Anger Management Is Bullshit or Yeah, I'm Mad For A Good Fucking Reason!

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Bruce Levine, Ph.D.

Maintaining the Societal Status Quo

Americans have been increasingly socialized to equate inattention, anger, anxiety, and immobilizing despair with a medical condition, and to seek medical treatment rather than political remedies. What better way to maintain the status quo than to view inattention, anger, anxiety, and depression as biochemical problems of those who are mentally ill rather than normal reactions to an increasingly authoritarian society.

The reality is that depression is highly associated with societal and financial pains. One is much more likely to be depressed if one is unemployed, underemployed, on public assistance, or in debt (for documentation, see “400% Rise in Anti-Depressant Pill Use”). And ADHD labeled kids do pay attention when they are getting paid, or when an activity is novel, interests them, or is chosen by them (documented in my book Commonsense Rebellion).

In an earlier dark age, authoritarian monarchies partnered with authoritarian religious institutions. When the world exited from this dark age and entered the Enlightenment, there was a burst of energy. Much of this revitalization had to do with risking skepticism about authoritarian and corrupt institutions and regaining confidence in one’s own mind. We are now in another dark age, only the institutions have changed. Americans desperately need anti-authoritarians to question, challenge, and resist new illegitimate authorities and regain confidence in their own common sense.

In every generation there will be authoritarians and anti-authoritarians. While it is unusual in American history for anti-authoritarians to take the kind of effective action that inspires others to successfully revolt, every once in a while a Tom Paine, Crazy Horse, or Malcolm X come along. So authoritarians financially marginalize those who buck the system, they criminalize anti-authoritarianism, they psychopathologize anti-authoritarians, and they market drugs for their “cure.”

Mad In America

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study Scoring Rubric

ACE Score Calculator

For use with this CDC study.

The Education Voices You Need To Hear Are Here

-Was Gerald Bracey wrong when he helped us understand how statistics in public education are manipulated for political purposes?

-How many lectures and invited talks does Diane Ravitch have to do before someone actually hears what she's saying?

-When will Deb Meier be taken seriously when she talks about the power of small democratic schools?

-Does Alfie Kohn really need to continue to point out the lack of research supporting the current high standards movement?

-How much more research does Linda Darling-Hammond have to produce that demonstrates that teacher education works?

-Why is it so hard for people to believe Steven Krashen's reporting about the failure of so-called high school exit exams?

-How many blogs does Anthony Cody have to write about a system that devalues public schools and teachers?

-When are people going to give Bill Ayers the credit he deserves for struggling for decades to elevate teachers and teaching to its well-deserved place of prominence?

-When will Valerie Strauss's education pieces get a chance to move the American public?

-How hard is it recognize the ability of Rick Ayers to use an analogy in describing how single metrics and MBAs damage public schooling?

-Why is Shaun Johnson's description of the "ruinous culture" of high-stakes testing only talked about on a local AM radio station in central Pennsylvania?

-When will more people read Anne Geiger's blog?

-Why is Fair-Test not regularly cited in mainstream media when discussions of education reform focus exclusively on achievement tests?

-And maybe most importantly, when are parents going to be listened to?

For the original with a link to each important educator, please see Timothy D. Slekar at HuffPo.

Results Of The Poll

WHAT CORRELATES WITH ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT AS SHOWN IN THE RESEARCH?

Excellent work. Socioeconomic status, which includes both choices voted for here and excludes the choices not selected, is what correlates with student achievement as shown in the research.

To those who claim we need to educate these kids out of poverty (I'm looking at you Obama, Duncan, Gates, Rhee, DFER, Guggenheim, Canada, and the rest) I say, enough already.

Here's some data to back this up from Stephen Krashen:

Protecting Students

More Research Showing MLK Was Right About Poverty And Education

We know from IQ tests in children that cognitive ability can be determined early; even in infants, simple tests of mental development (like pulling a string to ring a bell, matching pictures, and sorting pegs by color) can predict mental ability later in life. So, if it’s possible to gauge mental ability of 7-year olds, and if fraternal twins typically score differently on IQ tests, why did the kids in the study [fraternal twins] perform at the same level? What was special about these 7-year olds?

The answer, of course, was poverty. When researchers compared the IQs of 7-year olds from affluent backgrounds, variation between twins was huge- as expected. Poverty effectively erased an individual’s genetic contribution towards intelligence; thus, twins from low socioeconomic standing bunched together on the IQ spectrum, and twins from high socioeconomic standing fanned out according to their innate genetic potentials.

3QD

CDC Report Indicates Doctors Suck As Much As Teachers

From the new CDC Report (PDF):

¶Babies born to black women are up to three times as likely to die in infancy as those born to women of other races.

¶American Indians and Alaska Natives are twice as likely to die in car crashes as any other group.

¶More than 80 percent of all suicides are committed by whites, but young American Indian adults have the highest suicide rates by far — 25 per 100,000 population at age 21, compared with 14 for whites, 10 for blacks and 8 for Asians and Hispanics.

¶Overdoses of prescription drugs now kill more Americans than overdoses of illegal drugs, the opposite of the pattern 20 years ago. Overdose death rates are now higher among whites than blacks; that trend switched in 2002, after doctors began prescribing more powerful painkillers, antidepressants and antipsychotics — more easily obtained by people with health insurance.

¶Blacks die of heart disease much more commonly than whites, and die younger, despite the availability of cheap prevention measures like weight loss, exercise, blood-pressure and cholesterol drugs, and aspirin. The same is true for strokes.

¶High blood pressure is twice as common among blacks as whites, but the group with the least success in controlling it is Mexican-Americans.

¶Compared with whites, blacks have double the rate of “preventable hospitalizations,” which cost about $7 billion a year.

NYT h/t Teacher Sabrina

Arne Duncan Is A Liar, And Mike Klonsky Found Proof!

Writing in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, [Vivek] Wadhwa argues:

"Much is made of the PISA test scores and rankings, but the international differences are actually quite small. Most of the U.S. ranking lags are not even statistically significant. The U.S. falls in the second rank on some measures and into the first on others. It produces more highest-performing students in science and reading than any other country does; in mathematics, it is second only to Japan. Moreover, one has to ask what the test results actually mean in the real world. Do high PISA rankings make students more likely to invent the next iPad? Google? I don't think so."

High-Quality Early Childhood Education Is Crucial

Report-BayArea Special Ed Early Ed

Delayed Gratification, Vocabulary And Poverty

At every opportunity I try to explain how the achievement gap is a symptom of poverty, not the cause. Same for crappy schools--they're a symptom of poverty, not a cause.

With that, I give you this snippet:

Don’t Bite: Does Self Control Determine Class?

...on the whole, children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds tend to be exposed to far less language than their wealthier counterparts. A classic longitudinal study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley (1995) found that disadvantaged children hear far fewer word-types and far fewer words spoken overall, and receive less feedback and guidance in their production from their parents. To be clear: children from welfare families hear on the order of thousands fewer words per day than children from professional families, leading to what Hart and Risley term a “meaningful difference” over time. While it is difficult to quantify the impact this impoverished input has on learning, many researchers believe the effect to be massive. Just to give you an idea – by the age of three, children from professional families actually have larger recorded vocabularies than the parents of the welfare families....

There is a lot more at the link, but suffice it to say that if we chose to, we could provide universal health care and free, high-quality early childhood education which would do more to level the playing field than all the Gates/Broad/Duncan/Obama reform could ever hope to accomplish.

Crappy schools, small vocabularies, and ill health are symptoms. Poverty is the disease.  Eat the rich.

"Portfolio Districts" Research: Data Unavailable

Current Trends

In the latter half of the past decade, school districts in several large cities, including New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and post-Katrina New Orleans, have implemented a new model of urban school decentralization often called “portfolio districts.” Others, including those in Denver and Cleveland, are following suit in what appears to be a growing trend. The portfolio strategy has become increasingly prominent in educational policy circles, think tank and philanthropy literature, and education news reporting. The appointment of Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan as U. S. Secretary of Education suggests administration support for the concept. Duncan embraced such decentralization in Chicago in the form of Renaissance 2010 and continues promoting its elements in such national policy as Race to the Top and in proposed revisions to the No Child Left Behind legislation. The premise supporting portfolio districts is that if education vendors compete on the basis of proposed innovations, with a school superintendent monitoring activities, children will receive greater opportunity for academic success. This brief examines the available evidence for the viability of this premise and the proposals (for example, making all schools in a district charter schools) that flow from it.

A number of urban districts have embraced or are considering adopting the portfolio model. National policy also favors the idea. However, there have been no substantive studies of the portfolio district approach. The only relevant research to date has been on its constituent elements, which include 1) decentralization; 2) charter school expansion; 3) reconstituting/closing “failing” schools; and 4) test-based accountability. As detailed below, the available scholarly peer-reviewed evidence on these various constituent elements shows no effect or negative effects on student achievement and on educational costs.

The published policy literature advocating implementation of the portfolio model and its elements most often makes assertions without providing credible evidence for its claims. For example, all of the relevant six articles available from the scholarly database Academic Search Premiere write favorably of the portfolio model, but none of them either constitute or reference careful empirical study reviewed by a community of policy scholars. Much of such advocacy writing published about the portfolio model and its constituent elements is generated by authors housed in or connected to policy think tanks that tend to have political and policy agendas.

h/t Schools Matter

Pesticide / ADHD Link Found

Scientists identify link between pesticides and ADHD

A new study, published in the journal Pediatrics, links pesticide exposure to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the U.S. and Canada.

Led by Maryse Bouchard in Montreal, researchers based at the University of Montreal and Harvard University examined the potential relationship between ADHD and exposure to certain toxic pesticides called organophosphates.

The rest at the link.

Religion Makes You Stupid? Research Suggests

Hearing prayer shuts off believers' brain activity

When some religiously devout people hear a charismatic healer speak the word of god , the regions of their brains involved in skeptical thinking and vigilance appear to shut down. Uffe Schjødt of Aarhus University in Denmark and his colleagues scanned the brains of Pentecostalists while they listened to recorded prayers from non-Christians, "ordinary" Christians, and a healer. The brain activity changed only in response to prayers they were told came from the healer. According to Schjødt, the same deactivation may occur in response to the words of physicians, parents, politicians, and other charismatic leaders. The researchers published their results in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. From New Scientist:

Parts of the prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices, which play key roles in vigilance and scepticism when judging the truth and importance of what people say, were deactivated when the subjects listened to a supposed healer. Activity diminished to a lesser extent when the speaker was supposedly a normal Christian.

Schjødt says that this explains why certain individuals can gain influence over others, and concludes that their ability to do so depends heavily on preconceived notions of their authority and trustworthiness.

More at the link.

Think Tanks Purposely Deceptive? Looks Like It

Are think tanks in existence to support decisions or to help make them? In many cases it appears they exist simply to corroborate the nonsense put into policy, not to inform policy-makers prior to policy decisions. Sort of bass-ackwards, no?

Much more at the link.

The book is based on the work of the Think Twice/Think Tank Review Project, a collaboration of the Education and Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State University. It is funded by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice and has published expert third party reviews of research reports published by those think tanks.

Think Tank Research Quality demonstrates the importance of those independent expert reviews. Taken together, the reviews reveal that think tank publications have clear patterns of misleading, flawed, and even deceptive research practices. Yet this think tank research often serves as the foundation for federal and state programs. As the nation moves forward with Race to the Top, as well as the current effort to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind law also known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, this book provides a cautionary tale. Meeting a critical need, Think Tank Research Quality provides policy makers, the media and the public with valuable insight into the quality of the research used to support these and other reform initiatives.

h/t Schools Matter

Yong Zhao On Data

A Pretense of Science and Objectivity: Data and Race to the Top

Education has a new god: data. It is believed to have the power to save American education and thus everything in education must be about data—collect more data about our children, evaluate teachers and administrators based on data, and reward and punish schools using data.

The US federal government has been dangling $4.35 billion to recruit worshipers through the Race to the Top (RTT) program, and possibly a lot more through the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Already 40 states have somehow made the conversion, although only two (Delaware and Tennessee) were deemed to have developed a system powerful enough to generate more converts in schools and thus rewarded with a total of $600 million. Other states will have a second chance and many are working to rewrite their pledges.

Both Delaware and Tennessee did an excellent job pledging to build an education system around data. The Delaware application for RTT lists three strengths that “few states can match:”

1. Delaware’s state-of-the-art system (emphasis original) captures longitudinal information about both students and teachers, and links them together. Today, the State can quickly analyze the performance of any teacher’s students over time, can track how graduates perform in college, and can link teachers to teacher preparation programs, providing rich opportunities to use data to drive performance at the system, school, and classroom levels.
2. Delaware’s rigorous statewide educator evaluation system is based on the most respected standards for teaching and leading. The system provides a multi-measure assessment of performance that incorporates student growth as one of five components…an educator can only be rated effective if they demonstrate satisfactory levels of student growth.
3. Delaware’s newly-defined regulatory framework for school turnaround gives the State the authority to intervene directly in failing schools and requires schools to demonstrate results b achieving AYP within two years. (p. A4-A5)

All three are about data. With the RTT money, Delaware promises to become even more faithful—moving from data-rich to data-driven (watch the panel interview on Youtube). The State will “administer up to three formative and summative assessments per year per student in core subjects” (p. B-10), provide “immediate information that a teacher will use” (p. B-10), “provide data coaches to aid in the use of assessment data,” make tenure and licensure decisions for new teachers based on student performance (D-8), and include in teacher and administrator annual evaluations (p. D-16). With all these plans, Delaware will be “poised to promote data-driven instruction across all schools” (p. B-23). (http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/phase1-applications/delaware.pdf)

Tennessee embraces data as enthusiastically as Delaware. Its RTT application begins with a poetic piece that asks the reviewers to:

Imagine, for a moment, a new day that is coming for Tennessee’s children and families, teachers and principals, and the State’s economic future….It is a day when middle school students will have the benefit of formative assessments, with immediate results so their teachers can measure their progress and make adjustments in time for the annual test. And then principals will use that student achievement data as a significant part of more rigorous teacher evaluations, and work with their teachers to help them succeed (p. 10).

I could go on, but you could read the applications and/or watch their presentations/panel Q&A on youTube (quite fun, actually).

More at the link.

As If We Didn't Already Know

If you've been reading TFT for a while you know I blame poverty for most of our ills in education. Now a study has been published that nobody will read or reference saying exactly that!

From Early Ed Watch:

Why such significant differences? The researchers lay out several potential reasons: The effects of poverty on brain development are linked to cognitive ability in later years. Poverty can affect a family by elevating the stress parents feel and causing an increased likelihood of harsh parenting practices. These practices have the greatest impact during the early childhood years when the mother-child relationship serves as the foundation for a child's ability to regulate his emotions. That regulation, in turn, has an effect on children's achievement, behavior, and health. With little money to spare beyond day-to-day living expenses, parents can’t afford to financially support emergent literacy with books, educational toys and activities. These experiences in the early years are the basis of prior knowledge necessary for later school success.

Poverty can even touch children in the womb, with pregnant mothers' low incomes leading them to purchase less nutritious food , which leads to babies born at lower birth weights. That same lack of nutrition can lead to unhealthy weight gain as children grow. The pattern of low birth weight followed by rapid weight gain can lead to insulin resistance, the primary characteristic of diabetes, according to researchers into childhood links to adult disease.

The study provides some of the strongest evidence yet of the link between early childhood poverty and long-term adult outcomes. A proactive birth to five public policy, targeting the well being of our youngest citizens, would go a long way toward better outcomes for all of society.

Teaching Is A Craft

I have said that I think teaching is less science and more art (craft). The snippet below is not about that specifically, but it relates.  Teachers learn to teach by teaching.  Remember student teachers?  I can't help but agree with what follows:

For those of us that like drastic solutions and saltational mutations, one way to fix the perpetual crises (existential, and otherwise) that colleges and universities seem to find themselves in would be this: get out the axe. Axe the business school, axe all the engineering programs, axe the professional programs, axe even (hard as it is to say) the fine arts programs. So no more accounting majors and no more civil engineering majors, no more masters of public health, and no more dance majors, or creative writing majors, or bassoonists, either.

The thing most of those programs have in common is that they’re crafts—things better learned by doing than by sitting and discussing the doing.

h/t 3QD

Rep. George Miller: Charter School Lover

Representative George Miller (D-CA) has decided to rely on charter schools to fix what teachers and schools can't fix: poverty. He also chooses to ignore the facts: charters are no better than traditional public schools, and are sometimes worse. And none of these reformers ever mentions the fact that nearly every charter school deals with discipline in ways traditional public schools can't. It is a farce!

From Thompson:

WASHINGTON, February 26 — Signaling the important role of innovation in driving education reform, the House Education and Labor Committee chose charter schools as the focus of its first hearing to inform its rewrite of the eight-year-old No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law.

"If our goal is to build world-class schools," Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., said, "we absolutely need to look at high-performing charter schools for research and development and replicate what they are getting right."

Miller admitted that charter schools are not a "silver bullet," but those that are high performing can improve achievement levels of low-income and minority students by instilling competition into the traditional school system.

One in a "Handful" of Hearings

Committee spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz told Thompson Publishing that charter schooling is just one of many topics that will be discussed in a "handful of hearings" on reauthorizing NCLB, also known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).

The charter school hearing focused on the All Students Achieving through Reform Act (H.R. 4330), a proposal to provide competitive grants to expand and replicate successful charter schools. (Currently, about 1.5 children are enrolled at almost 5,000 public charter schools.) The bill would give priority to students from families with low incomes or those from schools with low graduation rates or in need of improvement.

Charter school proponent Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said the bill was a "promising idea" to expand these types of schools. The federal government, he said, could encourage the growth of charter schools by eliminating state-imposed charter school enrollment and growth caps and allowing new schools to be established under an existing charter.

Other hearing participants, however, weren't so keen to see the federal government expand charter schools or, at the very least, said stronger oversight is needed.

Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., pointed to a February 2010 study by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA called Choice Without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards, which argues that "charter schools continue to stratify students by race, class, and possibly language, and are more racially isolated than traditional public schools."

Thomas Hehir, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said more needs to be done "on the authorizing level" to improve charter school access for students with special needs and be sure that these schools aren't cherry picking the best and the brightest students, leading to concentrations of the hardest-to-serve students in the traditional public system.

h/t JH

Choice Without Equity

KIPP Study Makes A Dubious Claim

KIPP Works

It’s relatively obvious to anyone who looks that the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), the nation’s largest charter management organization, produces results. Just by seeing its classrooms you start to figure this out: the students are in matching uniforms, they chant and seem energized about learning, and, other than the chants, they’re orderly and respectful. To prove that KIPP works mathematically, up until now we’ve had to rely on pretty low-level analyses that show very high numbers of their students pass state accountability exams.

A new, rigorous analysis for the National Bureau of Economic Research changes that. Using a quasi-experimental research design that capitalizes on the large number of students applying to get into but ultimately rejected from one KIPP school in Lynn, Massachusetts, the researchers were able to compare students who entered the school with those who wanted to attend but were rejected due to space restrictions. This design helps the researchers isolate KIPP attendance from motivation, parental education, environmental factors, or any other variable that might be difficult to detect.

After these controls, KIPP attendees gained .35 of a standard deviation every year in math and .12 standard deviations each year in English. Results were even more positive for Limited English Proficiency and special education students (the demographics of KIPP Lynn lottery winners matched lottery losers and the district as a whole)...

Is it so obvious KIPP works?  The study claims to deal with "creaming"--the effect that self-selection creates a superior student body--so a comparison can be made between those who got into KIPP and those who didn't.  What the study doesn't deal with is the environment at the two different schools students ended up in.  On one hand you have the students who got into KIPP along with all the other self-selected students who got in.  Great learning environment there, I assume.  Then there are the kids who ended up in non-KIPP schools with all the other students whose parents couldn't or wouldn't attempt to get them into KIPP.  Not as great a learning environment there, I assume.

The study is flawed due to this rather blatant omission of reality.  A KIPP school demands proper behavior from its students, as well as high parental participation among other things.  A non-KIPP school takes all comers, regardless their motivation.  That makes for a less ideal learning environment.

So, it's not that KIPP works; it's that KIPP has "better" (creamed) students as we have been saying forever.

CEP Recommendations

From the Center on Education Policy study, February 2010 (link):

...
Principle 5—Out-of-school influences: Consider broader social factors that affect students’ achievement and readiness for school.

Disadvantaged children as a group start school with an achievement gap. As they progress through the grades, their achievement continues to be shaped by social factors outside formal schooling, such as poverty, health and nutrition, parental education and involvement, access to high-quality child care and preschool, and availability of community resources for learning. Although ample research has corroborated the link between achievement and these other factors, federal policies hold elementary and secondary schools accountable for raising achievement and narrowing gaps with little attention to social factors.

As discussed in recommendation 10, federal efforts to promote educational equity and improve learning for all students must pay more attention to early childhood education, particularly for disadvantaged children, as well as to after-school, summer , and family educational programs. In addition, the federal role in education should be considered in the context of national efforts to address health care, economic and job security , and other social problems. If fashioned correctly and carried out well, a reformed health care system, for example, could improve student achievement by making children healthier and more ready to learn. Programs to reduce poverty and create good jobs could also help narrow achievement gaps because family income is one of the strongest predictors of students’ test scores.
...

h/t John Thompson

The Re-Segregation Of Public Schools

Lots of sniping about this study at the link.

Are Charter Schools A Civil Rights Failure?

A study released last week by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, concluded that although charter schools are a political success, they are a civil rights failure. The report found that charter schools are more racially homogenized than traditional public schools and asserted that those in the western United States are havens for white re-segregation.
Is this a fair characterization of the charter school movement?

-- Eliza Krigman, NationalJournal.com