, is doing a job I would never in a million years want to do. So automatically she gets an extra 100 yards of slack, at least. This email informs me that I will need to stay at the Girl Scout meeting that night, because the Cookie Mom is going to explain about selling cookies to all the parents. This is a little bit of a pain in the ass, because I had planned to have John drop Lucy off at GS on his way to another meeting, which means he won't be able to stay, which means I'll have to take her after all. Still, as pains in the ass go, this is not even the biggest one that day, so no big deal. Far more concerning is the implication that the cookie selling will be explained to the parents. 

So we show up at the meeting (five minutes late, sorry, sorry) and Lucy hustles off with the other girls to work on constructing Christmas tree ornaments out of toothpicks, or some other equally valuable skill. I, meanwhile, am waved over to the Parent Table (or, more accurately, the Mom Table, with one dogged Dad sitting off to the side looking too exhausted to be offended by the genderedness of it all). There the Cookie Mom is explaining all the Important Cookie Information, like how to fill out the order form and not to knock on strangers' doors and how to take donations for our troop's charity, which by the way we need to choose. And all this time I am thinking one thing, which is that I am not a Girl Scout. 

Finally we get to the part where she tells us that we have to set the individual selling goals for the girls and the total selling goal for the whole troop, and I just can't take it anymore. "Um," I say, "shouldn't we be discussing this with the girls?" I say this in what I hope is a casual and offhand way but probably comes off as judgmental and bossy, because hey, it's me. They all look stunned. Discuss it with the girls? Why? Oh, I don't know. Because it's their troop and they're the ones selling the cookies to earn money for their troop and I thought the whole point of Girl Scouts was to teach girls independence and responsibility and of course to make Christmas tree ornaments out of toothpicks but really isn't the independence and responsibility just a teeny bit more important? I can't help but imagine Juliette Gordon Low sobbing in despair as she watches the parents set goals while their daughters attend to the important work of gluing bits of sponge onto poker chips (don't ask).

The Cookie Mom, to her credit, says that yes, that's a good idea. We should run all this by the girls. We should come up with the goals first, though, because they're not really able to set their own goals. Plus, another mom points out, we're the ones selling the cookies. 

Wait, what?

Now, I understand that taking the cookie order form to the office is a time-honored tradition, having ordered many cookies that way myself before I had a Girl Scout of my own. And I had already made a mental note to take advantage of another mom's suggestion to post on facebook. But, fundamentally, isn't this supposed to be a girl-driven project? Aren't they supposed to be the ones invested in it, planning it and making it happen? And if they can't set their own goals, well, isn't that part of what they're supposed to learn from an activity like this?

Because, let me tell you, that would be a fantastic thing for them to learn, and I'm not just saying that as someone who would like to think that her daughter might someday be able to schedule her own doctor's appointments and do her own grocery shopping. No, I'm saying it as someone who deals on an almost daily basis with nearly-grown-up kids who can't do those things. Kids who have no concept of how to set goals, let alone achieve them. Kids who have never really worked at anything, who often seem to not even understand what that might mean. Kids who, in spite of never working hard, have never failed, either, and are so risk-averse that I feel like telling Occupy Wall Street to just wait a few years because there's no pipeline in place to replace those Wall Street people anyway. Too risky. 

I won't lie. I'm disappointed in the Girl Scouts. From a noble beginning rooted in empowering girls, they have degenerated into a cookie-selling machine in which the girls don't even get to sell the cookies. But really, they're just following the crowd. I can't remember the last time I was at an activity for children that didn't involve parents hanging over the backs of chairs "helping". Parents often seem physically unable to drop their children off somewhere and, you know, leave. But I'll tell you what, we'd better start insisting that they do, or we are really screwed. Wall Street isn't the only thing that's going down if we don't start raising our kids with an eye toward their someday being adults.

Come on, Girl Scouts. Let's get ahead of the curve on this one. 

Breakfast

The kids are at a new school this year. To make a long (very long) story somewhat less long, there was a county-wide redistrict, and it turns out that we were one of the families who had to switch. So now instead of going down the mountain to a small, overcrowded rural school, we go up the mountain to a small, under-enrolled rural school. Frankly, although many of my neighbors will tell you otherwise, it's not a very big change.

Except for breakfast.

The new school has a higher percentage of students in the free lunch program than the old school did (and yes, this is the root of the reason my neighbors are so upset). This puts the school over some arbitrary threshold set by the federal government and means, among other things, that the school also has to provide free breakfast. To every child in the school. That's right, every child, even the ones who ate breakfast at home. Oh, sure, a parent may forbid her child from eating the breakfast. A parent may even notify the classroom teacher of this prohibition and the classroom teacher will have to enforce it. (Sounds like a good way to get off on the right foot with a teacher, doesn't it?) But the default is to offer all the kids breakfast when they walk into the room in the morning.

On the surface, this may seem like a fine idea. So the kids eat an extra bowl of oatmeal when they get to school in the morning. Big deal. In practice, however, there is no oatmeal on the menu. Pop Tarts, yes. Coco Puffs. Pastries. But no oatmeal.

So here are my options:
1. Look the other way while my children tank up on empty carbohydrates every morning,
2. Forbid them from having it and become both Mean Mommy and Problem Parent, or
3. Call the county's Director of Food Services and try to get the menu changed.

Three guesses which one I picked.

The Director of Food Services, like so many of the school system employees who field my complaints, agreed with me in theory. "But," he said, "I'm sure you've seen Food Revolution."

"Sure," I said, because I wasn't about to trash my credibility by admitting that I don't have a television and instantly being pegged as Crazy Hippie Lady who Probably Feeds Her Children Tofu for Breakfast. Plus, everyone says this to me, so even though I haven't seen it I actually knew what he was talking about.

"Well, that's what happens when we offer them healthier options," he said, meaning that the kids refuse to eat those foods. When the school offers, for example, yogurt and fresh fruit, the kids simply don't eat. Since they haven't eaten at home, this means that they don't get any breakfast at all. Furthermore, if they do eat at home they get things that are even worse than those that the school offers. At least the Pop Tarts the school serves are whole grain.

"ARGH!" I thought, but did not say. "Well," I did say, "everything we know about children's eating habits tells us that you have to keep offering them healthy foods over and over, and eventually they'll try them."

Unsurprisingly, he was familiar with this research. I told you, they all agree with me in theory. "But when they don't eat it, we have to throw it out," he said, "and we don't get reimbursed by the government for meals we don't serve."

"AH HA!" I thought, but did not say. "Well," I did say, "um." Because, to tell the truth, I couldn't really think of anything to say to that. Basically, he was telling me that the school system can't afford to provide healthy meals for the students. The free meals program is rigged, in fact, to make this impossible. Children are used to eating sugary, processed foods at home, and therefore that is what they expect at school. When they don't get it, they refuse to eat. When they don't eat, the system doesn't get the money it needs to provide food the next day. Thus, the schools are forced to offer choices that the children are familiar with so that they will eat them and the program will survive. For the school system to break this cycle would require a massive input of resources that it simply does not have.

Compounding this problem is the fact that the nutritional guidelines for school lunches (and breakfasts) are woefully out of date. The United States Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services are required by federal law to jointly issue updated dietary guidelines at least every five years. The most recent document is from 2005, and a new one is due out this year. But the nutritional requirements set out in the National School Lunch Program (which, curiously, is also administered by the USDA) are based on the guidelines from 1995. Why? Good question. To give you an idea of just how long ago 1995 was, those guidelines do not even mention whole grains or trans fats.

I told my kids that they have to eat their healthy breakfast at home, and then if they're still hungry they can have some of the school breakfast too. So far, at least according to their reports, they haven't been eating much at school. If that changes, maybe I'll reevaluate. But there's a bigger problem here than just my kids finally finding out what a Pop Tart is. These kids who refuse to eat fruit and yogurt are going to be running things when we're old, and it would be good if they didn't all have type 2 diabetes and chronic heart disease by then. The whole School Lunch Program needs a serious overhaul, starting with the way it's funded and going right down to the Pop Tarts. Get busy, Congress.

Like I Said

Turns out that the Alliance for Childhood (the fact that such an organization even exists speaks volumes, don't you think?) agrees with my assessment of the Common Core Standards. They have "grave concerns" about the standards, which in their view "conflict with compelling new research in cognitive science, neuroscience, child development, and early childhood education about how young children learn, what they need to learn, and how best to teach them in kindergarten and the early grades." Well, duh.

To paraphrase, they are worried that the new standards will:

• lead to age-inappropriate types of instruction
• push out play-based learning
• encourage more standardized testing
• leave no time for crucial learning in areas other than reading and math

Furthermore, they point out that there is no research-based evidence to suggest that teaching this way even works. There is no established link between intensive instruction in discrete academic skills and later success, yet there is clearly established cognitive science indicating that this is not the best way for young children to learn. What is clearly established, of course, is the link between intensive instruction and higher standardized test scores in the short term.

Like I said.

Curriculum

In case you missed it, the draft version of the new Common Core Standards for K-12 education came out last month. The document was developed by the commissioners of education of 48 states plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, (Alaska and Texas, to answer your question), and its purpose is to set uniform academic expectations for public education across the entire country. According to the authors, "the draft standards... seek to provide a clear and consistent framework to prepare our children for college and the workforce." They "define the knowledge and skills students should have within their K-12 education careers so that they will graduate high school able to succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing academic college courses and in workforce training programs."

Whether or not this is a laudable goal will be discussed in a moment, but make no mistake that it is a major paradigm shift. Public education as we know it has been around in this country for about 150 years - the first compulsory attendance laws were passed in the mid-1850's - and during that time curricular control has always been in the hands of local or, at most, state educational authorities. Over the last 50 years or so, the federal government has made efforts to control the outcomes of public education (the ubiquitous testing of the No Child Left Behind act is the most recent example, but such efforts date back at least as far as Sputnik), but never before have they attempted to control the inputs. To put this in perspective, it is akin to the difference between having an annual checkup to make sure you are staying healthy, and having someone dictate what you must eat and do in order to be healthy.

Now, to be fair, a lot of people do a lousy job keeping themselves healthy, and they would probably benefit from someone telling them what to eat and do. Similarly, local educational authorities have not exactly done a fantastic job of educating our kids over the last couple of centuries, and having common, cohesive expectations is very likely to help fix that. The problem is that in our culture we value autonomy. If people want to sit on the couch all day watching reality television and eating Big Macs only to die young from heart disease and diabetes, then they have the right to do that. The question is, does this autonomy extend to education? Is it a good idea for the federal government to kick the local authorities off the couch and make them go for a jog, or is that a violation of some deeply-held belief in local control and, more broadly, states' rights? Does Kansas have the right to teach creationism (oh, sorry, I mean intelligent design), or should the feds step in and prevent such folly?

To be honest, at first this seemed like a no-brainer to me. Of course there should be common standards. In an enlightened democracy (hey, we're getting there), the quality of your education should not depend on where you happen to grow up. Also, Kansas should not be allowed to decide for itself what constitutes science.

Then, on Monday, I toured my county's brand new high school for the arts. Housed in a beautifully restored and updated old theater building in the scrappy little downtown area of the county seat, this school represents the creative vision and superhuman effort of many, many people. For over an hour, I listened to the school's principal passionately defending the idea of a school for the arts against my hostile witness-type questioning. (You may not be surprised to learn that I tend to take an oppositional stance in just about any discussion. I'd like to tell you that this is a way to get all the information, but the truth is I just like to argue.) As I did, I began to wonder what the impact of top-down curriculum development would be on a school like that. Would they be permitted some kind of exemption? Or (more likely) would they be expected to meet all the standards for a typical high school and fit in their arts education, the core of their mission, around it? As it stands now, that is more or less what they do, but because the curriculum is state-mandated they have (perhaps) more flexibility than they would have (probably) under a federally-mandated curriculum. Would these new standards mean the end of schools like that, either actually or effectively?

Well, from there it's just a slippery slope, isn't it? I suddenly remembered what a disaster the intrusion of "standards" into early childhood education has been. Instead of play-based preschools and kindergartens where children experiment with activities that interest them and spend most of their time moving around, now we have four- and five-year-olds at desks being told to sit still and color inside the lines. This in spite of an ongoing stream of pretty conclusive research suggesting that young children need active, imaginative play to grow up into healthy adults. There is really no reason, then, to believe that the research on the value of arts education will be heeded any more. Or technical education. Or any other alternative path to adulthood.

And, for me, that's really the issue. One size does not fit all. Again and again, research has demonstrated that different kids learn different ways, and that to reach them we must have a wide array of flexible options for teaching them. Common core standards are fine in theory, but in practice will they mean a loss of that flexibility? Will the subjects considered "core" be taught at the expense of other things that are equally important for healthy development? The answer is probably yes. Treating kids as individuals is a lot of work. Expensive, too. Easier, and cheaper, to just give everyone the same thing and then test them on it.

Properly implemented, the common core standards could be a great thing indeed. But when was the last time anything in education was properly implemented? I'm nervous about this. Really nervous.

Grades

Sometime over the past year, while I was not paying attention, Lucy started bringing home papers with actual grades on them. Not smiley face stickers, which were the extent of the grading in kindergarten, or comments like, "good work!" or even corrections to mistakes, which sometimes happened in first grade. But actual percentage scores, obtained by way of a grading rubric and often translated into a letter. And if you think that she has not noticed this, then I can only say that I wish you were right.

As you have probably worked out for yourself by now, I am a college mathematics professor. This job, like all jobs, has its own set of joys and frustrations. The joys are probably obvious: the times when students get excited about the subject, have breakthroughs of understanding, ask (and answer) interesting questions, that sort of thing. Many of the frustrations are simply the complementary experiences: when students are bored, or uninterested, or frustrated themselves. But perhaps the principal frustration of my job is the almost universal fact that students work for grades. Even students who genuinely value learning for its own sake, and these are considerably less common than I might hope, usually aim their efforts not at learning itself but at earning good grades.

In a perfect world, of course, grades would reflect learning. But even if grades reflected precisely the learning that we hope to evaluate (which they do not, the world not yet being perfect), there is a fundamental difference of approach between learning for its own sake and learning to earn a grade. Grades are the mother of all extrinsic motivators (money, I suppose, being the father), and like other extrinsic motivators they teach students to look outward, rather than inward, for their rewards.

Young children understand that learning is an intrinsically rewarding activity. Infants learn to walk, toddlers learn to draw, preschoolers learn to count, and kindergartners learn to read, all because those things are fun to learn and interesting to be able to do. Then, suddenly, we start grading them. In the space of less than one academic year, children are no longer proudly announcing their new skills, they are proudly announcing their grades. Or, in some cases, not so proudly. And what is a grade, really? A grade is a summary judgment of a person's ability and achievement, distilled, usually, into a single character. How absurd is that? I mean, come on! Twenty years of multiple intelligence theory and this is still the best we can do?

I am publicly on record as being against assessment, at least the excessively quantitative forms of assessment that are currently so popular in education. But not all forms of assessment are created equal. Qualitative feedback helps students learn, and helps them hold onto the enjoyment of learning that comes so naturally at the beginning. All grades do is encourage students to become obsessed with performance, and discouraged if they do not perform well. And I can tell you from experience that when students enjoy learning, the entire process of education is more rewarding, and more successful, for everyone.

I am not naive enough to believe that we can eliminate grades at the college level, at least not in my lifetime. I have my doubts about the high school level, too. But could we not, at the very least, stop grading children in elementary school? Could we postpone, just for a few years, squelching the joy kids take in learning? Because it is painful to watch a child begin to worry about grades, but it is hard to fight and damn near impossible to correct later.