Students [1]don't want to be there.
Teachers [2] don't want to be there.
So what's not working in schools (everywhere) is the bribery, coercion and behavior modification? No surprise then, that the expert solution is better compulsion and manipulation, invest our national treasure in more carrots and sticks! -- the teachers and kids of America are a pesky breed of surly mules to be driven to market any way we can get them there. Otherwise, institutions can't make money on them!
[Raising my hand obediently, because I spent a couple of decades being socialized in school myself] --
As a free-thinking individual, may I ask a couple of questions?
For the moment let's leave aside the Alfie Kohn issue of carrots and sticks not "working" in learning and education. Apparently they work in schooling, to at least keep the parking lots full every day and the money flowing.
What's free, open, democratic, progressive, or academic (much less creative culture-fostering) about all this again? Are even liberal-leaning school thinkers now satisfied to equate "something that works" to keep staff and students at school despite their compelling desire not to be there, with something that works to create an educated populace?
How to perpetuate and protect "school" and inflict its form (not even its substance, too many of us are past pretending that works) by hook or by crook on increasingly unwilling participants on both sides of the grade book, was never the problem public education was meant to solve for us -- was it?
Hmmm, no one is even acknowledging my question, much less weighing its culture-shattering implications, maybe I need to get out of the classroom for this inquiry. Let's see, where to begin?
It helps my own understanding to sharply distinguish school as institutional place, from education as personal goal/ attribute. What we compel is showing up at the place, not becoming an educated person.
After Abu Ghirab, a Stanford psychologist detailed how "place" can win over "person" [3] through concepts like institutionalization, escalating dehumanization, stress and stereotyping, the seduction of boredom, the evil of inaction and much more. Sounds too much like what's gone wrong between school and education -- we've institutionalized thinking and learning and productive work, and lost the individuals we meant to inspire and empower in the process.
. . . experts say incentives make sense because they parallel the working world [4], where employees are given financial incentives to work harder or better. Some experts say incentives are acceptable if the rewards are education-related — laptops, say, instead of cars.
"In education, we just find such few things that work," said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a liberal-leaning research organization. "If something works, the ideological burden to not do it has to be huge."
Say he's right --as a liberal-leaning thinker, let's give him the benefit of the doubt, shall we? -- then I think the ideological burden he lays on us can be met, MUST be met.
Anybody wanna help? It's not a trick question or test question, it's immediate and real-world: which way does your own liberal education and intellect "compel" you to lean on the issue of school compulsion and coercion? Does school meet its own "huge" ideological burden anymore? Is it perhaps time that "liberal-leaning" thinkers re-think what education is and how to create it, to test our own beliefs and expert analysis under our own intellectual standards, in light of new evidence and old disappointments?
Time for the heavy lifting of changing our school cultures [5] and schooling in our culture. . .
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Notes added April 2007 -- because my lead's powerful news links are not powerful, if they don't go where they are meant to! They have expired.
Here are the relevant bits from the New York Times and Chicago Tribune archives:
And for Perfect Attendance, Johnny Gets a Car
New York Times
By PAM BELLUCK
Published: February 5, 2006
Attendance at Chelsea High School had hovered at a disappointing 90 percent for years, and school officials were determined to turn things around. So, last fall they decided to give students in this poverty-stung city just north of Boston a little extra motivation: students would get $25 for every quarter they had perfect attendance and another $25 if they managed perfect attendance all year.
''I was at first taken a little aback by the idea: we're going to pay kids to come to school?'' said the principal, Morton Orlov II. ''But then I thought perfect attendance is not such a bad behavior to reward. We are sort of putting our money where our mouth is.''
Chelsea High is not the only school trying to improve attendance with incentives for students. Across the country, schools have begun to offer cars, iPods -- even a month's rent. Some of the prizes are paid for by local businesses or donors; others come out of school budgets.
In Hartford last year, 9-year-old Fernando Vazquez won a raffle for students with perfect attendance and was given the choice of a new Saturn Ion or $10,000. (His parents chose the money.) At Oldham County High School in Buckner, Ky., Krystal Brooks, 19, won a canary yellow Ford Mustang. In Temecula, Calif., the school district prizes can include iPods, DVD players and a trip to Disneyland. . . .
Chicago to target absent teachers:
$10 million spent annually by district for classroom subs
Chicago Tribune
by Tracy Dell'Angela and Darnell Little
Feb 4, 2006
At Otis Elementary, Principal James Cosme tracks his teachers' attendance yearly and looks for excessive absences that can't be explained by a long illness or family emergency. In a typical year, he may call in three teachers--out of his staff of 50--to discuss excessive absences. Usually it works, but sometimes it doesn't. He once had a teacher who frequently called in sick on Mondays, which Cosme suspected was caused by a drinking problem. He ultimately decided to dock the teacher's pay, and the teacher retired soon after.
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