Homeschooling Word Boy

It has been a tough couple of weeks for me parenting Word Boy, because of his anxiety. I've handled it really well, but this morning I broke down crying talking to Raider about how I just couldn't face homeschooling. Yesterday was a very challenging day that left both me and Word Boy (and possibly also his therapist) exhausted, and he's doing better today but it's a pretty thin veneer. His perfectionism leads him to have anxiety attacks when he makes a mistake in math or doesn't understand something immediately, and it has been a challenge to me to be disciplined enough to make him do math anyway. A friend who studies behaviorism says that parents are very motivated by negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is the removal of an unpleasant stimulus--in other words, when a parent will do anything to avoid dealing with a tantrum, that's negative reinforcement. It's not easy for me to sit down to math with Word Boy when the likelihood is high that I'll have to spend half an hour dealing with an anxiety attack in order to get through what should be 10 minutes worth of math. He's behind grade level in math primarily because I have been negatively reinforced not to do math with him.

I've been doing a good job dealing with his anxiety-fueled behaviors during the last couple of weeks, which have feature not only yesterday's epic two-hour meltdown at the therapist's office but a four-day anxiety attack the other weekend. But I'm worn out. And the idea of trying to do homeschooling with him today when his equilibrium is so fragile just felt like too much.

And, honestly, I don't know why I bother "homeschooling" this kid. He and I decided to go the library, and on the way there, he asked about an errand I ran earlier, to renew the tags on our cars. I ended up explaining vehicle registration as well as automobile and homeowners insurance. He asked about the flood we had in our basement some years ago, which led to a conversation about sump pumps and the water table. From there, he gave me an impressive run-down of the causes and stages of a tsunami, which, like so many things, I have no idea where he picked up.

By this time, we were at the library, where, in a characteristic absent-minded professor slapstick, we had quite a bit of trouble figuring out how to open the unlocked door.

Once we were in, we browsed his favorite section, Juvenile Non-Fiction. He found a book on the Arctic and Antarctic; I found him a book on predictions people in the past have made about the future, which interestingly enough is something he had asked me about recently, so he was pretty thrilled. He found a Calvin & Hobbes collection he hadn't read. I found a book on Ideas that Changed the World that I decided to bring home just in case anybody wanted to look through it, and a book on teeth I bet Word Boy will like eventually. I found a book called Real-Size Animal Babies to show the Tiny Tornado, and then I slipped around to fiction and grabbed some Beverly Cleary for bedtime reading, because TT is all about the chapter books these days.

At this point, Word Boy, who is excessively conscientious, began to be concerned that we were checking out too many books. "Do you know how many things I'm allowed to check out on my card?" I asked him. "Fifty. And you could get your own card, and also check out fifty things. And the Lego Savant could get his own card, and then we could check out..."

"A hundred and fifty things," Word Boy said. "That would be a lot to carry."

He seemed reassured, but said again as we walked toward the circulation desk, "I don't know, it just seems like an awful lot of books." I spotted the librarian, who was just finishing up a conversation, so I hauled him over to her. "Librarian," I said, "This is Word Boy. Word Boy, this is the Librarian."

"Hello, Word Boy," said the Librarian. "It's nice to meet you."

I said, "Word Boy is concerned that we are checking out too many books."

The Librarian looked at him and said, "I don't think there's any such thing."

We ran our stack through the self check-out and hauled it to the car (Word Boy: "I have an idea for a new workout...it involves putting a strap around all of your books and then carrying them around.").In the car on the way home, he started reading about Antarctica, reading aloud little tidbits that interested him. "Did you know that the largest animal that lives on land year-round in Antarctica is a tiny insect? Did you know that there is evidence that Antarctica had a subtropical climate 70 million years ago, suggesting that the land that is now Antarctica used to be located near the equator?"

I kept saying, "I didn't know that. Wow, really? That is interesting." Finally, I said, "Ha, I guess it's your day to homeschool me."

Word Boy said, "Mom, I'm just reading stuff out of a book to you!"

I said, "How do you think I do it most days?"

He's reading in the big recliner now, having dealt with the perennial post-library problem of which book to read first.

I actually bought him a curriculum this year, because with me being in school it was very hard for me to keep up with homeschool planning last year, and things really fell apart somewhere around March. I was willing to pay someone to do my planning for me. It's been a mixed thing. I bought him a fifth-grade curriculum, and much of it is focused around grammar, spelling, and vocabulary lessons he doesn't need, so we don't waste our time on that. He finds the assigned books very interesting, but they're short and he goes through them quickly. This week, to try to address that, I assigned him a book that was supposed to be two weeks' worth of reading. He finished it Monday morning. Over breakfast. And then went on to read the next book, which was supposed to be for the next two weeks. And then read half of a biography of Alexander that is part of his big brother's curriculum and that happened to be in the stack on the table. I wanted to be able to hand the reins over to a curriculum. But this curriculum is not running the show the way I hoped it would. Word Boy's insatiable curiosity and drive for knowledge is. He's a fast horse galloping ahead at full speed; I'm doing my best to keep up; and our curriculum thinks maybe he's ready to learn a genteel trot.

 

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Six Months in the Public Schools

So, the Tiny Tornado has been a public school student for six months now, and that seems like a good time to take stock. My older two, who are almost 12 and almost 9, have been homeschooled straight through, so I am now qualified to talk at least a bit from both the perspective of a homeschooling mom and a public school mom.

The first thing to say is that the Tiny Tornado is in an excellent school with an excellent teacher. I like and respect the principal so much that I am sorry that he won't be able to continue at the same school next year. The school has plenty of resources, and good music and gym teachers. The building is clean and in good repair. Teachers change their bulletin board and hallway displays regularly, and the effect is one of a busy school where students are engaged in a variety of activities.

I've only been disappointed in two of the staff. I volunteered at a book fair, and got to spend some time with the librarian. At least on the day I was there, she was cranky with the kids who came through the library; she seemed to expect the worst of them; and she spent some time talking with a teacher about her class in very negative terms while the students, sitting quietly on the floor waiting to be released to explore the book fair, could hear them. OK: I have been disappointed in three of the staff, since I should count that teacher as well. As a parent, I think that it's important for kids to overhear us sharing the good things we notice, and expressing our high expectations. I think it's also important that they not overhear us venting our frustrations. For instance, when Raider comes home from work I might tell him, "The Lego Savant was a big help today! He took out the recycling without being asked, and organized the other kids to pick up the living room floor." If the Lego Savant is sitting nearby reading a book, it's just fine with me if he overhears this.

But if we've had a challenging day, and I've maybe disciplined the kids--say I took away the TV for the afternoon because they were fighting over it all morning--I think it's important for the kids to know that, once the discipline has happened, or once we've worked out a disagreement, it's behind us. I turned the TV off for the afternoon: they don't need to keep being punished for it. I might need to rant to Raider about the rough day I had, but I'm not going to do it where the kids can hear me. At least, I shouldn't do it where the kids can hear me.

The teacher's conversation with the librarian was like that. She'd had a rough morning with her class, and rather than letting it go, chose to have a loud conversation about it with the librarian where the kids could hear her do it. I think this sends a terrible message to kids. It says that whatever disciplinary action was taken for their behavior was not enough, that the incident isn't really put behind them. It suggests that the teacher sees them in negative terms, that she expects bad behavior from them. I also think it's wrong to poison the well: a student who is struggling in class may find a change of environment to be a new chance to shine, and a new adult as an opportunity to form a positive connection. For how many "bad" kids has a librarian, a gym teacher, an art teacher, a coach, been the one adult who saw them differently? For how many kids has the library or the art room been a refuge? Children should not be preceded into a new environment by the suggestion that they are troublemakers.

I was quite distressed by this teacher's behavior, and I hope it was a lapse brought on by stress and not a habit. But I was also bothered by the librarian's willingness to engage; she might have said, for instance, "Tell me about it later! Let's get these kids ready for the book fair!" But from watching the librarian interact with kids for the next two hours, I would not expect her to have that kind of sensitivity. She was suspicious of their motivation and behavior; she questioned the buying choices they made as she was helping them check out (if you don't want the girls buying the Justin Bieber photo books, don't put them out. If you put them out, let them buy them in peace! Say, "I hope you enjoy it!" Not, "I'd have hoped you could make a better choice. Is that how your mother wants you spending your money?").

The other weak staffer is the art teacher. At the beginning of the school year, I was actually quite excited by the projects I saw on the wall, and that the Tiny Tornado brought home. The kids painted great big sheets of paper in interesting patterns, then used them for the background for themed art that incorporated painting and collage. They were bright and arresting, and if they were a bit cookie-cutter (everybody make a house! everybody make an elephant!) the medium was at least interesting, and provided a chance to explore different textures and techniques.

And then the next set of projects went up. And they were big splashy colorful painting-and-collage projects. And then the next one. And the next one. As far as I can tell, all the art that the children have produced so far this school year has been in this same style. Maybe I simply don't understand what the expectations are for elementary school art, but I'd have liked to see some variation. And for the Tiny Tornado's sake, more opportunities to work in three dimensions.

One day in the hallway, I was admiring some really impressive clay sculptures in a display case. The art teacher passed by, and I said, "Are these all student work? They're very good." He said that they were indeed student work, from past years. I was pleased. I was happy to think of the Tiny Tornado working with a teacher who was capable of getting that quality and variety of work from students, and who would give them the opportunity to do it.

My bubble was burst when the art teacher said, "They did those with the previous art teacher."

Who is she, I wonder, and where is she teaching now?

As far as the Tiny Tornado's own classroom goes, there can be no complaints about the teacher. TT's class is "Begindergarten." This is a special class for kids who are old enough for Kindergarten but whose parents didn't think they were ready for it. So: 20 kids. 17 of them boys. Most of them perfectly nice, reasonably well-behaved kids like the Tiny Tornado, who just need a little time to mature. A handful of them: handfuls.

The teacher is a young woman in her second year of teaching. She is full of enthusiasm and good cheer. She handles her kids' behavioral challenges appropriately and affectionately. She and the school practice catching kids in good behavior. I have seen her, in the middle of a loud and chaotic process of transitioning from one activity to another, see through all the movement and noise in the room to catch a kid who can almost literally never sit still in his one fleeting moment of perfect behavior, and call him out on it to the whole class ("I see Aidan sitting quietly, ready to get started! Good job, Aidan!").

The classroom is extremely well-organized, and her days seem very well-planned with activities the kids enjoy. My only concern about Miss N is that, as a former teacher myself, I worry that she is going to burn herself out. Sometimes I joke that I'm glad TT got her early in her career, before she learns to temper her enthusiasm and manage her energy. But, sincerely, I hope that she makes a productive transition to being a slightly-less perfect teacher who can stay in it for the long haul.

That said, I think that an excellent classroom in an excellent school is a perfect case study for what is wrong with public education, as well as what is right about it.

Even in the Begindergarten, this school district places a strong emphasis on academics from an early age. There is almost no activity--not even during class parties on holidays--that doesn't focus somehow on phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, or math skills. They've done some really cool projects. For instance, recently the kids each drew a winter scene, framed it in brown construction paper like a window frame, and then the teacher added a picture she took of them from the back, as if they were looking out the window. These came out very charming.

They also came out mostly all alike. All the projects are cookie-cutter projects; there's no room for variation. If the kids are gluing together pre-cut pieces to make snowmen, the snowmen will have two eyes, a carrot nose, and buttons just like the model the teacher showed them. If a child wants his snowman to have three eyes, he will be told to do it like he was shown. The activities they do have a surface purpose: to practice the letter M, to count as high as 12, to make a little snowman. But the underlying purpose is also always to produce work that matches the model, to do it the way they have been told to do it.

The kids seem to enjoy the work they do; when I'm there helping with centers, they're having fun. And they are definitely experiencing multiple approaches to learning things: they might do a measurement project, a count-the-little-bears project, or a make-a-book project, each focused on a similar numeracy skill. But as they do each project, they are expected to do it exactly as they are told to do it. There is very little time in the classroom for children to make choices about how they will spend their time or what they will do. All the kids seem perfectly happy whenever I'm volunteering in the classroom (except poor B, who is temperamentally never happy: if they're doing centers, he wants to be doing morning meeting. If his group is at the math center first, he wants to be at the puzzle center. When he gets to the puzzle center, he doesn't want the puzzles that are available, he wants the firefighter one another kid has already started. And so on. I'm actually impressed with how Miss N and her classroom aide are supporting B in the classroom, and I hope he grows into a sunnier disposition, poor kid). But I can't help but wonder about the long-term effect of thirty-five hours a week, of "Do exactly what you're told. Produce exactly what you're told to produce."

The Tiny Tornado has learned a lot. This cannot be denied. He knows all his letters, is making big progress in matching letters and sounds (and can now identify consonant sounds at the end of words as well as the beginning!), can write all his letters, can count past 20 (though it's hilarious when he gets to 20-10 and 20-11), can recognize numbers into the teens. He is ahead of where both his brothers were at the same age, because we didn't do much systematic instruction when the Older Two were 5.

I am neutral on whether this is a good or bad thing. Both of the Older Two are perfectly numerate and literate now, which suggests that it is not necessary to spend hours and hours in direct instruction when kids are young. On the other hand, the TT was developing an interest in letters and numbers before he started Begindergarten, and has enjoyed learning them this year. It hasn't been stressful or negative, and his progress spares me the years of anxiety I suffered about whether the Lego Savant, now a voracious reader who devours multiple novels a week, would ever learn to read. As far as I can tell, TT's classmates seem to be enjoying themselves as well.

One area of flexibility in the classroom is that the kids are welcome to be where they're at: at a journal-writing center, for instance, some kids will dictate, some kids will write with spelling help, and some kids will write using their own mix of correct and invented spelling, and this is OK. This ameliorates much of the concern I might have had about the relentless emphasis on academics for what is essentially a class of pre-kindergartners. But I wonder what it will be like next year, when they move on to kindergarten or first grade. Last year, at the kindergarten information night, I was very uncomfortable with the academic expectations for kindergarten, though I suspect I'll be less concerned now that TT will have had a year of what is essentially Kindergarten Readiness. Still, I plan to visit a nearby district I've heard good things about, and consider whether I might be able to send him there under Schools of Choice.

I have heard a lot of criticism of the district from the parents of kids in middle and high school, from young adults who recently graduated from the district, and from the one or two kids I've met while they were attending the high school, about the effect that academic pressure has on the students. The district is affluent--at least 3 of TT's classmates are the children of doctors, for instance, and other parents are research scientists at the university. I hear that there is quite a bit of class-based tension at the middle and high school levels, and that it can be an uncomfortable setting for students whose families don't vacation at ski resorts or buy late-model cars for sixteenth birthdays.

Our decision to send TT to school was made pragmatically for the family: I needed childcare, and he needed stimulation. I am happy and relieved that it has worked out so well. Although I miss the wonderful open-ended art projects he used to bring home from his Reggio Emilia-inspired preschool, I am pleased with his academic progress (and so is he). Having some first-hand experience of the public school reinforces my belief that it would have been terrible for the Lego Savant (all those people around! all the time! never a moment to yourself! never a moment to think quietly!), and OK for Word Boy, who is more adaptable and inclined towards traditional academics. Though I think it has been good for Word Boy, who thinks too much of other people's preferences, not to be reinforced in his tendencies. I could do a whole nother post on that. Maybe I will sometime.

I've never imagined that the Tiny Tornado would stay in school long-term, and I continue to hope that's true, though it's not clear how my plans to become a Speech Language Pathologist will affect our homeschooling in another few years. I continue to be concerned about how factors like the pressure to conform, and the relentless beat of academics, will take their toll as the years pass by. The Tiny Tornado wants to homeschool for first grade, or possibly even this next year for Kindergarten. For my part, I very strongly do not want him to continue in this district past elementary school. We'll have to see what time brings.

 

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Nel Noddings' Critical Lessons

I've had mixed results keeping my new year's resolution to stop thinking so much about stuff and focus my reading on genre fiction. I've enjoyed The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway; The Hunger Games series (very violent, but I appreciated the author making it clear that the violence the characters were involved in had long-term consequences for them); Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear (I have loved generation ship stories ever since I read Ben Bova's Exiles Trilogy as a child); Jack Finney's Time and Again, which was recommended to me in the comments on my blog; and Feast of Souls and Wings of Wrath, by C. S. Friedman, the first two books in a trilogy about magic users who pay the cost of their magic use in lost moments of life.

That's SFF. In mysteries, I liked In The Woods a lot; I thought at first it was a bit over-written but then I got sucked in. I was wary because I don't like books in which children get hurt, but she never dwells on what happens to the children, so I was able to cope with it. I can't say what else I liked about it without spoilers, but I will say that it's a great example of an unreliable narrator--it's told in the first person by someone who isn't trustworthy. He tells you right up front that he lies, but more subtly he is also wrong about a lot of things, and so you have the challenge of reading between the lines of his interactions with people (this is where he is most often wrong about things) to try to figure out what is really going on.

I also liked the Liam Campbell series of mysteries by Dana Stabenow. I will not make any claims of greatness for these books (and when I tried to read another of Stabenow's series I was unimpressed). But they are competent mysteries that work for me because they hit what I am coming to understand is my mystery-series sweet spot: the mysteries are not necessarily easy to figure out, but they're easy to understand. At the end of the book, I know what happened. And there is a tortured, unfulfilled romance that stretches through more than one book (cf. Clare/Russ). Perhaps I should just cave in and start reading romance novels, but I choose instead to skirt around the edges of that genre, re-reading Jane Austen and Jane Eyre, and mysteries with a romance component.

But that's not what I came here to talk about. As with most resolutions, I have sometimes failed in keeping mine. Since January 1, for instance, I've read four books on economics, nine about education, and two on child development and children's issues, as well as a few on miscellaneous other topics. So, really, I've failed pretty spectacularly at the "stop thinking so much" part of the resolution, while doing pretty well at the "read more fun genre fiction" piece of it. A mixed bag.

Right now, I'm reading Nel Noddings' Critical Lessons: What Our Schools Should Teach, and am liking it. She wants us to encourage young people to apply critical thinking--which she defines very broadly--to all sorts of areas where we either don't attempt to educate them at all (parenting, homemaking), or where we want them to just listen to us and do what we say (the value of homework, the idea that everyone should always try to do their best).

The bulk of the book is chapters that take up specific topics: Learning and Self-Understanding; The Psychology of War; House and Home; Other People; Parenting; Animals and Nature; and so on. In her introduction, she identifies some of the kinds of questions we might encourage young people to ask, and I like her questions:

When and under what conditions do I do my best work? Is it possible that a problem, topic, or potential product might "speak" to us or somehow reveal itself? Is it sometimes morally acceptable and creatively productive to do less than my best work? What does it mean, anyway, to be educated? (pp 2-3)

and:

Today we insist that everyone (almost without exception) must study academic mathematics. Yet relatively few students will actually use this material in their adult lives. In contrast, all of us will make a home of some sort. Why, then, does homemaking not appear as a serious and sustained subject in our schools? Among the questions we [might] consider are these: What is a home? What does our house, room, or corner say about us? What attitude might we take toward our possessions? What organic habits do we acquire in our childhood homes? Is it possible (or desirable) to enjoy household tasks? What role does conversation play in contributing to the growth of partners or children? What does ignorance or ineptitude on these topics contribute to present societal conditions? Are there people who want to maintain these conditions? Can it be that your ignorance might serve my purpose? (p. 6)

I think I'm drawn to her approach because of my own experiences with gradually coming to think critically about received wisdom from my family and the schools I attended. Also because I hear parents and educators talk about wanting their children to have "critical thinking" skills, but having either a very narrow view of what that might mean (Noddings wants a very broad and deep definition of it), or assuming that it means that the children will come to agree with them.

I see this in some liberals I know, who believe that they have reached their political position through critical thinking, and so their efforts to practice critical thinking with young people look more like leading them down a path to a foregone conclusion. If that makes sense. I have had some teachers of my acquaintance describe things they've done in the classroom as "introducing critical thinking" that sounded more to me like "introducing a liberal point-of-view," and I think it's important for adults to make the distinction. Especially for those of us who see ourselves positioned in opposition to the mainstream or to the status quo, who might have to be extra-vigilant in remembering that not everyone who thinks deeply about a subject will reach the same conclusions.

I could go into a whole digression here about how I see us ("us" being me and my liberal friends; me and my fellow Quakers) engaging in persuasion and socialization that we fail to recognize as such. For instance, in my monthly meeting we regularly reinforce the idea that young people should go to college; that "name" colleges are important; that the kind of professional accomplishments that win awards and garner articles in the paper are worth celebrating publicly; and so on. I'd like to see us thinking more critically about how we engage with these things, and I'd like our young people to see us doing it. End of digression.

Noddings says, "Students need to believe that they should reflect, evaluate, and make authentic decisions. That means perhaps rejecting some of what the adult community advises them to do" (p. 99). I think that's hard for even the best-intentioned grown-ups to grasp.

Noddings goes on to say, "There are risks in conducting these discussions with teenagers.... The risk may be worth taking" (pp 100-101). Even though the thesis of her book is clearly that we should be raising these questions and having these conversations with young people, she invites us to consider: What are the risks? What are the trade-offs? Are they worth it?

My More Moderate Views on Education

I enjoyed my rant the other day, but find that I want to say a few words about my more measured opinions about education and the schools.

1. I have been a teacher. Not in the public schools, but in their closest collegiate analog, the community college. In addition, I taught a class (freshman composition) that was required of all incoming students but which almost none of them wanted to take or expected to enjoy. From this, I have first-hand knowledge of how impossible it is to teach students who are in your class by compulsion. I also know first-hand that a system can be less than the sum of its parts; that is, it can be full of mostly-competent people doing their best according to their lights and with as much goodwill as they can muster, and the system overall can still be failing (in my department, after we instituted a portfolio review process, we had a failure rate of about 1/3--and this was of the students who made it to the end of the semester. Another sizeable chunk tended to disappear partway through). So I have tremendous sympathy and respect for individuals in the schools, doing their jobs. And sympathy for the ones who, like me, burn out and leave.

2. I homeschool for what seem to me like good reasons, but I think the truth is that my kids, and the kids of people like me, would probably do OK either in school or homeschooled. There are some reasons of temperament that I think this is less true for Eric than for most kids, but in general the children of middle-class and upper-middle-class families, with educated, involved, loving, functional parents and resources for books, travel, trips to museums, and so on, seem to learn what they need to learn and do all right. You hear a lot about how the American school system is failing--all those media reports that we're second-to-last in some international test of math skills. But we really have at least two different educational systems in American, and my kids (and your kids, probably, if you're reading this) are in the one that works pretty well.

A few years ago I read a book whose title I can never remember, something like Making Sense of Research in Education. It looked at some of the typical education headlines and examined the research behind them. One I remember is those international tests. According to the author, most countries have more explicit tracking than the US does, and when they participate in these tests, they choose students from specific schools to participate. In some cases, they choose the students individually. IIRC, only the US and Canada actually provide random, national samples. So "America came in 26th out of 29 countries," for instance, might be a statistic that compares all American children to only the children who've been tracked into academic schools in other countries, or an even smaller sample than that--like comparing all American kids to the equivalent of kids at the High School of Science and Technology. When the American sample is sorted by race, the white kids move up to second or third; the black kids drop even lower in the rankings.

So, when people urge me to put my kids in school and get involved in my local school district: well, I know my local school district has problems (I've heard the kid culture is unusually toxic, for instance), but for the most part, that school district doesn't need me, or my kids. There's a case to be made that Lansing does, and I know that one woman in my Quaker meeting carries a concern about Quakers taking their kids outside the Lansing school district. But there are bigger problems with education for working-class people, poor people, people of color, immigrants. I don't know what to do about those problems, either as an individual or as a society. But I do think both I and society could be doing better in this regard.

3. For all my bluster, I am not a zealot about home education. I don't think it's necessary or right for all kids (or their parents)--not even necessarily for all of mine. Yehva, for instance, is so high-energy and extroverted that I will not be surprised if we put her in kindergarten just to see how it goes (yes, I know extroverted children homeschool...but poor Yehva was born into a family of introverts, and I think it will always be a challenge to get her enough stimulation if she's stuck with us most days. But we'll see). I am also less sure about what I'm doing than it might seem from my writing; one of my weaknesses as a homeschooler, I told a friend recently, is that I am always second-guessing myself. It's actually one of my weaknesses in general; I'm more likely to have questions than opinions, about a lot of things.

That's all, really. I have my ranty moments, and I have my moderate, see-all-sides moments. I shared one the other day, thought I'd share the other one today.

What It Looks Like When I Finally Snap

Last night, I took an allergy medication with a decongestant in it too late in the evening, and couldn't get to sleep. At 1:36 a.m., on a website I hang out at, I came across someone making a very familiar argument, that people who opt out of the pubic school system (homeschoolers were mentioned specifically) are exercising privilege in an unacceptable way. Why don't they stay in the school system and work to improve? Why do they criticize without proposing solutions to the problem? "I don't see anyone with an alternative, besides pulling out of the system.
I just see a bunch of people who are privileged enough to be able to have an alternative, whether it's having someone homeschool their children, or a private school, dump on the system without giving any kind of path to change," this person said.

I am so tired of this argument. I don't know why my decision to homeschool my children seems like an intolerable expression of my privilege to so many people (including some I've met in real life, and including some friends of mine, as well as various internet commentators), or why they think it's my job but not theirs to fix public education. And last night, sleep-deprived and wired, I snapped at hearing it one more time, and I got ranty. Here's what I wrote:

[name redacted], I think I would fall into your category of people who "are privileged enough to be able to have an alternative," in my case homeschooling my children.

I am very interested in education issues, and over the last few years have read probably 60 to 80 books on the subject (that's a guess that may be wrong, but kind of totting up in my head--if anything it's probably low), including Alfie Kohn's stuff and Diane Ravitch's stuff and books about the history of education in the US and books about how schools shortchange boys and books about how they shortchange girls and every Respected Scholar's theory on the subject and every Nutcase Crank's theory on the subject. I also regularly read journalism on the subject, like Education Next, for instance, which I've found very informative. I did a whole reading project a couple of years ago on school finance, and another on the teachers' unions. I have done some freelance writing and editing work in the field of education and school improvement.

I could list what I see as the major problems with schooling today, and it would range from, oh Jesus, incompetent teachers to testing to a general disrespect for kids that means nobody cares if their time is wasted; from funding problems (both the problem of under-funding and the problem of funds coming from multiple sources for specific purposes so that a school might have the money to put in a swimming pool but not to buy the updated textbooks they need more urgently) to an over-powerful union to parents who protect their children from failure; from the progressive myth that every child under the right circumstances can be an intellectual to, at the other end of the spectrum, rigid tracking; from inadvertent sorting by social class that begins with what first-grade reading groups kids are placed into, to city schools that are so understaffed that one book I read about the Chicago school system said that on any given school day there are dozens of classrooms in the system that literally do not even have an adult presence; from bloated administrations to decaying infrastructure to technology initiatives that throw resources at putting computers at every desk, say, as if that will somehow magically make learning happen with joy while never asking teachers what they really need in their classrooms in order to do their jobs.

How's that for a start? If I put more thought into it, I could come up with more.

Solutions? Well, if I were the Great Omnipotent Being Of The World, I'd start by eliminating poverty, drug abuse, bad parenting in all its guises from neglect and physical abuse to pressuring kids to excel in parent-defined ways. I'd provide so much support for teachers, in the form of grading assistants, say, or a schedule of only 4 contact hours a day, and pay them so much that the profession would attract the very best, enthusiastic young people and not burn them out or spit them out. I'd lavish money and resources on some of the nutcakes who want to try radical alternatives; I'd seed Sudbury Valley-model schools all over the place, and same-sex academies, and year-round schools, and Montessori schools, and Reggio Emilia schools, and I'd make them all free so every parent could try the school she thought would work best for her particular kid. I'd turn the American workplace into a Dolly Parton/Jane Fonda utopia of job-sharing and on-site daycares and sunny little elementary schools right next to the corporate enterprise parks so that parents could be involved with their kids' educations and have the time and energy to also just hang out with them and enjoy them.

Read a little on the subject and you will find that the problems with schooling are many and varied and intractable. I get so tired of people jumping on my back for homeschooling my kids, as if I'm not entitled to do that unless I am somehow the one magic person who knows the secret solution to a decades-old problem.

I know it's an expression of my privilege that I get to be home with my kids full-time and homeschool, but practically everything in my life is an expression of my privilege, from waking up in a warm bed in a home with intact windows in a nice if modest suburb of a decent-if-declining small city, and driving a reliable car, and feeding my kids three meals plus snacks every day. Nobody has ever suggested that I stop feeding my children until I solve the problem of childhood hunger, and yet I'm supposed to know how to fix the American education system before I'm allowed to be critical of it, I'm supposed to somehow make my local schools an edutopia before I'm allowed to sit down and work a few math problems with my kids.

(I forgot to mention bullying, homophobia, sexist teachers, meaningless busywork, the resemblance between American high schools and minimum-security prisons, incoherent curricula, constantly-changing standards, educational fads, excessive oversight of teachers except where they are neglected, declining resources for gifted & talented programs, the over-medication of elementary school children, and a dozen other things, I'm sure, which will come to me later.)

Book Report: Diane Ravitch Changes Her Mind

A few years ago, I did a big reading project on education issues and education funding. As part of that project, I read a couple of things by Diane Ravitch, who has been writing about education in the US for forty years. Ravitch is a historian of education; her book Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform is very good if you like that kind of thing, and I remember The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn as my introduction into the scandal that is textbook selection in the United States.

In The Language Police, and in other places, Ravitch championed school choice and local control. She wanted schools to have autonomy over curriculum and funds, and teachers to have autonomy in the classroom. In other writings, and in her work in the Department of Education, she has been a passionate advocate of vouchers, school choice, and charter schools, as well as of standards. She thought parents would embrace the opportunity to send their children to better schools, that charter schools would be like 1000 little petri dishes where educational theories and practices of all kinds could be tested and the best ones then raised up. She thought testing programs would be founded on clear and robust curriculum standards, that the curriculum would be the driving force, and what harm could then be done by students being tested over their knowledge of that curriculum?

She wasn't just some writer blathering about these things. She influenced policy. She was a Big Name.

Her latest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education is her mea culpa. "How could I have been so wrong?" she asked herself. This book is her answer.

Much of the content was familiar to me, since I've been following these issues for awhile. I also loved the idea of school choice, of vouchers allowing poor parents to get their kids into schools that could serve them better, of charter schools offering parents a variety of educational options, so that they could choose the school that would best serve their own individual children.

But I was too cynical to let myself hope much. In this, I was wiser than Ravitch, but I am sorry to have been right about it.

Schools of choice? Turns out that in most places, fewer than 1% of parents choose to send their kids to a school that is not their neighborhood school. The reasons vary: people like their neighborhood schools; some parents aren't all that motivated to take an active part in choosing their children's school; many parents find the travel to an out-of-neighborhoood school prohibitive for them or their children (I remember reading a story a couple of years ago about a girl who spent 90 minutes on public transportation at the beginning and end of her school day so that she could attend a choice school. Who would wish that on their child?); it is hard to participate in extracurriculars at a school farther from home.

Ravitch said she thought there'd be a flood of discontented parents eager to move their kids to better schools if they could. Nope. No flood. 1% or fewer of eligible kids.

Charters? Turns out, in most places, they really do skim the best kids from local public schools. Kids who have parents involved enough to enroll them in charters are the same kids who are likely to do well even in a weak school, so selection bias plays a role. Also, it turns out that charters do expel problem children, who are dumped back on the local public school. (Yes, I know charters are public schools, too--but I think this language is parsimonious for my purposes.) Or they make sure they only get the most motivated kids by setting up subtle barriers to entry that nonetheless screen out the kids with less-supportive families, for instance by requiring an in-person meeting between parents and educators prior to enrollment.*

And, in most places, what they do and how they do it doesn't really look all that different from what other schools are doing. This is borne out in my very limited experience; one of my friends had her son in a charter school, for instance, and she felt that the benefits were subtle, like the kids not having to ask permission to use the bathroom.

Ravitch was dismayed and disappointed by No Child Left Behind, which focused on testing, plus rewards and sanctions for better or worse performance, without defining any curriculum standards. She had assumed there'd be curriculum standards; how could there not be? But there weren't. It was high-stakes testing divorced from any grounding in clear objectives about what children should learn.

Math and reading instruction began to edge out other subjects; test-taking strategies became a school subject; corruption and cheating were rife; state standards were watered down (in some states, the bar to be considered adequate on the tests is now as low as getting 17% of the questions right. That's an extreme example, but it's not a typo: 17% is a passing grade. This is why we have many states that claim 80-90% of, say, fourth graders are proficient in math and reading, while only 20-30% get that kind of score on the NAEP ).

All of this was entirely predictable. The problem with high-stakes testing, she quotes one researcher as saying, "is that it corrupts the tests as measures of student performance" (160). Turns out this is such a well-known thing that there's a term for it and has been for over 30 years: Campbell's Law, formulated by a sociologist in 1975, which says:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. (qtd. on p. 160)

NCLB is apparently the poster child for Campbell's Law.

There's more; Ravitch has a lot to say about the failures of the market-style approaches she had championed, and about her concerns that so much education funding is now coming from the foundations of people like Bill Gates and the Walton family (of Wal-Mart fame), who are trying to impose the business models that have made them so successful. She is concerned that the Gates foundation in particular has given so much money to almost literally every institute and publication that studies and monitors education and shapes policy that there is no one left who is enough of an outsider to offer a critique. And she does a very good critique of the current New New Idea, the idea that excellent teaching is the solution and that we can create a corps of excellent teachers by studying what excellent teachers do and then filling the schools with people who do that, too. (I like the part where she says that the problem with this plan becomes obvious if you take a moment to ask yourself why baseball teams don't just fill themselves up with .300 batters who are also great basemen and fielders.)

So, it's bad. What's Ravitch's solution?

Hell if I know. I do know she's a big fan of content and curriculum standards; she's a board member of the Core Knowledge Foundation, which advocates nationwide grade-based content standards. But beyond that, I don't know. The book concludes with a whole bunch of high-falutin' language, a veritable cascade of Glittering Generalities:

As a nation, we need a strong and vibrant public education system. As we seek to reform our schools, we must take care to do no harm. In fact, we must take care to make our schools once again the pride of the nation. Our public education system is a fundamental element of our democratic society. Our public schools have been the pathway to opportunity and a better life for generations of Americans, giving them the tools to fashion their own life and to improve the commonweal. To the extent that we strengthen them, we strengthen our democracy.

At the present time, public education is in peril. Efforts to reform public education are, ironically, diminishing its quality and endangering its very survival. We must turn our attention to improving the schools, infusing them with the substance of genuine learning and reviving the conditions that make learning possible.

I don't know about you, but I can't read that without picturing a waving flag and hearing some stirring martial music. But I still don't know what the heck Ravitch thinks the answer is. "Strong...vibrant...do no harm...pride of the nation...improve...infuse...revive." Got it! No problem! My friend Joann works in the field of school improvement; I'll send her those two paragraphs and she will thank me for making her job 100% easier.

*A little side note: Two years ago, I edited the annual report for the Michigan Legislature on the status of charter schools in Michigan. About a thousand pages of, "17% of students here versus 13% there on practically every measure possible. One of the things that rose up from that data that has stayed with me was that in Michigan, charter school students do about as well academically as their public school counterparts. The exception is African-American students in urban districts, who do somewhat better that AA kids in the public schools. I found it interesting.

Four Quick Book Notes

The Coming Population Crash: And Our Planet's Surprising Future, by Fred Pearce.

I have found books about population and demographics very interesting in the past, so I grabbed this one at the library. I thought I might be hitting the point of diminishing returns on the topic; I already know a lot about the declining birthrates we're seeing all over the world, and suspected I might end up skimming this because it was all too familiar. What Pearce does that made this worthwhile for me, though, is devote chapters to exploring the cultural forces that drive lower birthrates in various parts of the world. For instance, I was interested in his discussion of industrial ghost towns in the former East Germany. For reasons I can't quite remember, young women are more likely than young men in these areas to leave for cities in the west, seeking education and professional employment. So Germany has a demographic skew, with 120 or more women for every man [edit: I of course mean for every hundred men. Oops.] in some cities, and the opposite in these depressed former industrial areas. The men left behind are lost in an epidemic of alcoholism, and educated single professional women have low chances of finding a man they consider worth marrying. This leaves a surprisingly large proportion of Germans child-free.

Pearce did a great discussion of forces in India and Singapore, as well. One kind of throw-away line caught my attention because we hear so much about the high academic achievement of children in Singapore, who often attend school for 8-10 hours a day, and have tutoring and enrichment classes on top of that. Pearce mentions a woman who, in an interview, suggested that one reason she and her friends had chosen not to have kids was that, having lived through that experience, they didn't think childhood was worth it. They didn't want to have kids only to push them along that same path, but they didn't think it was realistic to think they could opt out.

This is a book that reminded me, through both historical and present-day examples, that human hunger is rarely caused by actual food production shortages, but is almost always caused by political decisions made by people in power. I have ancestors (supposedly) who came to the US during the Irish potato famine, and I was fascinated and appalled to learn that many poor people in Ireland were forcibly relocated, forced onto crowded ships on which many (do I remember half? That might be too high) would die on the passage, and the rest would simply be dumped on a wharf in the New World with no money or resources. I knew people migrated because of hunger; I had not known they were ejected from their homes en masse and forced out under such circumstances.

His stuff on current-day patterns of migration, and the forces driving it, are very interesting, too. He says Europe's birth rates are so low that Europe finds itself in the ridiculous position of turning away and deporting immigrants it would have to go looking for if they weren't coming on their own. A good read.

A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America, by Patricia Cline Cohen.

I love this kind of history, that points out ways that what we take for granted--like our assumption that a well-educated person will know mathematics--are actually historically-bound. Turns out it wasn't until well into the 19th Century that anyone thought math should be part of a well-rounded liberal education; it had always been seen as something only merchants and traders needed to know, and they only provisionally. Math was treated as a brute-force process of memorization of rules; people weren't even expected to understand, say, multiplication as a concept. Books called "Ready Reckoners" were published for the use of clerks; they were nothing but tables of calculations, so that a clerk selling X yards of cloth at Y price could look it up in a table, rather than be expected to perform the math.

To be sure, this was partly driven by the incredibly complex non-decimal money system, and by a system of measures that seems insane to the modern reader: a gallon of, say, milk had a different number of ounces than a gallon of beer, while a barrel of wine might have 4 more gallons in it than a barrel of maple syrup. There were three or four differing "ounces" used to measure different commodities. The spread of the idea that people should be able to perform math was partly made possible by Thomas Jefferson's drive to standardize measures and convert America to a decimal money system: at that point, ordinary people could figure this stuff out.

When math first became part of a standard education plan, it began as a single course taken during a student's final year of college. As it moved into earlier stages of education, the idea persisted for a long time that boys under 12 were simply not capable of grasping mathematics. We expect so much of elementary-aged children these days that I find it interesting to learn about how different expectations were not really that long ago.

Finally, I love stories of people resisting inevitable change. In the middle ages, as Arabic numbers first came to Europe, they were strongly resisted. Roman numerals had always been good enough, and even though the only thing you could do with them was count and record quantities, who needed to do more? Arabic numerals were seen as dangerous because they lent themselves to fraud: a 0 could easily be changed to a 6, for instance, or 412 to 1412. They evoked so much anxiety that in the late 13th century, the city of Florence actually outlawed their use. Like Canute commanding the tides.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen.

I love spiritual memoirs. Sadly, despite its title, this isn't one. Janzen isn't a very good writer or a very deep thinker, and this book wanders around and skims the surface of what could have been some very interesting and meaty stuff. On the other hand, she can be wickedly funny. I'd be trying to read passages out loud to David and laughing too hard to finish them. A light read, kind of disappointing in some ways (I was thinking so often, "Wow, I'd like to hear more about that," and not getting it.), not too bad for passing an evening. Very glad I got it from the library; I wouldn't have wanted to pay good money for it.

Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto.

I am an old fan of John Taylor Gatto for his essay The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, which has always seemed to me like a valid critique of school systems, and a good reminder that while we think we are teaching children content, our actions and words and expectations and use of time are also teaching them things we may not be aware of and wouldn't like if we were.

Gatto was a teacher in the New York public schools for 30 years, and he resigned in the year he won New York State's Teacher of the Year award, becoming a vocal critic of public schooling. I would like to give him an award, too: crappiest book I've read this year.

First, the book is not coherent. Oh, on the sentence level, it's fine. But I often could not figure out what he thought the connection between two ideas was. He'd talk about X for three paragraphs, and Y for the next three paragraphs, and I'd be mystified about why he put X and Y next to each other, what larger point he thought they made, why a juxtaposition seemed useful. The book is organized into chapters, but their content seems almost random.

But worse, Gatto's argument is founded on two bases, both of which are very weak. The first is anecdote. He loves a good story about a bad teacher, principal, superintendent, or school board. I think such stories can be useful, especially when they come from "good" schools--Gatto himself taught in a school in a very affluent neighborhood, and his students were the children of well-off, highly-educated parents. When he tells a toe-curling story and you know it comes from a school that might be held up as a model rather than a school everybody knows is broken, that does have impact.

But, as the saying goes, "the plural of anecdote is not data." There were 95,726 public schools in the US in the 2003-4 school year and 76.6 million children enrolled in 2006. With that many schools to draw on, it would be astonishing if I couldn't fill a book or six with crap anecdotes. Anecdotes are evocative; they are compelling; they are illustrative; they raise questions. They are not strong enough to support an entire argument about policy.

Fortunately, Gatto does not have only anecdotes in his toolbox. He has one other thing: The Genetic Fallacy. The genetic fallacy is the rejection of an institution or idea because of perceived problems with its origins, and critics of American public schooling have a lot of temptation for falling into this, because the genesis of our system is ugly, ugly, ugly.

You can find philanthropists, education experts, founders of the movement for public education, and even the occasional US president saying in so many words that public education's purpose is to fit the mass of people to accept a life of repetitive manual labor for the benefit of the few who will be allowed a true liberal education; to remove children from the home for so many hours and days that family ties will be weakened, replaced with loyalty to external authority; even to deliberately suppress children's innate genius, because, as one person Gatto quotes says (a president of Harvard, IIRC), we have more statesmen, entrepreneurs, and potential leaders of industry than we need already.

The first time you learn this stuff, it's pretty shocking. And I think it can be worth examining whether, given public education's ugly birth, there are legacies in our system that should be examined, that perhaps continue to work against the kinds of goals we have today, for student achievement and the fulfillment of potential.

But somebody needs to tell Gatto that repeating that one thing Woodrow Wilson said in 1909 in four different places in your book does not actually constitute a critique of public education as it is practiced today. None of his sources were written later than 1920, I don't think--the only time he dips a toe into more modern ideas, it's to compare something to "one of the first laws Hitler passed." Early 20th century eugenicists plus Hitler: a toxic combination, indeed, but not one that any rational person could think had a lot to do with 21st century schools.

[Edit: on re-reading it, I find The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher a bit overwrought as well. The six lessons are worth paying attention to; the rest of the essay, not so much.]

More Charles Murray: Real Education

After The Bell Curve, I didn't think of Murray as an author I would seek out again. I just didn't pay any attention to what he was up to. Then someone mentioned his book Real Education on a website I hang out at, saying that they were surprised by it after expecting to hate it. Since I have a reflex that causes me to seek out and read any book a person mentions in my hearing (this could be exploited to great humorous effect by loved ones, it occurs to me), I put it on my list and eventually got a copy from the library.

I also didn't expect to write more about Murray after yesterday's post on The Bell Curve, but I find myself thinking about it this morning, and the only way to get that out of my brain is to write it down.

Real Education is Murray's attempt to outline the solution to our educational problems. His subtitle is "Four Simple Truths For Bringing American's Schools Back to Reality," and his four simple truths are that children have different abilities; that half of all children are below average; that too many young people go to college, and that our future depends on the gifted.

Under the rubric of the first three of those, he takes progressive education to task for its naive belief that all children, under the right circumstances, can achieve in a certain way, academically. He draws on Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, identifies the ones that best correlate with academic success, and says that our academic system attempts to force all kids to achieve in the ways that kids with that particular academic bent can do. This is a waste of resources, and it is self-esteem destroying for children who spent 13 years being pounded into a square hole.

He includes what was, for me, a very striking image: he asks his readers who were not good at gym class to remember what it was like to be in a class where you were constantly asked to do things you couldn't do, at least not well; to know that you couldn't do them and be expected to do them anyway; to receive low grades even though you were achieving at your best level.

OK, he says, that sucked for you. But gym class was never held up as the class that defined your school success. Once you suffered through the required credit hours, you were free to fill your schedule with classes that were a better fit.

But imagine you are a child for whom the standard ways of teaching and learning in schools are just as bad a fit. You're not only trapped in a great many more classes that are the psychic equivalent of that horrible gym class, and for a lot more years, but you're told that your future success in life depends on you being good in these classes; that you could succeed in them if you just applied yourself; and so on. He wants these kids, who are smart and able but just not necessarily smart and able in that particular way, to get a better deal.

He wants educators to let go of an idealized vision where all children are above average, where all children just need the right supports to succeed academically, where a four-year college degree is the path to success for everyone. I don't think he's necessarily wrong about that. (I don't have the energy to go into his alternative vision for post-secondary education, which would allow for multiple paths, more two or three-year programs, more credentialling exams, rather than forcing everyone through a four-year baccalaureate model that was only ever a good fit for a certain small subset of people, but I found it intriguing).

On the other hand, this is a much smaller, more focused book than The Bell Curve, and so it's easier to see what Murray decides to overlook. When he talks about multiple educational models for different kids, and an educational setting where one model isn't exalted over another, where the kid being excellently prepared for the skilled trade he's gifted at is not stigmatized versus the kid on the AP college fast track, you can almost see him holding his hands up beside his face like blinders chanting "La la la tracking I don't see it; la la la social class doesn't exist."

This great leap over the realities of how social class plays out both in our current system and in his idealized replacement system was especially glaring to me because at about the same time I read Literacy With an Attitude: Educating Working-Class Children in their Own Self-Interest, which describes the ways that education can be different for kids of different social classes even in the same classroom, with the same teacher.

One thing that stuck out to me from that book was its discussion of different styles of speech, and different ways of relating to adults and authority, which kids have adopted even before entering school. Researchers observing first-grade classrooms were able to observe how these different styles led, as time passed, to, for instance, reading-group assignments that tracked closely to children's social class, and in which teachers related to children differently, and sent them very different non-verbal messages about their place in the classroom and their abilities.

For instance, in the "A" reading group, children were allowed to group loosely, outside the teacher's reach, and given simple verbal instructions like "Get your book and open it to page 7." The group at the other end of the spectrum were often physically led to their reading group; books were placed in their hands and opened for them; they were seated so that the teacher was within physical reach of every child; much more of the teacher's speech during the group was about behavior than with the higher-level groups. Teachers, if they even noticed they were doing this, would have said they were responding to the reality of each group's abilities. But by halfway through the year, middle-class kids who had ended up in lower groups had been moved up, and working-class kids who started in higher groups had been moved down. Middle-class kids learned to read; they also learned that they were allowed a certain level of autonomy, that they could be trusted, that what they had to say was of interest to adults. The working-class kids learned--from the very same teacher--that they needed to be guided to do certain tasks, that behaving a certain way was more important than the content of the lesson, and so on.

Murray doesn't seem to want to really wrestle with these kinds of issues in Real Education, perhaps because he believes that, by and large, by being sorted into social classes children have already been sorted by intelligence. But I reject that notion.

I am sympathetic with some of his criticisms. I grew up with a brother, for instance, whom nobody could think was anything but very very smart, but for whom academics was a bad fit. Gary might say something different about this, but from my view, his transition to young adulthood was much harder than it had to be in part because of the assumption that a four-year academic degree was the only path to take. I would embrace a system that could have better identified my brother's enormous strengths and gifts, and without stigma, helped guide him to make the most of them. (While at the same time doing a better job of not putting very academically gifted kids like me on such a pedestal that it was, for me at least, damaging in a different way.)

But I don't think Murray's solutions, especially at the K-12 level, wrestle sufficiently with these realities.

And don't even get me started on Reality #4, which basically says that we should do a better job of identifying those who have certain kinds of gifts, and instead of neglecting them as we do now, intensively train them for leadership. Here, he invokes reality: he says that our leaders always have, and always will, come from the highest tiers of whatever it is that is measured by IQ, and we should recognize this and do a better job of preparing them for their leadership roles.

OK, maybe, because that might include the old-fashioned notions of stewardship, servant leadership, ethics, which our leaders certainly seem to lack.

On the other hand, this was, for me, Murray at his most distasteful. Philosopher-Kings, hello? I wanted to hold the book at arms length and say "ewwww." I'm pretty sure I skimmed, and tossed the book into my library bag to be returned with perhaps more than usual vehemence.

I like Murray's questions: How do we recognize the different abilities of different children? How do we nurture and guide them to the best use of those abilities? How do we de-stigmatize the less academic gifts, so that spending 13 years in our school systems doesn't leave so many kids feeling like failures?

I like his willingness to take progressive educators to task for naivete and utopianism.

But I am more interested in other people's solutions to these problems.