4 reasons to rethink competition in children's sport

"The race to win turns us all into losers."

-Alfie Kohn

There is an enormous gap between what we know and what we do. Too often what we admire and aspire to does not align with our actions. Sometimes this is true in school -- sometimes it's true in sport. 

Here are 4 reasons why we need to seriously rethink how keeping score and winning can distract good intentioned adults from being better coaches, better parents and better people.

1. Adults should not be fans while children play sports because fans are not expected to do the right thing. Consider this: A "fan" is short for a "fanatic" which literally means a person with an extreme and uncritical enthusiasm or zeal, as in religion, politics or sports. The origin of the word fanatic comes from Latin fanaticus which means "mad, furious, zealous, frantic, and characterized by excessive enthusiasm".

Too often "fans" are unable to control their passion and emotions for winning and defeating others. Too often fans don't understand that excellence and winning are products of positive participation and learning, and that an intense focus on winning comes at the expense of learning and having fun.

If you only cheer, encourage or support your own child or your own team, or actively cheer against other people's children, you are not only a bad parent -- you are a bad person. "It takes a village to raise a child" applies to sport just as much as it applies to school and community. If it would be wrong for teachers in schools or parents at home to be fanatics in favour of a select few children, what makes it right in children's sport?

Adults should be less like fans and more like coaches or teachers for every child, regardless of whether they are your child or if they are on your team. Coaches and teachers, unlike fans, are associated with an entirely different set of characteristics -- they have integrity and are unconditionally supportive and encouraging while making decisions that are in every child's best interest.

2. The problem with keeping score for young children is that adults get distracted by winning at the cost of player development and learning. Winning can have the same affect gambling and alcohol have on addicts. Just like the gambler who forgets about their loved one's while sitting at the blackjack table, coaches, parents and athletes tend to forget about having fun and learning the game when winning becomes the point of sport.

The point of school and sport is to learn and have fun -- regardless of the score or the situation. We place children in classes like language arts and sports like baseball not because they are already good at reading and running, but because we believe reading and running are important for all children to learn to love, regardless of their ability. If we coach differently when the game "counts", we teach children that winning counts more than learning and having fun.

You do not teach children to win by keeping score -- you teach children to win by coaching them to love to learn the game.

Competition is for the strong -- sport and school should be for all children. See the problem?

3. Too often all of the statistics, standings and awards cheapen the games we love. Out of one side of our mouths we say that there is no "I" in team, and yet too many sports relish the opportunity to rank and sort teams and athletes. Too many teams keep statistics and records. Too many teams have Most Valuable Player awards, and too many tournaments have A Finals. All of this counting and quantifying leads us to compare and rank children in ways that we shouldn't be doing at all.

Competition is a zero-sum game which by definition means that one person or team can succeed only if others fail. Sports can be naturally competitive enough without adults adding more emphasis on winning arbitrary and artificial awards. If we want children to play sports for the right reasons, we need to stop awarding them and just let them play.

4. The purpose of sport is more sport. Whether you are 7, 37 or 77 -- whether you believe you can win or not, we want children and adult's alike to maintain a sustainable healthy, active and pro-social life-style. 

When we convince children that the purpose of sport is winning artificially scarce awards, we encourage too many children to play for the wrong reasons and others to quit. As an athlete, teacher, coach and parent, it is my experience that the children who play sports through out their childhood believe they have a chance at winning and the children who quit believe they will lose. And yet ironically, the children who play sports into their adulthood, while balancing family and work, are those who figure out that winning has little or nothing to do with why they play.

So what do we do when we want to raise a noncompetitive child in a competitive world? 

I did not become a teacher, a coach or a father so that I could merely prepare children to live in a cruel and cut-throat world. I became a teacher so that I could help children grow up and make the world a better place. Yes, the real world is full of competition that makes winners and losers out of everyone, but we don't need to immerse children in competition to learn this. When we teach children about racism, we don't immerse them in racism. I refuse to subscribe to the notion that because children will one day grow up and have bad things done to them that means we need to do bad things to them in school to get them ready for it.

Alfie Kohn makes a solid case against competition and offers 4 ways to minimize the damage:

• Avoid comparing a child's performance to that of a sibling, a classmate, or yourself as a child.

• Don't use contests ("Who can dry the dishes fastest?") around the house. Watch your use of language ("Who's the best little girl in the whole wide world?") that reinforces competitive attitudes.

• Never make your love or acceptance conditional on a child's performance. It's not enough to say, "As long as you did your best, honey" if the child learns that Mommy's attitude about her is quite different when she has triumphed over her peers.

• Be aware of your power as a model. If you need to beat others, your child will learn that from you regardless of what you say. The lesson will be even stronger if you use your child to provide you with vicarious victories. 

Raising healthy, happy, productive children goes hand in hand with creating a better society. The first step to achieving both is recognizing that our belief in the value of competition is built on myths. There are better ways for our children -- and for us -- to work and play and live.

Debunking the Persistent Myth of Lagging U.S. Schools

This was written by Alfie Kohn who writes and speaks about parenting and education. His website is here and he tweets here. This post was originally found here.

by Alfie Kohn

Beliefs that are debatable or even patently false may be repeated so often that at some point they come to be accepted as fact. We seem to have crossed that threshold with the claim that U.S. schools are significantly worse than those in most other countries. Sometimes the person who parrots this line will even insert a number -- “We’re only ____th in the world, you know!” -- although, not surprisingly, the number changes with each retelling.

The assertion that our students compare unfavorably to those in other countries has long been heard from politicians and corporate executives whose goal is to justify various “get tough” reforms: high-stakes testing, a nationalized curriculum (see under: Common Core “State” Standards), more homework, a longer school day or year, and so on. But by now the premise is apt to be casually repeated by just about everyone -- including educators, I’m sorry to say -- and in the service of a wide range of prescriptions and agendas. Just recently I’ve seen it on a petition to promote teaching the “whole child” (which I declined to sign for that reason), in a documentary arguing for more thoughtful math instruction, and in an article by the progressive journalist Barbara Ehrenreich.

Unsurprisingly, this misconception has filtered out to the general public. According to a brand-new poll, a plurality of Americans -- and a majority of college graduates! -- believe (incorrectly) that American 15-year-olds are at the bottom when their scores on tests of science knowledge are compared to students in other developed countries.

A dedicated group of educational experts has been challenging this canard over the years, but their writings rarely appear in popular publications and each typically focuses on just one of the many problems with the claim. Here, then, is a concise overview of the multiple responses you might offer the next time you hear someone declare that American kids come up short. (First, though, I'd suggest politely inquiring as to the evidence for his or her statement. The wholly unsatisfactory reply you’re likely to receive may constitute a rebuttal in its own right.)

1. Even taking the numbers at face value, the U.S. fares reasonably well. Results will vary depending on subject matter, age, which test is being used, and which year’s results are being reported. It’s possible to cherry-pick scores to make just about any country look especially good or bad. The U.S. looks considerably better when we focus on younger students, for example -- so, not surprisingly, it’s the high school numbers that tend to be cited most often. (When someone reduces all student performance to a single number, you can bet it's the one that casts our schools in the worst possible light.)

But even with older students, there may be less to the claim than meets the eye. As an article in Scientific American noted a few years back, most countries’ science scores were actually pretty similar.[1] That's worth keeping in mind whenever a new batch of numbers is released. If there’s little (or even no) statistically significant difference among, say, the nations placing third through ninth, it would be irresponsible to cite those rankings as if they were meaningful.

Overall, when a pair of researchers carefully reviewed half a dozen different international achievement surveys conducted from 1991 to 2001, they found that “U.S. students have generally performed above average in comparisons with students in other industrialized nations.”[2] And that still seems to be the case with the most recent data, which include math and science scores for grade 4, grade 8, and age 15, as well as reading scores for grade 4 and age 15. Of the eight results, the U.S. scored above average in five, average in two, and below average in one. Not exactly the dire picture that’s typically painted.

2. What do we really learn from standardized tests? While there are differences in quality between the most commonly used tests (e.g., PISA, TIMSS), the fact is that any one-shot, pencil-and-paper standardized test -- particularly one whose questions are multiple-choice -- offers a deeply flawed indicator of learning as compared with authentic classroom-based assessments.[3] One of them taps students’ skill at taking standardized tests, which is a skill unto itself; the other taps what students have learned and what sense they make of, and what they can do with, what they've learned. One is a summary statistic labeled “student achievement”; the other is an account of students’ achievements. Anyone who cites the results of a test is obliged to defend the construction of the test itself, to show that the results are not only statistically valid but meaningful. Needless to say, very few people who say something like “the U.S. is below average in math” have any idea how math proficiency has been measured.

3. Are we comparing apples to watermelons? Even if the tests were good measures of important intellectual proficiencies, the students being tested in different countries aren’t always comparable. As scholars Iris Rotberg and the late Gerald Bracey have pointed out for years, some countries test groups of students who are unrepresentative with respect to age, family income, or number of years spent studying science and math. The older, richer, and more academically selective a cohort of students in a given country, the better that country is going to look in international comparisons.[4]

4. Rich American kids do fine; poor American kids don’t. It’s ridiculous to offer a summary statistic for all children at a given grade level in light of the enormous variation in scores within this country. To do so is roughly analogous to proposing an average pollution statistic for the United States that tells us the cleanliness of “American air.” Test scores are largely a function of socioeconomic status. Our wealthier students perform very well when compared to other countries; our poorer students do not. And we have a lot more poor children than do other industrialized nations. One example, supplied by Linda Darling-Hammond: “In 2009 U.S. schools with fewer than 10 percent of students in poverty ranked first among all nations on PISA tests in reading, while those serving more than 75 percent of students in poverty scored alongside nations like Serbia, ranking about fiftieth.”[5]

5. Why treat learning as if were a competitive sport? All of these results emphasize rankings more than ratings, which means the question of educational success has been framed in terms of who’s beating whom.

a) Education ≠ economy. If our reason for emphasizing students' relative standing (rather than their absolute achievement) has to do with “competitiveness in the 21st-century global economy” -- a phrase that issues from politicians, businesspeople, and journalists with all the thoughtfulness of a sneeze, then we would do well to ask two questions. The first, based on values, is whether we regard educating children as something that’s primarily justified in terms of corporate profits.

The second question, based on facts, is whether the state of a nation’s economy is meaningfully affected by the test scores of students in that nation. Various strands of evidence have converged to suggest that the answer is no. For individual students, school achievement is only weakly related to subsequent workplace performance. And for nations, there’s little correlation between average test scores and economic vigor, even if you try to connect scores during one period with the economy some years later (when that cohort of students has grown up).[6] Moreover, Yong Zhao has shown that “PISA scores in reading, math, and sciences are negatively correlated with entrepreneurship indicators in almost every category at statistically significant levels.”[7]

b) Why is the relative relevant? Once we’ve debunked the myth that test scores drive economic success, what reason would we have to fret about our country’s standing as measured by those scores? What sense does it make to focus on relative performance? After all, to say that our students are first or tenth on a list doesn’t tell us whether they’re doing well or poorly; it gives us no useful information about how much they know or how good our schools are. If all the countries did reasonably well in absolute terms, there would be no shame in being at the bottom. (Nor would “average” be synonymous with “mediocre.”) If all the countries did poorly, there would be no glory in being at the top. Exclamatory headlines about how “our” schools are doing compared to “theirs” suggest that we’re less concerned with the quality of education than with whether we can chant, “We’re Number One!”

c) Hoping foreign kids won’t learn? To treat schooling as if were a competitive sport is not only irrational but morally offensive. If our goal is for American kids to triumph over those who live elsewhere -- to have a better ranking -- then the implication is that we want children who live in other countries to fail, at least in relative terms. We want them not to learn successfully just because they’re not Americans. That’s built into the notion of “competitiveness” (as opposed to excellence or success), which by definition means that one individual or group can succeed only if others don’t. This is a troubling way to look at any endeavor, but where children are concerned, it’s indefensible. And it’s worth pointing out these implications to anyone who uncritically cites the results of an international ranking.

Moreover, rather than defending policies designed to help our graduates “compete,” I’d argue that we should make decisions on the basis of what will help them to develop the skills and disposition to collaborate effectively. Educators, too, ought to think in terms of working with – and learning from – their counterparts in other countries so that children everywhere will become more proficient and enthusiastic learners. But every time we rank “our” kids against “theirs,” that becomes a little less likely to happen.

NOTES

1. W. Wayt Gibbs and Douglas Fox, “The False Crisis in Science Education,” Scientific American, October 1999: 87-92.

2. Erling E. Boe and Sujie Shin, “Is the United States Really Losing the International Horse Race in Academic Achievement?” Phi Delta Kappan, May 2005: 688-695.

3. See, for example, Alfie Kohn, The Case Against Standardized Testing(Heinemann, 2000); or Phillip Harris et al., The Myths of Standardized Tests(Rowman & Littlefield, 2011).

4. For example, see Iris C. Rotberg, “Interpretation of International Test Score Comparisons,” Science, May 15, 1998: 1030-31.

5. Linda Darling-Hammond, “Redlining Our Schools,” The Nation, January 30, 2012: 12. Also see Mel Riddile, “PISA: It’s Poverty Not Stupid,” The Principal Difference [NASSP blog], December 15, 2010; and Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein, “What Do International Tests Really Show About U.S. Student Performance?”, Economic Policy Institute report, January 28, 2013.

6. Keith Baker, “High Test Scores: The Wrong Road to National Economic Success,” Kappa Delta Pi Record, Spring 2011: 116-20; Zalman Usiskin, “Do We Need National Standards with Teeth?” Educational Leadership, November 2007: 40; and Gerald W. Bracey, “Test Scores and Economic Growth,” Phi Delta Kappan, March 2007: 554-56. “The reason is clear,” says Iris Rotberg. “Other variables, such as outsourcing to gain access to lower-wage employees, the climate and incentives for innovation, tax rates, health-care and retirement costs, the extent of government subsidies or partnerships, protectionism, intellectual-property enforcement, natural resources, and exchange rates overwhelm mathematics and science scores in predicting economic competitiveness” (“International Test Scores, Irrelevant Policies,”Education Week, September 14, 2001: 32).

7. Yong Zhao, “Flunking Innovation and Creativity,” Phi Delta Kappan, September 2012: 58. Emphasis added.

Hitting the target, but missing the point

This was written by Jonathan Teghtmeyer who is with the Alberta Teachers` Association. Jonathan tweets here. This post first appeared on the Alberta Teachers` Association website.

by Jonathan Teghtmeyer

Lance Armstrong is a cheater.

If I had written that a few months ago, I’d have had the pants sued off me. But since Armstrong admitted to doping in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, the chances of a lawsuit have greatly diminished.

Armstrong doesn’t believe that he is a cheater. He explained to ­Winfrey that the definition of cheating is to gain an advantage over a rival and he didn’t view his actions that way—he viewed it as a part of a level playing field. Armstrong attributes his actions to a ruthless desire to win at all costs; a desire that served him well on a bike but ultimately caused his unceremonious downfall.

Cheating is common in a world that focuses on winning. For ­example, in 2000, in the U.K., Tony Blair’s government allocated money to the British public service based on agreed-upon targets. Inquiries into this so-called “target world” found examples of “creative compliance.” In its 2002 report, the UK Commission for Health ­Improvement related the case of one particularly creative hospital, in which too many patients were waiting too long in emergency wards and, conseque-ntly, the hospital was in danger of missing its target for finding beds for patients in a timely manner. The hospital met its target by turning gurneys into beds by removing their wheels. A senior civil servant characterized this incident of cheating as “hitting the target, but missing the point.”

In another case, in 2010, Georgia’s State Department of Education ­suspected rampant cheating after it analyzed erasure marks on test bubble sheets and found that changes from incorrect to correct ­answers were inexplicably high in some schools; the state ordered an investigation.

Of the worst offenders, 21 of the 27 were from the Atlanta Public School District, where in four schools 80 per cent of classes were flagged for cheating. Could the $2,000 cash bonuses (aka merit pay) given to teachers at schools that met improvement targets have had anything to do with this?

Daniel Pink, a renowned academic on motivation and the author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, says that traditional if–then rewards tend to produce the opposite of what they were meant to achieve. A rewards system extinguishes intrinsic motivation, diminishes performance, crushes creativity, fosters ­short-term thinking and encourages cheating.

The more a system is based on rewards and winning, the more people will cheat. Armstrong didn’t feel bad about cheating because he saw it as part of the system—part of a popular culture that ­worships winners.

Cultural values are incredibly powerful, so we need to be very ­careful about the types of cultures that develop in our schools. ­Cultures based on ruthless competition divide people into winners and losers. Some will win by cheating, and people who lose in the system can become disenchanted and quit. Such a culture damages the core task of public education—preparing all learners for life.

Although some welcome increased competition in education, ­teachers must focus on collaboration and reject a culture of competition and the bad ideas, like merit pay, that come with it.

From a culture of performance to a culture of learning

Please consider taking 18 minutes and watch this video that features Alfie Kohn talking about the costs of overemphasizing achievement. I promise, you won't be disappointed.

ALFIE KOHN: "From a Culture of 'Performance' to a Culture of 'Learning'" | #PSP2012 (via @CurtisCFEE) from c f e e on Vimeo.

Here are a couple highlights:

• There is a world of difference between getting kids to focus on their performance or achievement (how well they are doing) and getting them to focus on their learning (what they are doing).
• Do we want children to get up in the morning and get excited about school because they want to learn something new or do we want them to get excited about getting an A and conquering their peers?
• The questions teachers and parents ask children tells them what we consider to be most important. "What did you learn" and "did you ask any good questions today" are distinctly different than "what grade did you get on your project" or "is your homework done".
• Do we want young children to focus on the cool stories and exciting characters or do we want them to focus on how good they are at reading?
• Do we want to make a fetish out of meta-cognition where we have students obsessing over thinking about how well they are doing?
• At what point are we overemphasizing performance and achievement?
• An intense focus on achievement and performance comes at the expense of learning.
• The purpose of education is more education.
• Yes we want children to learn, but then that means we must care very deeply about whether children want to learn which means we must provide them with a learning environment that is worth learning.
• Do we want kids to ask "am I better than I used to be" and "is this good enough" or do we want them to ask "how do things work that way" and "I wonder why the character acted that way"?
• If you want to sabotage learning, we would not only get kids focused on how well they are doing, we would get kids to focus on how well they are doing compared to others.
• Everyone loses in the raise to win.
• The behaviour that we can measure and collect data on is not what matters most, and the more we focus on these behaviours that are easy to measure, the greater the chances we will miss what matters most in respect of learning.
• How children rationalize their success matters more than their success.
• Overemphasizing achievement and performance leads to neurotic perfectionism and an acute fear of failure.

Here are 6 consequences of an overemphasis on achievement and performance:

1. Kids become less intrinsically interested in learning and learning becomes a chore.
2. Children come to attribute their success and failure to ability rather than effort.
3. Children will avoid challenging tasks to ensure higher achievement.
4. Children crumble at the first sign of failure or setbacks.
5. Children come to see their peers as obstacles to their own success.
6. The more children are focused on their achievement the shallower their thinking.

If these are the effects of overemphasizing achievement what specific classroom practices and school policies would lead children to overemphasize achievement?

Disruptive Innovation or Distracting Profiteering

I've written before about how personalization and technology can be read as a dream or a nightmare. I've also written about how Curtis Johnson & Clay Christenson's book Disrupting Class might contribute to rethinking school as a dream.

Here's the nightmare that we need to avoid.

In his post A call for President Obama to change course on education, Arthur Camins writes:

Innovative companies such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Apple have rapidly revolutionized how we all communicate. Their success is not just the result of invention, but rather in designing the integration of multiple technical and process innovations, as well as successful marketing to the public. Their transformative power is measured not only in winning over customers from rivals, but in changing the entire landscape so that their rivals must change what they offer and how they operate in order to survive. The thinking of market-based reformers is that we need to make similar rapid and dramatic change in how we educate students. The need for dramatic improvement, especially for children from low-income families, is assailable. But, for every new private sector idea that was transformative, there were thousands generated that were not. In addition, not every idea that is transformative is necessarily good for society. For example, market-supported product and process innovations in the fast food industry have transformed how and what families eat. Consumers “choose” MacDonald’s. Is this a healthy desirable outcome? Ideas rise and fall, as do the fortunes of their developers and investors. This is, I think what reformers have in mind when they push for increasing the “market share” of charter schools that will need to compete for enrollees. Customers decide whether they want to buy an iPhone or a Blackberry. As a result, Apple stocks flourish and RIM’s plummet. For reformers, schools are just another market choice. However, is this the best way to decide on the form and content of schools for children in a democracy? What happens to kids when schools open and close? Instability in the restaurant marketplace may be acceptable, but disruption in schools and teachers is a disaster for students whose lives are already too chaotic. 

There is no evidence in the United States or anywhere in the world that market-driven choice among competing charter schools is a successful systemic strategy to improve learning for all students — not anywhere! Arguably, the likely result of charter school proliferation is that some students will get to go quality schools, while many others will not. This is hardly transformative. It is a replication of what we have now. In addition, rather than mediating current geographic segregation patterns through more integrated schools, it will exacerbate racial and socioeconomic isolation.

The Parenting Trap

Check out The Parenting Trap by A.A. Gill from Vanity Fair. Here are my favorite parts:

• Forget all the advice. Forget the special tutors, camps, coaches, and therapists. A father of four argues that the biggest problem kids face is the byzantine education-industrial complex known as school, which ruins the most carefree and memorable years of their lives.

• I stand at the school gates and watch the fear in the eyes of other fathers. The barely contained panic as they herd their offspring, already looking like hobbit Sherpas, carrying enormous schoolbags full of folders and books and photocopied letters and invitations to birthdays and concerts and playdates and football and after-school math clubs. You know my younger kids carry more paperwork than I do? And my job is paperwork. And they can’t read.

• In the 100 years since we really got serious about education as a universally good idea, we’ve managed to take the 15 years of children’s lives that should be the most carefree, inquisitive, and memorable and fill them with a motley collection of stress and a neurotic fear of failure. Education is a dress-up box of good intentions, swivel-eyed utopianism, cruel competition, guilt, snobbery, wish fulfillment, special pleading, government intervention, bu­reauc­racy, and social engineering. And no one is smart enough now to understand how we can stop it.

• If you want to see the absolute proof that we’ve got it all wrong—that education is really about the fear and guilt of parents projected onto their children, then go to your own school reunion. Obviously most normal people would rather attend a naked consciousness-raising workshop. But do it once and you’ll see what the Adonises and the Venuses of your halcyon days actually did with all that promise. The boy who was captain of everything, who strode the halls like a young Alexander; the girl with the glistening hair who memorized poetry and whose golden limbs danced across a stage as a Juliet no one would ever forget. Well, they’re both sorry, seedy never-was-es now. Their finest moments are behind them. Everything after that brilliant year at school or college was mediocrity. Nothing good ever came from peaking too early.

The interesting adults are always the school failures, the weird ones, the losers, the malcontents. This isn’t wishful thinking. It’s the rule. My advice to any child reading this: If you’re particularly good at the violin or math, for God’s sake don’t let anyone find out. Particularly your parents. If they know you’re good at stuff they’ll force you to do it forever. You’ll wake up and find yourself in a sweaty dinner jacket and clip-on bow tie playing “The Music of the Night” for the ten-thousandth time in an orchestra pit. Or you’ll be the fat, 40-ish accountant doing taxes for the people who spent their school days copping a feel and learning how to roll a good joint.

What is changing about being a child

When I think about what is changing about being a child and an adolescent today that we must attend to, I find myself tying to figure out what is really plaguing public education.

If I had to pick just one problem, I would say there are two:

poverty and inequity

Some say that public education is the great equalizer. Some say that the antidote to poverty is education.

But what if the opposite is true?

What if public education perpetuates some of the worst injustices and inequities of our society? What if inequity and poverty are advanced, rather than stifled, by public education? What if public education is really the great divider?

These are scary questions -- nonetheless, important questions we really shouldn't run from or shrug at.

 So what are the implications of poverty and inequity?

With the shrinking of the middle class comes the inescapable truth that the social contract between education and community is being broken. While past generations found salvation in the advice get a good education and you'll get a good job the current generation of students are finding this to be a risky proposition.

As inequity and inequality increase, society and schools are likely to adopt an even more competitive mindset that encourages children and adults to see their peers as obstacles to their own success. When competition trumps collaboration, the ideology of rugged individualism tends to trump teamwork.

If we are competing, then we aren't collaborating. The ideology of competition says that everyone benefits, but when in reality competition is for the strong -- the winners continue to win on the backs of the losers.

Inequity and poverty are only destiny if we choose to ignore them. People who say poverty is no excuse are making excuses about doing nothing about poverty. Children never choose to live in poverty, but society can choose not to ignore it.

So where do we go from here?

Schools and society need to stop using excellence for the few as the driver for progress and start making equity for all our focus. Some might think by focusing more on equity that we have to focus less on excellence; this is a misconception. When we focus on equity, excellence becomes ubiquitous.

So how will we know if our education system is advancing inequity? If the affluent provide their children with a good education and a different education that is good enough for other people's children then we know something is amiss.

How GERM is infecting schools around the world

This was written by Pasi Sahlberg, author of “ Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland? and director general of Finland’s Center for International Mobility and Cooperation. He has served the Finnish government in various positions, worked for the World Bank in Washington D.C. and for the European Training Foundation in Italy as senior education specialist. Sahlberg has also advised governments internationally about education policies and reforms. He is also an adjunct professor of education at the University of Helsinki and University of Oulu. He can be reached at pasi.sahlberg@cimo.fi. You can follow Pasi Sahlbeg on Twitter here and read his blog here.

by Pasi Sahlberg

Ten years ago — against all odds — Finland was ranked as the world’s top education nation. It was strange because in Finland education is seen as a public good accessible to all free of charge without standardized testing or competitive private schools. When I look around the world, I see competition, choice, and measuring of students and teachers as the main means to improve education. This market-based global movement has put many public schools at risk in the United States and many other countries, as well. But not in Finland.

You may ask what has madeFinland’s schools so extraordinary. The answer has taken many by surprise. First, the Finns have never aimed to be the best in education but rather to have good schools for all of children. In other words, equity in education comes before a ‘race to the top’ mentality in national school reforms.

Second, Finns have taken teachers and teaching seriously by requiring that all teachers must be well trained in academic universities. All teachers should enjoy professional autonomy and public trust in their work. As a consequence, teaching has been a popular career choice among young Finns for three decades now. Today the Finnish government invests 30 times more in professional development of its teachers and administrators than testing its students’ performance in schools.

Third, Finnish educators have learned systematically from other countries how to reform education and improve teaching in schools. The United States has been a special source of inspiration to Finland since John Dewey a century ago. Such American educational innovations as cooperative learning, problem-based teaching and portfolio assessment are examples of the practices invented by teachers and researchers in the United States that are now commonly found in many Finnish classrooms.

One thing that has struck me is how similar education systems are. Curricula are standardized to fit to international student tests; and students around the world study learning materials from global providers. Education reforms in different countries also follow similar patterns. So visible is this common way of improvement that I call it theGlobal Educational Reform Movement or GERM. It is like an epidemic that spreads and infects education systems through a virus. It travels with pundits, media and politicians. Education systems borrow policies from others and get infected. As a consequence, schools get ill, teachers don’t feel well, and kids learn less.

GERM infections have various symptoms. The first symptom is more competition within education systems. Many reformers believe that the quality of education improves when schools compete against one another. In order to compete, schools need more autonomy, and with that autonomy comes the demand for accountability. School inspections, standardized testing of students, and evaluating teacher effectiveness are consequences of market-like competition in many school reforms today. Yet when schools compete against one another, they cooperate less.

The second symptom of GERM is increased school choice. It essentially positions parents as consumers empowering them to select schools for their children from several options and thereby promotes market-style competition into the system as schools seek to attract those parents. More than two-thirds of OECD countries have increased school choice opportunities for families with the perceptions that market mechanisms in education would allow equal access to high-quality schooling for all. Increasing numbers of charter schools in the United States, secondary school academies in England, free schools in Sweden and private schools in Australia are examples of expanding school choice policies. Yet according to the OECD, nations pursuing such choice have seen both a decline in academic results and an increase in school segregation.

The third sign of GERM is stronger accountability from schools and related standardized testing of students. Just as in the market place, many believe that holding teachers and schools accountable for students’ learning will lead to improved results. Today standardized test scores are the most common way of deciding whether schools are doing a good job. Teacher effectiveness that is measured using standardized tests is a related symptom of GERM. According to the Center for Public Education, standardized testing has increased teaching to the test, narrowed curricula to prioritize reading and mathematics, and distanced teaching from the art of pedagogy to mechanistic instruction.

Healthy school systems are resistant to GERM and its inconvenient symptoms. In these countries, teaching remains an attractive career choice for young people. My niece Veera is a good example of this.

Seven years ago, when she was graduating from a high school in Helsinki, she called me and asked my advice on how to get into the teacher education program in the university where I had been working as teacher educator earlier. I told her that as a straight-A graduate, she should feel comfortable with the entrance examination and be herself in the interview.

In Finland primary school teacher education is a master’s level academic research-based degree similar to degrees in law, economics or medicine. She read required books, took the exam and was invited to the final interview where only the top candidates were selected. A month later, she called me in tears and told me she was not accepted. I asked her what was the toughest question in the interview. She said: “Why do you want to become a teacher when you could become a lawyer or doctor instead?”

Afterwards she wrote me a letter about her interest in teaching. This is what she wrote: “First is the internal drive to help people to discover their strengths and talents, but also to realize their weaknesses and incompleteness. I want to be a teacher because I want to make a difference in children’s lives and for this country. My work with children has always been based on love and care, being gentle and creating personal relations with those with whom I work. This is the only way that I can think will give me fulfillment in my life.”

The following spring she applied again. She was accepted from a ten-fold number of applicants and she recently earned her master’s degree as a primary school teacher. If the Finnish education system had been infected by GERM like many other countries, Veera and many of her peers would never have chosen teaching as their life career.

Addressing pandemic disinterest in the teaching profession with Teach for America and Teach First programs may be a solution to local shortcomings but will not cure the systemic infections that cause current educational underperformance in many countries. We should instead restore the fundamental meaning and values of school education. Without public schools, our nations and communities are poorly equipped to value humanity, equality and democracy. I think we should not educate children to be similar according to a standardized metric but help them to discover their own talents and teach them to be different from one another. Diversity is richness in humanity and a condition for innovation.

A growing number of students in Korea and Japan are taking their own lives because they can’t take the pressure by the adults anymore. Recent suicides of two 14-year-old Kenyan schoolgirls, Mercy Chebet and Sylvia Wanjiku, add a sad chapter in the book of the victims of GERM.

We must stop the GERM that puts such a pressure on children in schools through competition, choice, and accountability. Choosing collaboration, equity and trust-based responsibility as the main drivers in education reforms enhance immunity of our school systems to stop GERM and have good school for all children.

Chinese students learn on IV drips

Some people claim that school's primary function is to prepare children for the real world. Those same people tend to say that the real world is very competitive and that we must prepare kids for that competitive world.

Is this what that looks like?

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Vouchers, direct instruction and standardized testing

"Standardized exams serve mostly to make dreadful froms of teaching appear successful."

-Alfie Kohn

Edmonton Journal blogger David Staples wrote a post titled "Redford will be dealing a blow to elementary students if the government axes provincial achievement tests."

Staples laments Alberta's newly elected Premier Alison Redford's campaign promise to do away with grade 3 and 6 provincial achievement tests. He is also critical that Redford's education minister Thomas Lukaszuk is currently reviewing how provincial achievement tests are conducted.

Before any changes are made, David Staples implores Redford to consult with all kinds of experts on testing, including Mark Holmes, professor emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

I had never heard of Mark Holmes so I googled him and found that he is an honorary patron with The Society for Quality Education (SQE). Here's what I learned.

Essentially, SQE believes the root of the problem in public schools is child-centered learning. They believe that progressive education that encourages children to play an active role in constructing an understanding from the inside out while interacting with others is nothing more than a fad.

Holmes and SQE are critical of the idea that learning should be customized to meet the individual needs and interests of each student. They are unimpressed that child-centered learning is designed to be fun, engaging and hands-on.

They go on to make the sweeping generalization that girls tend to respond well to child-centered learning, but low-income students and boys suffer.

It's important to note that the only evidence they use to claim any of this are standardized test scores.

So what is their solution? Holmes and SQE want public education to get back to the basics with more emphasis on reading, writing and numeracy with a strong focus on direct instruction and lecturing, including phonics, drills, and rote learning.

The way forward, they suggest, is by taking money from the provincial public schools' budget and provide parents with school vouchers. The idea being that funding would follow the student to whichever school the families choose, which would force schools to place a portion of their already scarce resources towards competing against each other to attract students.

It's been said before that the real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure ideology and mother nature hasn't misled us into thinking something that you don't actually know. I'm all for changing and improving education, but is there any evidence that endorses a 'back to basics' learning environment with school vouchers?

In the U.S., Milwaukee's voucher program was launched in 1998 and now serves 20,000 low income students and remains the longest-running program in the United States. In Milwaukee, the voucher program claimed to have two goals: the first was to provide a better education for poor children and the second was to create a competitive market among public schools, forcing all schools to improve. The theory being a rising tide would lift all boats.

Milwaukee has had vouchers for years, so it might be interesting to see whether they have fulfilled their mandate. American education historian Diane Ravitch writes, "Milwaukee's 21-year experiment has demonstrated that competition did not cause all boats to rise." Even if standardized test scores told us all we needed to know about these schools (and they don't), students in Milwaukee public schools continue to get higher scores than students in voucher schools. Vouchers fail even when held to their own unimaginative and narrow criteria (standardized test scores).

Pedro Noguera is a Professor of Education at New York University where his research focuses on the ways in which schools are influenced by social and economic conditions in the urban environment. Noguera explains that there are problems with using vouchers as a means to improve schools for poor children. He writes:

The problem with using vouchers as a means to expand access to quality schools for poor children is that it is based on the premise that parents are the one's who do the choosing. The truth of the matter is that schools are the ones who choose and not parents. 

When a low-income parent shows up at a private school, especially an elite school with few poor children of color, there is no guarantee that their child will be chosen for admission - even if the parent has a voucher. This is particularly true if the child has learning disabilities, behavior problems or doesn't speak English very well. As we've seen with many charter schools, such children are often under-served because they are harder to serve and possession of a voucher won't change that. Many private schools maintain quality through selective admissions and vouchers won't change that either. 

Moreover, choice assumes that a parent has access to information on the choices available and transportation. Neither of these can be assumed. Many parents choose a school based on how close it is to their home or work, rather than the school's reputation. Many are unwilling to send their children to schools in neighborhoods far from their homes, particularly if transportation is not provided.

The irony here is that organizations like the SQE, political parties like the Wild Rose Alliance and other American Education Deformers, continue to prop up vouchers in the face of mounting evidence against their use.

Vouchers and choice tend to benefit those who have already "won the lottery" and often alienates and marginalizes those who can least afford it. Competition and the free market is for the strong. Public education is for all. See the problem?
So if vouchers haven't proven to help poor children learn better, will a 'back to basics' movement help them?

I've heard a lot of people complain about school. I've worked with unhappy parents and angry students who have shared with me how they have been wounded by school. I've listened to politicians and policy-makers describe why schools need to improve. In fact, I spend a good chunk of my time on my blog writing about how school should look a little less like school.

I even participated in Alberta Education's Inspiring Action that engages Albertans in a dialogue about transforming our education system, but I have never, and I mean never, heard anyone ever suggest that what school needs is more lectures, more direct instruction, more worksheets, more textbook drills and more rote learning.

When I hear someone say that we need to get back to basics, my immediate response is "when did we leave?" In his book The Schools Our Children Deserve, Alfie Kohn writes:

Proponents of traditional education often complain that the model they favor is on the wane. They're apt to describe themselves as a brave minority under siege, fighting an uphill battle for old-fashioned methods that have been driven out of the schools by an educational establishment united in its desire for radical change.

Such claims are understandable as a political strategy; it's always rhetorically advantageous to position yourself as outside the establishment and to describe whatever you oppose as "fashionable." To those of us who spend time in real schools, though, claims about the dominance of progressive teaching represent an inversion of the truth so audacious as to be downright comical. As we slip into a new century, traditional education is alive and well - as I see it - damaging a whole new generation of students. If this isn't always obvious, it may be because we rarely think about how many aspects of education could be different but aren't. What we take for granted as being necessary features of the school experiences are actually reflections of one kind of schooling - the traditional kind. 

Consider: Just as we did, our kids spend most of their time in school with children their own age. Most of high school instruction is still divided into 45-50 minute periods. Students still have very little to say about what they will do and how they will learn. Good behaviour or meritorious academic performance, as determined unilaterally by adults, is still rewarded; deviations are still punished. Grades are still handed out; awards assemblies are still held. Students are still "tracked," particularly in the older grades, so that some take honors and advanced placement courses while others get "basic" this and "remedial" that. Kids may be permitted to learn in groups periodically, but at the end of the day eyes must still be kept on one's own paper. Even from a purely physical standpoint, schools today look much as they did decades ago.

While it's true that traditional education can be found in rich and poor communities, the truth is that poor children are often subjected to poor teaching more often than their affluent peers.

In his article The Pedagogy of Poverty Versus Good Teaching, Martin Haberman writes about a typical form of teaching that has become accepted as basic. Children living in poverty are often provided a wealth of ritualistic routines that have teachers lecture, test and punish non-compliance while the students play a passive, seated role of regurgitating factual information. In this environment, Haberman explains, students can 'succeed' without ever becoming engaged or thoughtful.

Like Haberman, author Jonathan Kozol adds: "The children of the suburbs learn to think and to interrogate reality," while inner-city kids "are trained for non-reflective acquiescence." Paulo Freire's book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed further outlines the oppressive nature of an education that is simply done to us by someone else.

Debra Stipek, dean of School Education at Stanford University puts it this way: "Drill-and-skill is not how middle class children got their edge, so why use a strategy to help poor kids catch up that didn't help middle class kids in the first place?"

In his article Poor Teaching for Poor Children... in the name of Reform, Alfie Kohn outlines a stinging indictment of the sit-and-get, spew-and-forget characteristics of a traditional education. Kohn writes:

The pedagogy of poverty is not what’s best for the poor. There’s plenty of precedent. A three-year study (published by the U.S. Department of Education) of 140 elementary classrooms with high concentrations of poor children found that students whose teachers emphasized “meaning and understanding” were far more successful than those who received basic-skills instruction. The researchers concluded by decisively rejecting “schooling for the children of poverty . . . [that] emphasizes basic skills, sequential curricula, and tight control of instruction by the teacher.

Learning is not like instant mashed potatoes; kids have not been through an industrial process of cooking, mashing and dehydrating to yield packaged convenience learning that can be reconstituted in the classroom in seconds by simply adding direct instruction and testing.
To suggest that school for any student, regardless of their socio-economic status, needs to be less actively child-centered and more passive not only ignores 60 years of research, but it also borders somewhere between ridiculous and asinine.

As for standardized tests, they tell us as much about learning as reality television tells us about reality. Very little of what matters most in schools can be reduced to a number, and as long as we continue to stifle the education debate by limiting ourselves to the narrow measurements of standardized tests, cancerous and destructive forms of education reform will continue to look appealing. As one educational researcher put it, "Measurable outcomes may be the least significant results of learning."

A rule of thumb I use: A person's understanding for standardized testing rapidly diminishes with their demands to test younger and younger children. Virtually all specialists condemn the practice of giving standardized tests to children younger than 8 or 9 years old.

Anyone who suggests that 5 year olds should be tested as soon as they enter school, followed by annual testing clearly hasn't paid attention to the cancerous effects of 10 years of No Child Left Behind's testing policies in the United States. Nor have they been paying attention to China's recent desire to liberate their nation from standardized testing's reign of terror. Like those who favor vouchers and direct instruction, pro-standardized testers are unfazed by research or real life -- for them, ideology trumps reason.

It's interesting that support for standardized testing intensifies the further you get from the students. There's a reason for this -- standardized test scores provide people who have absolutely no desire to spend time with children the opportunity to judge and control what goes on inside of schools without ever stepping foot in schools.

It makes little sense to pursue reform strategies such as vouchers, direct instruction and standardized testing which are absent in countries with the most successful education systems. As an Albertan who is both a parent and an educator, I would rather Premier Redford and Minister Lukaszuk spend their time with more informed and inspring people than those who are willing to advance their ideology and play politics with education at our children's peril.

The folly of artificial and arbitrary recognition

I used to teach at a school that had a tradition around Thanksgiving. Every kid in the school was encouraged to run or walk around the school yard perimeter with their peers. We called it the Turkey Trot.

In the early years, we would record the times of the students as they crossed the finish line. It was deemed by someone that every student who finished the race inside of 10 minutes would receive 10% bonus on their physical education report card grade. The student who finished under 10 minutes were eligible to have their name placed in a draw for all sorts of prizes, ranging from free turkeys, movie passes, frisbees and assorted gift cards. The top three boys and three girls from each grade level were also identified and paraded in front of the entire population of the school.

All this was done, following the run, in an awards ceremony in the school's gymnasium for the entire school to see.

As I developed professionally and gained a more sophisticated understanding for the damaging effects of pitting children against each other in an attempt to win artificially scarce awards, I engaged in conversations with my peers about how we could improve the Turkey Trot.

If you were to ask any staff member why we were doing the Turkey Trot, most would have said something like this:

It's healthy to get outside and be active.

Over the years, I started to see a disturbing trend. Some students were very excited to participate while others were very turned off by the whole affair. Some of the keeners couldn't wait to run, while others were willing to risk skipping school, pretending to be ill, or even begged to do their homework in the library. "Just don't make me do the Turkey Trot," they would plead.

Upon closer inspection, I was able to categorize these two kinds of students:

The excited students thought they had a chance at winning. The avoiders thought they had no chance.

Through many conversations, I was able to convince my colleagues to allow all children who participated in the Turkey Trot to be eligible for the prizes and drop the 10% bonus. In short, I was able to convince them that these extrinsic motivators and manipulators were not why we wanted to encourage children to participate in an outdoor, fun run.

When we made these changes, it became a lot easier to honestly say to kids:

This isn't about winning or losing. It's about trying your best, whatever that looks like.

All was well, until one year someone was cleaning out the storage areas of the school and came across a whole bunch of very old, very lame hats. They were like the 1980s gas station ball caps you can find at garage sales for a nickel. I think they even had a pom pom on the top. The school didn't want them, so someone decided to give them away to the boys and girls that finished in the top three for their grade level.

Sounds harmless, right?

Maybe not.

Imagine this. While the top three boys and girls for each grade level finished their run, they eagerly took their hats. While the entire population of the school sat down in the gymnasium for the prize draws, there were two categories of students: the hats and the hatless.

As fast as they could be handed out, the hats became valuable status symbols. Having a hat allowed the students to elevate and separate themselves from the crowd. They were the winners; everyone else was... well, just everyone else, but not quite as good.

As I looked on, I could see clearly what we had done. I leaned over to a colleague and asked them to look at the crowd and tell me what they saw. At first, they didn't notice anything but a gym full of our students, but after a moment they too could see that by passing out hats to only a select few, the students were able to rank and sort themselves.

Don't get me wrong. Those who passed out the hats had no malice intent. In fact, I would go so far as to say they had the best of intentions, but as the old saying goes, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." My point here is that we need to be acutely aware of the unintended consequences that accompany our simplest actions. In this context, passing out an artificially scarce number of hats to an arbitrary number of students creates a kind of caste system. Keep in mind that the latin root of caste is castus which means "pure, cut off, segregated"and is etymologically related to carere which means "to cut off".

If we can agree that public education is for everyone and that competition is for the strong, then we have no business creating learning environments that are built on exclusion.

It's important to note that when the students exited the gymnasium, almost every single one of the hats were either left on the floor or placed in the garbage. Because their purpose as a status symbol had expired, there was no reason to continue wearing the hats.

After all, they were awfully lame.

Why I don't like the Edublog Awards

Because I believe learning should always be framed as a collaborative activity and never a competitive one, I am critical of the Edublog awards.

Before you run off hating me, I would ask that you suspend judgment long enough to at least hear me out -- then you can run off hating me.

I realize this isn't going to win me many fans, and I'm likely to lose followers on Twitter and subscribers to my blog, but I guess that would be my point. How many people have jumped on the Edublog Award bandwagon and think it's a good idea? Is anyone out there giving pause long enough to think about whether educational leaders should be "recognizing excellence" in a way that pits us against each other as we vie for artificially scarce awards?

That I can count on one hand the number of people who publicly speak their doubts about these awards, leads me to believe that many have resigned themselves to groupthink or simply don't feel comfortable sharing their thoughts. Either way, this is can't be okay.

There are many responses to my criticism for the Edublog Awards. Here are a couple followed by my rebuttal:

Competition might be bad for kids, but we are adults.

• Even if this were true, there is an award for "The Best Student Blog". This year, five children who attend K-12 schools somewhere in the world named Jaden, Miriam, Jake, Jarrod and Gemma were pit against each other so adults could vote for their favorite. Would this be an appropriate way to "recognize excellence" in your classroom? If not, then why is this okay? On top of this, scientific research and anecdotal evidence both tell us that collaboration trumps competition. Always. This is true for children and adults alike.
• It's also important to note that the children are always watching. While we flood Twitter with our support for this competition, we are modelling for our students and colleagues that competition is more important than collaboration, recognition is something you get when you defeat others and success is arbitrarily scarce.

Why do some people feel compelled to rain on others' parade? Can't we recognize excellence?

• Labelling doubts about Edublog Awards as a personal attack on the winners misrepresents the issue as personal when it is a systemic problem. The issue isn't over who was nominated or who won, rather, the real issue is that anyone is nominated or that anyone wins or loses. I don't disparage the winners anymore than the losers (full disclosure: I was nominated) -- but I do wish that this kind of recognition was not artificially scarce and dispersed to only a select, popular few.

Can't we celebrate excellence? Why are you so against naming names?

• I'm not arguing that nobody can be named. In fact, I'm all for recognizing excellence and naming lots of names. But I am against the notion that we arbitrarily name only a select few names while arbitrarily excluding others. Recognizing excellence and declaring winners are not the same thing.

So if you're against awards, does this mean you will not accept awards? Does this mean your children will not accept awards?

• That it is really, really hard for people to say 'no thank you' to being nominated or winning should tell us something about the bullying nature of awards. Someone who turns down a nomination or an award is likely to be seen as ungrateful and someone who does not win or is not nominated and criticizes is likely to be labelled jealous. Either way, the idea that we should compete for artificially scarce recognition remains unscathed. The status quo has remarkable momentum.

• I have seen with my own eyes how awards can rupture relationships between winners and losers.  I've seen people placed in situations where they were made to win over and conquer their peers and they wanted nothing to do with the situation. This sounds awfully like bullying to me. This is precisely why I helped abolish award ceremonies at one of my previous schools. Chris Wejr has a remarkable list of links on rethinking award ceremonies and has started a movement for Honouring All Students. What's good for the kids is equally good for the adults.

These awards allow us to expand our Professional Learning Networks by introducing us to new blogs.

• I agree. It's true. These awards can be used to grow your network but I would argue that this is better done through collaboration rather than competition. Do we need the Oscars to tell us which movies to watch or Oprah to decide which books to read? If you want to find a good book, go to a library that has lots of books. If we really cared about expanding our PLNs, why not make the EduBlog Awards like the phone book or a dictionary where all blogs are listed for all to see all year long?

Our belief in the value of competition is built on a great number myths. It takes courage to cultivate a community of learners without resorting to killing it with competition.

Competition Kills Community

The case against competition is rich with both anecdotal evidence and scientific research. Alfie Kohn's book No Conflict may be the definitive work for helping us see why the right amount of competition for children is none at all.

In her book Widening the Circle: The Power of Inclusive Classrooms, Mara Sapon-Shevin summarizes the case against competition nicely:

Low achievers are rarely motivated by competition because they do not perceive themselves as having a chance to win. A small number of high achievers may be motivated, but they are generally motivated to "win" rather than to learn. Competition often encourages cheating, poor interpersonal behavior, and sometimes even lower achievement (if there's a prize to the first child who finishes a book, I am unlikely to undertake reading the long and challenging book that might actually stretch me). And for all students, competition damages community and student's willingness to help one another succeed.

For more on competition:

Treating Kids like Pets

Competition is for the strong. Public education is for everyone. See the problem?

No Grades and Group Work

Charmed by Choice: Undermining Public Education

The assault on public education is not just an agenda pursued by some Americans. In Canada, there are those who would like to dismantle our public education system, and in Alberta they are the Progressive Conservatives and the Wildrose Party.

Of course they don't come out and say they want to destroy public education -- instead they sell their privatization agenda by talking about the freedom to choose.

It's quite ingenius really -- I mean who in their right mind would object to having more choice? This assault on public education is phrased very carefully so to make it very difficult to oppose -- because if you do oppose it, the quick response might be "what's wrong with you, you don't want choice?"

At this point, it's important to remember that when something looks too good to be true, it's usually not what it appears -- and when it comes to those who are selling choice as a means to authentically improve public education, they are either neglectfully ignorant, willfully blind or outright lying.

Pedro Noguera explains why school choice is not what it seems in his guest post for NBC's Education Nation:

The problem with using vouchers as a means to expand access to quality schools for poor children is that it is based on the premise that parents are the one's who do the choosing. The truth of the matter is that schools are the ones who choose and not parents. 

When a low-income parent shows up at a private school, especially an elite school with few poor children of color, there is no guarantee that their child will be chosen for admission - even if the parent has a voucher. This is particularly true if the child has learning disabilities, behavior problems or doesn't speak English very well. As we've seen with many charter schools, such children are often under-served because they are harder to serve and possession of a voucher won't change that. Many private schools maintain quality through selective admissions and vouchers won't change that either. 

Moreover, choice assumes that a parent has access to information on the choices available and transportation. Neither of these can be assumed. Many parents choose a school based on how close it is to their home or work, rather than the school's reputation. Many are unwilling to send their children to schools in neighborhoods far from their homes, particularly if transportation is not provided. 

The idea that vouchers would solve the lack of access to quality schools in poor, inner city neighborhoods is based on the belief that the free market is a better regulator of goods and services than the government. While this idea sounds good in theory, it's not borne out by the facts. 

In most inner city communities in the United States, the free market is not effective at providing healthy food at affordable prices, banking services or safe, affordable housing. That's because the poor in the inner city constitute a "captured market" and suppliers of goods and services are typically able to get away with low-quality products because community members have few available alternatives. 

Systems of school choice only work when there are lots of good choices available and a means for parents to exercise their choices. This can only be done when government insures quality by holding schools accountable for the quality of education they provide. Of course, our policymakers have largely failed to do this because they've focused on accountability as measured by student test scores, rather than concentrating on insuring that all schools have the resources and support systems in place to meet the needs of the students they serve, and holding themselves accountable if they don't.

Today more than ever, we need public education to educate all children to a standard that at one time may have been reserved for the elite. This means we can no longer afford to ignore the challenge of educating those who are difficult to educate.

In his publication Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform, Marc Tucker tackles education funding:

Two decades ago and more, elementary and secondary education in most of the provinces was funded much the way it is funded in the United States, with each locality raising much of the money locally, with the provinces providing additional sums intended to moderate the disparities in per student funding that such a system inevitably produces.  But, about 20 years ago, this began to change.  Conservative governments, in response to complaints from citizens about skyrocketing local tax rates, initiated a move to steadily reduce reliance on local taxes and to increase the portion of the total budget paid for by the province.  In the biggest provinces now, little if any of the money for public education is raised locally.  All or almost all comes from the province.  Not surprisingly, the gross inequities that came with raising money locally are gone, too, and Canada, like the top performing countries elsewhere, is moving toward a funding system intended to promote high achievement among all students, which means putting more money behind hard to educate children than children who are easier to educate.

Vouchers and choice tend to benefit those who have already "won the lottery" and often alienates and marginalizes those who can least afford it. Competition and the free market is for the strong. Public education is for all. See the problem?

In some US states, there is a movement underway called the "Parent Trigger" which is being sold as a way to empower parents in reforming and improving their children's schools. However, upon closer inspection this is no more than another fraudulent ploy with a charming name whose objective is to undermine public education. Diane Ravitch writes:

In early 2010, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor of California, the state legislature passed the "Parent Empowerment Act." This law is commonly known as the Parent Trigger. It allows a majority of parents in a low-performing school to sign a petition that leads to various sanctions for the school: firing all or some of the staff, turning the school over to charter management, or closing the school. These are similar to the options in the U.S. Department of Education's School Improvement Grant program. All of them are punitive, none is supportive of changing the school for the better, and none has a shred of evidence to show that it will improve the school. Neither the Parent Trigger nor the federal SIG program offers any constructive alternatives to unhappy parents, only ways to punish the school for low scores.

Supporters of the Parent Trigger say it empowers parents, especially poor parents, and gives them a tool with which to change their school. They say that it enhances not only parent power, but school choice.

Throwing educational funding to the competitive free market via school vouchers and selling it as the freedom to choose may allow politicians to look good but it offers a hollow promise to the families that can least afford to compete. It's sadly ironic that education reforms built around choice, competition and parent empowerment tend to victimize the very people they profess to be supporting.

Jose Reyes, Ryan Braun, Ted Williams and Campbell's Law

What if yesterday's National League Batting Title is metaphorical of how our obsession with numerical data and statistics is corrupting our love for baseball and learning?

Yesterday, September 28, was the last day of Major League Baseball's regular season. The pennant races proved to be full of barn-burning action, but to be honest, that's not what I found most interesting.

Today, I want to talk about Ted Williams, Jose Reyes and Ryan Braun.

First, some history.

Seventy years ago yesterday, Ted Williams went into the last day of the 1941 regular season with an epic batting average of .39955 which would have been rounded up to .400. When faced with the opportunity to not play on the last day of the season, thus ensuring his record-book average, Williams chose to play in a double-header against the Philadelphia Athletics.

Williams ended up going 6 for 8 that day and raised his average to an impressive .406. Later, Williams explained that had he not played, he would not have deserved the title. At the time, this was Williams first of six batting titles, and today, he is the only player since 1925 to finish the regular season with a .400 batting average.

Going into yesterday's final day of the regular season, the 2011 National League Batting Title was a two horse race between New York's Jose Reyes who had a small lead over Milwaukee's Ryan Braun.

Reyes, however, chose a very different strategy than Ted Williams.

After laying down a first inning bunt single, Jose Reyes promptly pulled himself from the game. This strategy allowed Reyes to preserve his league leading average while simultaneously forcing Ryan Braun into a position where he would need to go 3 for 4, in order to have a chance at the title. Unfortunately for Braun, he went 0 for 4.

But here's the difference, while Reyes chose to quit before the first inning was even over, Braun chose to play the entire game. Reyes collects accolades while Braun goes home empty handed. Reyes gets remembered. Braun forgotten.

Are you as disgusted as I am?

This story epitomizes the cancerous effects of our mania for reducing the things we love, like baseball and learning, to numbers. When an obsession with our batting average actually convinces us to quit playing or a fetish for our grade-point average persuades us to quit learning, I think it's time to pause and reflect on how our use of data is sabotaging our ultimate goals.

If the point is to succeed and/or conquer others rather than to stretch one's thinking or discover new ideas and abilities, then it is completely logical and rational for Jose Reyes and students to want to do whatever is easiest. To do what ever is easiest, which sometimes includes quitting like Jose Reyes, can maximize the chances of success or minimize the odds of failure.

To be clear, this isn't a Jose Reyes or little Johnny problem. This is a systemic problem that is the result of our mania for reducing something as magnificently messy as baseball and learning to statistics and grades. Campbell's Law tells us that the more any one indicator (such as test scores or batting averages) are used for decision making, the more that indicator will suffer from corruption, therefore, bastardizing the very processes it was meant to monitor.

There is no substitute for what a teacher can see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears when observing and interacting with students while they are still learning. Because the children are always watching us, I fear they will learn the same dangerous lesson from Jose Reyes that they learn from grading; that real learning and strategically conquering others are the same thing.

Video from SOS March

Here is a short video from the Save Our Schools March that took place July 28-31, 2011.

My favorite parts include:

• Matt Damon gives a lesson on the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. "Do you think job insecurity makes me work hard? A teacher wants to teach! Why else would you take a shitty salary and really long hours and do that job unless you really love to do it?"
• When the "reporter" sarcastically "asked" the question: "Are first grade teachers intellectuals that need to be protected?" I damn near swallowed my tongue. The gentleman's response was well put: "I hope that they have studied child development.
• When Deborah Meier was asked about funding for education she replied: "We should give as much money as rich people think they need to for their children."
• My local grocery store is not analogous of my local public school. Period.
• Jonathan Kozol was asked about vouchers being a solution to poverty: "Vouchers and charter schools are the worst possible answer because first off all they will never serve more than two or three percent -- maybe five percent at most of the population."
• Reporter: "So we need more charter schools." Kozol: "No, that's insane. First of all charter schools on average are no more successful than public schools. The only ones you hear about are the super schools - the ones that get on Opera.
• Competitions have winners and losers. Public Education is for everyone.

Near the end the "reporter" implies we are all losers with public education. This of course plays on the fact that there are problems in public education. Yes there are problems in public education, and I blog about how we can improve almost everyday. But I see these issues as problems to be solved, not destroyed or ignored.

If something is broken, you don't destroy it -- you fix it.

It's not about the winning

My four-year old daughter Kayley and I went for a visit with her great-grandmother Betty.

Kayley was quick to say, "Gramma, I have soccer tonight."

"Oh, really. Do you run around and try to win?" Grandma asked.

Kayley paused and half-rolled her eyes, "oh Grandma, it's not about winning... it's about having fun."

Grandma and I looked at each other and grinned. I was a little surprised to hear this from my four-year old, while Grandma turned to Kayley and said, "that's quite profound, Kayley. How right you are."

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The truth is that much of the conventional wisdom surrounding the motivational effects of competition prove to be mythological. If you are like me and you enjoy a good competitive game this might be a tough pill to swallow. After all, it's not easy to challenge some of the foundations of our reality.

A familiar challenge to rethinking the conventional wisdom surrounding competition goes something like this:

In the real world there's lots of competition, and because kids live in the real world, they need to be prepared to be competitive.

I agree that there's plenty of competition in the real world, and I'm even willing to admit that children should be literate in the art and science of competition. But let's be clear, even if a good case can be made for learning about the effects and consequences of competition, that is not the same as immersing them in it.

Acknowledgment

One of the best things school can teach kids is that they can acknowledge others' achievements without feeling diminished or competitive.

The fear of exclusion

When we confuse harder with better, we run the enormous risk of allowing a scarcity of success, via desperate competitiveness, to creep into the classroom.

When we brag about how many kids couldn't cut it in our class, or how quickly we can cull the heard, or efficiently separate the wheat from the chaff, we frame learning as an act of compliance.

When we take as much pride in the number of students who fail as we do with those who succeed, we invest in a learning environment built on exclusion.

When we define our own success as educators by wearing students' failures as a badge of honour, we teach powerful lessons to not only those who are excluded but to all of us who witness the exclusion. Under these threatening circumstances, we wonder and worry what it means for us and for own safety and desperate need to be included - we eagerly comply to be included out of a fear of being excluded.

Under these conditions, real learning doesn't stand a chance.

Learning as a competitive sport

Every time we cast learning as if it were a competitive sport by ranking and sorting kids where one must conquer another, we fail children more than they could ever fail us.

The best parents and teachers never make success artificially scarce by ensuring that if one child succeeds another must fail - but that is exactly what we are doing when we make learning a competition.

When we encourage children to raise their grade or ranking in comparison to their peers, we are really saying that we want other children to do badly.

Is there any surprise that Alfie Kohn describes this practice as "intellectually and morally bankrupt"?