Those neglected middle schools

It’s fall, and students are back in school. People who want to fix education, or at least improve it, often focus on “dropout factory” high schools or access to pre-kindergarten instruction. But middle schools tend to get ignored.

In “Bad Grades” (Pacific Standard, September/October), Dana Goldstein reports on studies done on middle schools and points to ways they can better meet the needs of the students within them.

A recent study from the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign of 1,400 Midwestern middle schoolers “found that about a fifth of students reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment, bullying or abuse, often within the classroom,” Goldstein writes.

Another study showed that 28 percent of Taiwanese eighth and ninth graders earned scores on a math test that placed them at an accomplished level, while only 6 percent of U.S. eighth and ninth graders did.

But don’t blame the students, says Goldstein. Middle schools are poorly designed to meet their students’ needs. Five studies, however, provide some hope.

1. Accept that middle schoolers are adolescents. “Today,” writes Goldstein, “puberty’s onset is happening months and often years earlier than it did in the 1960s.” The most likely cause of this change is diets high in fat and processed sugar. “Early puberty,” she writes, “is associated with depression, misbehavior, academic struggle and sexual initiation at a younger age.”

Middle schools should provide a supportive environment and, writes Goldstein, “because the adolescent brain is not at its best in the early morning, the opening bell should ring closer to 9 a.m. than to 7 or 8.”

2. Crack down hard on truancy. A study of sixth graders in Philadelphia found that, “of the students who failed either English or math in sixth grade, less than a quarter went on to graduate high school.” And poor attendance drives academic failure.

3. Hire better-educated teachers and give them reasons not to quit. “Since the middle school years have a crucial impact on children’s later success,” writes Goldstein, “middle school teachers should be among the most elite and highly paid educators in K-12.” They should have better training and be given incentives to stay, like higher salaries, says Goldstein.

4. Focus on character as much as book learning. Goldstein writes that “the best middle school curricula teach kids coping mechanisms that can be applied both to completing schoolwork and to navigating adolescent friendships and dating.”

One promising program, Habits of Mind, helps students develop skills such as “applying past knowledge to new situations,” “admitting you don’t know,” “listening with understanding and empathy,” “taking responsible risks” and “being able to laugh at yourself.”

5. Or get rid of middle school entirely. A growing number of school reformers believe it makes no sense to isolate sixth, seventh and eighth graders in separate school buildings.

One study of children in Florida found that, “across urban, suburban and rural areas, students who attend middle schools do worse academically than peers who attend K-8 schools and are more likely to drop out of high school,” writes Goldstein.

In response to these findings, she writes, “hundreds of middle schools across the country, especially in cities, are transitioning to K-8 formats.”

According to these studies, teaching middle school is a high calling and needs all the support it can get, because it affects the lives of many of our children.

Disaster capitalism: the corporate takeover of public education

We’ve all heard the many criticisms of U.S. education, how it’s going downhill, not competitive with the rest of the developed world. But how true is that? And how did it get so bad?

Yes! Magazine devotes most of its spring issue (“Education Uprising”) to such questions and tells stories of schools and people who are doing creative work at educating students in new, effective ways.

In his article “The Myth Behind Public School Failure,” Dean Paton notes that until around 1980, America’s public schoolteachers were held in high esteem. He traces the turn in public opinion to a PBS series in 1980 called Free to Choose, in which Milton Friedman devoted one episode to “the idea of school vouchers, a plan to allow families what amounted to publicly funded scholarships so their children could leave the public schools and attend private ones.”

Meanwhile, Jonathan Kozol, an author and advocate for public schools, called vouchers the “single worst, most dangerous idea to have entered education discourse in my adult life.”

Then, in 2001, comes “No Child Left Behind,” which tied federal funding for public schools to student scores on standardized tests. It also, writes Paton, “guaranteed millions in profits to corporations such as Pearson PLC, the curriculum and testing juggernaut, which made more than $1 billion in 2012 selling textbooks and bubble tests.”

In 2009, after the economy collapsed, came a program called “Race to the Top,” which provided grants to states for their public schools.

Both programs measured school success based on students’ standardized-test scores.

Then, in early 2012, then-Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott called such high-stakes exams a “perversion.” Many Texas school boards agreed that tests were “strangling education.”

In January 2013, teachers at Seattle’s Garfield High School announced they would refuse to give their students the Measures of Academic Progress Test. That school’s boycott “triggered a backlash to the ‘reform’ that began with Friedman and the privatizers in 1980,” writes Paton.

He calls this education crisis a “manufactured catastrophe,” part of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism.” This follows a formula, writes Paton: “Underfund schools. Overcrowd classrooms. Mandate standardized tests sold by private-sector firms that ‘prove’ these schools are failures. Blame teachers and their unions for awful test scores. In the bargain, weaken those unions, the largest labor organizations remaining in the United States. Push nonunion, profit-oriented charter schools as a solution.”

Why do corporations want to get involved in charter schools? Because, says Chris Hedges, the federal government spends $600 billion a year on education.

A few corporations already control the $20 billion to $30 billion a year textbook and standardized-testing industry, writes Paton.

He offers examples: In Michigan, charter schools cut instruction money, raised administration costs and came out ahead by $366 per student. In Ohio, charter school teachers make 59 percent of what public schoolteachers make.

And are the charter schools making a significant difference? A Stanford University study showed that in reading, 25 percent showed better results, while 75 percent showed no improvement or “significantly worse” results. In math, the numbers were 29 and 71 percent.

Many factors affect education. One of the biggest is poverty. In another article in the Yes! issue, Lennon Flowers writes that “in many high-poverty schools, up to 60 percent of children experience stress levels that can impair functioning.”

Education is a huge, important issue with no easy answers. But there are encouraging signs that changes are happening.

How do digital immigrants deal with young digital natives?

In 2001, education and technology writer Marc Prensky popularized the term digital natives to describe the first generations of children growing up fluent in the language of computers, video games and other technologies. (The rest of us are digital immigrants, struggling to understand.)

In her article “The Touch-Screen Generation” in The Atlantic (April), Hanna Rosin writes about how young children—even toddlers—are spending more and more time with digital technology. She asks, “Should parents recoil or rejoice?”

In 1999, Rosin writes, the American Academy of Pediatrics discouraged television viewing for children younger than 2, “citing research on brain development that showed this age group’s critical need for ‘direct interactions with parents and other significant caregivers.’ ” In 2006, 90 percent of parents said their children younger than 2 consumed some form of electronic media. Yet in its updated policy in 2011, the AAP “largely took the same approach it took in 1999, uniformly discouraging passive media use, on any type of screen, for these kids,” writes Rosin.

What are parents to do? Well, Rosin is one, with three children “who are all fans of the touch screen.” But when she talks with people (also parents of young children) who help develop interactive media for children, she finds them more restrictive than she is about their children using technology.

Rosin describes “the neurosis of our age: as technology becomes ubiquitous in our lives, American parents are becoming more, not less, wary of what it might be doing to their children.” Parents are afraid that if they don’t use the new technology just right, “their child could end up one of those sad, pale creatures who can’t make eye contact and has an avatar for a girlfriend.”

Rosin asks, How do small children actually experience electronic media, and what does that experience do to their development?

Because much of the recent technology is new, most of the research in this area concerns toddlers’ interaction with television. Researchers eventually identified certain rules that promote engagement: “stories have to be linear and easy to follow, cuts and time lapses have to be used very sparingly, and language has to be pared down and repeated.”

Now researchers are beginning to study toddlers’ use of iPads to see what they can learn and if they can transfer what they learn to the real world. They ask further, “What effect does interactivity have on learning? What role do familiar characters play in children’s learning from iPads?”

Rosin wondered if too many apps developed for children emphasized education over play. Then she came across apps designed by a Swedish game studio named Toca Boca.

In 2011, the studio’s founders, Emil Ovemar and Björn Jeffery, launched Toca Tea Party. “The game is not all that different from a real tea party,” writes Rosin. It’s not overtly educational, and there’s no winning and no reward. “The game is either very boring or terrifically exciting, depending on what you make of it,” she writes. For kids, the game is fun every time, “because it’s dependent entirely on imagination.”

Rosin notes that “every new medium has, within a short time of its introduction, been condemned as a threat to young people.” However, despite “legitimate broader questions about how American children spend their time,” parents have to decide for themselves.

Rosin decided to let her young son have access to an iPad for six months. “After about 10 days, the iPad fell out of his rotation, just like every toy does.” It was just one more tool.

We digital immigrants will continue to struggle with our digital natives.

Women confront gender-based violence

The linked problems of sex trafficking and forced prostitution, gender-based violence and maternal mortality claim one woman every 90 seconds, according to a four-hour documentary film shown on PBS stations in October and available online at pbs.org/halfthesky. On the other hand, it is women and girls who are doing the most to change such human-rights abuses across the globe.

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide is inspired by the book of the same name by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who are New York Times reporters.

The film visits 10 countries and follows Kristof and celebrity activists America Ferrera, Diane Lane, Eva Mendes, Meg Ryan, Gabrielle Union and Olivia Wilde as it tells the stories of inspiring, courageous individuals.

Kristof and WuDunn, who lived in China and reported on events there, became aware that China aborted 39,000 female fetuses in one year, and no one was reporting this. Their focus on human-rights abuses against women grew from there and led to their book.

In the film, Kristof and Mendes visit Sierra Leone, a country recovering from a civil war that ended in 2002. However, the incidences of rape that increased during the war continued afterward, reinforced by a culture where shame falls on the survivor rather than the perpetrator and where laws fail to prosecute rapists.

Kristof and Mendes talk with the director of a rape crisis center, who says they’ve seen 9,000 survivors in eight years, and 26 percent of these were under 12 years old. She shows them a 3-year-old who had been raped.

Kristof and Mendes talk with a 14-year-old who says she was raped by her “uncle,” who is a pastor. Others have also said he attacked them. They go with the police, who arrest the man. They talk with him, and he denies the charge.

In the end, he is released, and the girl’s father expels her and her mother from his home because she brought shame on the family.

The lesson is that rape is unfortunate but forgivable, while being raped is punishable. Less than 1 percent of the rapes reported to authorities are prosecuted.

Next, Kristof and Ryan visit Cambodia and meet the amazing Somaly, who runs an organization that rescues girls from brothels. Somaly, who speaks four languages, was taken from her village at age 10 or 11 and sold to a brothel at age 12 and brutalized. Later she escaped and now helps girls in similar  circumstances.

While the problem can feel overwhelming, she says, “everyone can do something.” The most important tool in fighting sex trafficking and other gender-based violence is education.

The film next visits Vietnam, where the organization Room to Read helps girls gain access to good education. One girl bikes 17 miles to her school.

In many poor families across the world, girls are kept at home to work, while boys are more likely to receive education beyond the fifth grade. One Vietnamese father, whose wife had died, sacrifices in order for his daughter to attend school.

The film notes that schools are often a safe haven, that education is transformative. It’s also a great investment in a community because “when you educate a girl, you educate a village.”

This documentary is both hard to watch and inspiring. It presents a huge problem long ignored by most of us, yet it offers hope. The film is definitely worth seeing. 

A break from bad news

We're surrounded by news of murders (Aurora), political polarities, economic woes, starvation, wars, you name it. Sometimes our spirits need the sweet air of good news or something to look forward to.
Here's one: the Olympics in London. The opening ceremony is tomorrow night, though some events have already begun. In talking with some people at work, I realize many people aren't as interested in the Olympics as I am. You, too, may consider them overhyped, boring, involving weird, uninteresting sports. One office co-worker said, Why don't they play football. They do, of course, but he meant American football, not what we call soccer, the most popular sport in the world.

I may not like all the Olympic sports, but I enjoy most of them, and I admire all the athletes' abilities, which far surpass mine. I also like the fact that the Olympics at least try to be international and nonpartisan.
The triple jumper Voula Papachristou was kicked off Greece's Olympic team for her comments on Twitter mocking African immigrants and expressing support for a far-right political party in Greece. One can argue free speech, but I'm glad the Olympic spirit opposes such jingoistic prejudice.
Another headline in today's paper was, "Nine Olympians suspended." I'm glad the Olympics at least tries to uphold standards of fairness and punishes doping.

I'm glad we myopic Americans obsessed with football, Nascar and golf get exposed to other sports. My favorite is track and field, but I also will try to catch table tennis, badminton, tennis, soccer and as much else as I can.

Another bit of good news: An article in the July 30 issue of Time (its Summer Olympics Special) looks at "The Undroppables," a social media campaign that plugs staying in school.

Documentary filmmaker Jason Pollock is gathering video testimonials from students who have decided to stay in school, despite difficult obstacles. Kayla Webley writes that Pollock "is trying to harness the power of social networks to keep an estimated 1.2 million students from dropping out of school each year." He points to the success of campaigns such as It Gets Better and wants this project to have as great an impact on young people's lives. The tagline for the campaign is "I am undroppable."

In June he uploaded short clips of 70 or so students who have decided to stay in school or go back to school. The bulk of the proceeds from his documentary will go to charity.

Both the stories Pollock presents and the campaign itself are good news.

As we slog through the toxic political speech of this season and the plethora of bad news in our world, let us take time to breathe the fresh air of good news. That air can give us energy to face the injustices around us with greater hope.

Maybe the Olympics don't lift your spirit as they do mine. OK. Find something that does.

Questioning assumptions

Every year I choose my five top books of the year. I believe I've already read one of my top five for 2012.  When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, $24, 202 pages) collects 10 incisive essays on an array of topics, though common themes thread their way throughout, including education, religion and the nature of humanity. (Robinson is also an outstanding novelist; her novels Gilead and Home have appeared on previous top five lists of mine.)

When I read a book for review (and I've reviewed this book for the Wichita Eagle), I underline passages that strike me with their insight, the beauty of their language or their troublesome nature. Typically, by the end of my reading I’ve underlined a dozen or two passages at most. My copy of this book, however, is filled with such markings. There are few spreads without something underlined.

Such a plethora of insights and apt sentences make it difficult to do justice to the book. Any quotation will represent a small sample of what could be quoted.

In the book’s first essay, “Freedom of Thought,” Robinson notes what will become evident throughout the book, that she tries to free herself of constraints and not simply accept the standard approaches to certain areas of knowledge. She writes that the tendency of much of what she took from studying and reading anthropology, psychology, economics and cultural history “was to posit or assume a human simplicity within a simple reality and to marginalize the sense of the sacred, the beautiful, everything in any way lofty.”

Over and over, Robinson questions the assumptions made by so-called scholars that see human nature as simplistic, reductionist. She points out that often “the most important aspect of a controversy is not the area of disagreement but the hardening of agreement, the tacit granting on all sides of assumptions that ought not to be granted on any side.” One example, she notes, is “the treatment of the physical as a distinct category antithetical to the spiritual.”

She writes, “We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small.” Then, adopting her role as a teacher of fiction writing, she adds, “Fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true.”

She challenges assumptions about religion or ancient peoples (“The Babylonians used quadratic equations.”) and points out the limits of science. She concludes that essay thus: “Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.”

In “Austerity as Ideology,” she applies this failure to see the mystery in humanity to current views of economics. She note that “market economics … has shown itself very ready to devour what we hold dear, if the list can be taken to include culture, education, the environment and the sciences, as well as the peace and well-being of our fellow citizens.” She also shows that “America has never been an especially capitalist country.” Meanwhile, “our wealth is finally neither more nor less than human well-being.”

In the title essay, we get a glimpse of what has already become evident: the wide and extensive range of Robinson’s reading. We also gain some insights into her fiction. She writes, “In a way Housekeeping [her first novel] is meant as a sort of demonstration of the intellectual culture of my childhood.” Remarking on her study of Latin in high school, she notes that her “style is considerably more indebted to Cicero than to Hemingway.”

She discusses her growing up in the West (Idaho) and the kind of individualism that often inheres there. However, she writes, “there is no inevitable conflict between individualism as an ideal and a very positive interest in the good of society.”

In “The Fate of Ideas: Moses,” Robinson defends the integrity of the Old Testament against critics who want to write it off. She pulls no punches in her interaction with Jack Miles’ God: A Biography, calling it a “dumbed-down pseudo-syncretism.” She calls some of the thinking behind such criticism “the flip side of fundamentalism” and concludes with: “Whether he was a rabbi, a prophet or the Second Person of the Trinity, the ethic [Jesus] invokes comes straight from Moses.”

In spite of these punchy quotes, Robinson’s style is more formal and florid, more—as she writes—Cicero than Hemingway. And she often includes a smile if not a laugh. For example: “I have never heard anyone speculate on the origins and function of irony, but I can say with confidence that it is only a little less pervasive in our universe than carbon.”

She questions accepted opinion and helps us think through its implications and its reasonableness. In “Cosmology,” her concluding essay, she takes on scientism and atheism: “The difference between theism and the new atheist science is the difference between mystery and certainty. Certainty is a relic, an atavism, a husk we ought to have outgrown. Mystery is openness to possibility, even at the scale now implied by physics and cosmology.” 

If you read When I Was a Child, be ready to have certain assumptions challenged and think through important issues while enjoying a master of prose.

Working to end poverty

I belong to a movement (they don't like to call it an organization) called Circles of Hope. It's part of a national movement called the Circles Initiative. Its goal is to end poverty one family at a time. Here's a description from the peaceconnections.org website: Circles of Hope is part of a national campaign. The Circles® Campaign is a transformational approach that partners volunteers and community leaders with families wanting to make the journey out of poverty. Operating in communities around the country, each Circles® initiative consists of families working to get out of poverty and several middle and upper income Allies who befriend them and lend support. The family is the Circle Leader, setting direction for activities. With the help and friendship of their allies, each family sets and achieves goals unique to their own needs.

I got involved about two years ago. After my job was cut to half-time, I sensed God calling me to do some kind of volunteer work. Jeanne, my wife, had told me about something called Bridges Out of Poverty, which is a book that looks at poverty culture. Peace Connections, a local organization that sponsors Circles of Hope, was offering training for allies (see definition above). I did the training and eventually became an ally and was assigned to a circle leader. That was about 18 months ago, which is the commitment an ally makes to remain with a circle leader. It's been such a good experience that I hate to see it end. Likely I'll remain an ally and join a new circle leader.
Last evening (Feb. 21), at a weekly meeting of Circles (circle leaders and allies meet once a month), two of the national leaders of the Circles Initiative addressed our group and responded to questions. I jotted down some notes I found interesting.
Karin VanZant, CEO of Think Tank and the National Circles Campaign, responded to questions from the group (about 70 people were there). Among her responses she mentioned that in Ohio, where she lives, there are 88,000 unfilled jobs. Colleges are not designed to meet the training needs for those jobs in a very efficient way. Circles, of course, is interested in helping people get training and find jobs that pay a livable wage. Here is an opportunity.
She and John White, National Circles Campaign director, who was with her, travel around the country to various Circles groups. Karin noted that a group in California has several Spanish-speaking groups. A big problem is that there are many undocumented adults with documented children.
She pointed out the importance of working with businesses and showing them that helping people get out of poverty is good for business. She offered several examples. In her community, they did research and found that there were more payday loans than banks. They also learned that in one year the payday loans made $3 million. The banks realized that here was money they were missing out on. She also said there something called the Community Investment Act, which says that banks are to invest in their local communities. Here was a chance for a win-win. The banks needed customers and to invest in the community; circle leaders (people in poverty) needed checking accounts and loans that were not at such an ungodly (and I mean that word) rate. Circle leaders told some bank managers that they'd tried to open checking accounts but were denied. And the payday loans were located in their neighborhoods. Two of the banks stopped running credit checks on circle leaders and got more customers--ones with a community behind them.
Checking accounts are crucial, Karin said, because some employers pay by direct deposit and won't hire people who don't have a checking account.
Karin said that studies show that by looking at third grade reading scores you can figure how many kids will drop out of high school before they graduate, and many of these will end up in prison. So in Ohio, they are building prison cells based on third grade reading scores. But she argued that this is shortsighted. Instead of investing $7,000 per year to raise reading scores, they are spending $37,000 per year for a prisoner. It's in the best interests of society to invest in education.
She also noted that turnover (when employees leave after only a few months) costs employers a lot of money. But with what circle leaders learn and with the support of their circle community, they will stay longer on a job when they are hired. She shows employers how this saves them money. Then she says they should allow the employee to move into a better-paying position once they've been there six months or so. Both groups win.
Karin mentioned four goals for circle leaders: get a job, get a better job, get an education, strengthen their family. Doing this helps people get out of poverty and helps make a better society for all of us. 
Circles of Hope is not a religious organization, but many who are involved in our group are Christian. It should be obvious that working to end poverty and build community are spiritual values we all should support.