The Denial of Science: Be Very Afraid

About ten days ago, I read an opinion piece in The New York Times entitled Why Republicans Keep Telling Everyone They’re Not Scientists. Here

As I do in the autumn of every year, I had a flu shot a few weeks ago. When a couple I know returned from South Africa in early September, I did not fear catching Ebola from them. When a friend was able to start a new therapy for her advanced breast cancer in late October, I felt happy that she qualified for clinical trials.

Some of us are old enough to remember how our relieved parents took time off work one summer day in 1954 to take us to queue up in a school cafeteria for our first polio shot. Haven’t most of us used our smartphones in the past 24 hours to send or receive a text, talk to someone in another part of the country, check email, or use a net-based app?

Do we have to be scientists to benefit a thousand ways from science every day, to make informed science-based decisions? Do we need to be scientists to take flu or polio shots, to use our mobile phones, to be alert to the predicted tracks of dangerous storm systems, to seek out the best treatments for our cancers, to understand how unlikely it would be to contract Ebola from someone who’d been thousands of miles from any reported cases?

I won’t accept that science is optional, a matter of opinion, I'll-take-my-flu-shot-and-reject-evolution-of-species (without which there could be no flu shots). As an educator, I completely reject the ignorance that drives school districts to cower before parents who demand that the science curriculum be sliced and diced or confused with ignorant and superstitious counter-possibilities.

My last few years as a principal were enlivened by our school district’s DESERT Project. A handful of intrepid science-loving educators landed over $5 million to bring to our teachers and kids engaged, hands-on, inquiry-based, thought-provoking REAL science. Beginning in kindergarten, kids would do science and learn to observe systematically. They’d think and talk about what they were seeing, smelling, touching, hearing, then write and draw in science notebooks, and become immersed in authentic scientific method. They would not just read about science in pre-digested and boring paragraphs as I did through my own years in elementary school.

But then I retired and the Twenty-First Century arrived, accelerating the ascendancy of nonsense over science. I didn’t notice how extreme this had become until a 2013 trip to Australia and New Zealand, where the natural world was persistently described and discussed by scientists, science teachers, and zoo managers without apology or pulled-punches. No, “In my opinion,” or "I hope I'm not offending anyone" buffering, but “this is how it is.” This is the history of volcanic eruption and earthquakes here, this is the evolutionary biology of this animal, this is why our planet is experiencing increasing weather extremes.

Be afraid of how American schools are backing away from science and informed interpretation of natural phenomena. Speak up about anti-science and pseudo-science just as you would about racism.

Sacrifice: The Unfortunate Persistence of Monastic Tradition in Public Education

During my first year as principal, 1986-87, an unmarried teacher I’ll call Morgan came to my office and told me, “I’m pregnant. On purpose. I’m due in April. I’m not getting married.”

When this happened in the 1980s, public schools were still sorting out the collision between individual employee rights and traditional social values. Morgan gave birth to her child less than two decades after Tucson began allowing married teachers to stay in their classrooms once the pregnancy was obvious.

Before public schools existed, teachers often came from monasteries and convents, where they were bound by vows of poverty and chastity. As schools have developed into secular institutions and the profession has overflowed the bounds of the religious orders, I wonder if an expectation of personal sacrifice continues to undermine not only teachers' salaries but also their status as professionals.

 Once I became a principal, I found that it was part of my job to help maintain the illusion of the chaste and bland teacher. Even as teacher celibacy stereotypes have faded, we as a nation may not have stopped regarding the call to teaching as an implicit commitment to living in worthy poverty, some willingness to occupy a subordinate and humble role.

Ironically, today’s teachers must do far more parenting in their classrooms than previous generations of educators—yet another aspect of the work inside the sacrifice paradigm but outside the job description. Imagine an accountant or a book editor or an architect, both high-intensity professionals, having to work with all their clients together in one room, six hours at a stretch, five days a week. 

Does the tradition of teacher as sacrificial instrument infect public policy and educational decision-making in America? In all the discussion of teacher compensation, does the abstemious monk or the virtuous nun hover in the background, the images against which today’s teachers are judged? I’m not sure we are beyond that yet.

Another Take on Reading: the Case of Japanese

My recent trip to Japan challenged me in an entirely new way.  As a proficient reader and writer of English, I take alphabetic writing for granted and am comfortable with Roman letters in the languages that use them. Russian and Greek also seem close enough that I believe I could fairly easily learn what the letters represent in the spoken language.

Then there's Japanese. In two weeks, I never knew which of their three linked writing systems I was seeing. I did not learn to recognize a single character in Kanji, Hiragana, or Katakana. So today I turned to Google to find out a little more.

It turns out that the orthography used for beginning reading, Hiragana, has "only" 46 characters. Each Hiragana character is formed with at least three strokes, with seven strokes being the maximum. While there are no reverse letters like b and d, p and q, there are many characters of six and seven strokes that closely resemble one another to an inexperienced reader. And these strokes can curve all over the place and cross each other. Unlike most Western alphabetic orthographies, Hiragana characters represent syllables rather than phonemes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#Table_of_hiragana

Holy cow! Japanese children can read most or all of the Hiragana (syllabic) characters by the end of kindergarten. Dyslexia is rare.

We have often attributed superior academic achievement of Japanese children to cultural or structural elements of their schooling. I started thinking about the more micro level of the connections among developmental factors (visual vs. auditory cortex of the brain), informal and formal preparation for reading, and the instructional strategies that are used.

Japanese children are introduced to and expected to learn written language content that is very much more visually challenging than the English alphabet. At the same time, the characters represent syllables, a pattern of sound that is more cognitively and acoustically authentic than the more abstract phonemic segments that correspond to English letters.

It makes me wonder if our emphasis on a fairly primitive version of "phonics," based on the artificial segmentation of speech sounds, makes life more difficult for our young readers. The Hiragana system, with its greater load on visual processing and lighter load on auditory perception than English "phonics," raises a question about brain development. Are humans at ages 4 and 5 more "ready" to deal with concrete graphic distinctions than with the much more ephemeral and artificial auditory segments emphasized in English literacy?

We have tended to work preschool children's auditory processing much harder than their visual in our pre-literacy teaching efforts. Is it possible that we are wasting some of their visual learning potential by not looking for more ways to stimulate and challenge a readiness for graphic analysis that may be superior to their auditory discrimination? Or is it possible that we are wasting auditory learning potential by teaching a phonemic level of analysis rather than one based on the more natural acoustic unit of the syllable?

I've always been skeptical of systems that fail to develop areas of strength while over-working areas of weakness. I've opposed so-called phonemic segmentation practice for kindergartners as backwards to the natural sequence of learning, a time-waster for kids under a certain age who may be quite ready to deal with graphic material. Why couldn't they be doing fun and interesting activities (art? science?) that build on a readiness in visual discrimination and analysis rather than forcing them through cognitive tasks more appropriate to where their brains will be at age 7?

I could be all wet. I imagine there's a body of research on all of this, and right now I have way more questions than answers.

Another Scene from the Book: A Tuesday in March, 2001

I sit for a few seconds staring at my computer, watching my own personal mission statement march across the screen, hoping I can live up to it today.

Caring Profoundly, Enacting Community, Inspiring Inquiry, Illuminating Possibility.

Two summers ago, in 1999, I composed these phrases for my screensaver during a workshop on the topic of “visioning.” I don’t recall what motivated me to give up the four June days for this topic, but I knew I needed to re-focus after the Columbine killings. The workshop refreshed me for the final two years, reminding me why I had walked through the door marked Principal in the first place.

Much of the time, the stream of events, kids, and conversations just flows forward, finding its own channel. Today, riding that flow, I will make many more small choices than big decisions. Choices are the infinitesimal adjustments that come from the place where my individual disposition meets my life experiences. Fundamental to my doing of this job, these choices, these units of inclination, are the subatomic particles of daily decision making.

Decisions, the currency of school leadership, are more administrative than choices, more about the public yes/no, now/later, this/that. Choices are the corrections, amendments, right or left turns, and adjustments in vocal tone that I make in each of the thousand moments that make up a day. I wish I could say that I only make good choices. Like decisions, choices not only express ideals, knowledge, wisdom, and good intentions, but also reflect misunderstandings, blind spots, and prejudices.

Today, will I stonewall? Will I lie to anyone? Will I weasel to avoid doing something that I really don’t want to do? And today, will impatience trail off into anger, my own particular defense against the frustration that can come from never finishing anything, from encountering one more thing I am supposed to pretend is other than what it is? Maybe. 

Linda and I Eat Tamales and Talk About Why I'm Retiring

I promised excerpts, so here are a few paragraphs from the Preface:

    “Fifty-four seems too young,” Linda said.

    She and I were sitting in her living room a few days after Christmas of the year 2000, eating tamales from plates we held on our laps. I’d known Linda longer than anyone who was not part of my family, and we hadn’t had a chance yet to talk about the job—the career—I was leaving in just a few months. I had no idea how to respond.

    In the years I’d worked in schools and Linda had worked as an urban planner, I’d heard her mention that educators worked less than a full year, had all those long vacations, and spent only six hours a day working. She didn’t see how jobs in schools could be very hard.

    On that winter day, I didn’t tell her that two principals I knew had simply cleaned out their desks and walked away on days that were not even Fridays, let alone ends of semesters. I didn’t tell her that after fifteen years, my job had come to feel like a game of pinball, one where I was the ball. I’d sat silently for almost a minute when Linda asked, “Do you think it’s futile?

    Surprised at her use of this word, I put my fork down on my plate and said, “No! It’s not futile. But I can’t do it anymore.”

    Growing up in the second half of the Twentieth Century, I had regarded capital-P Progress as a sure thing. My post-war generation would, I assumed, pitch in to keep things moving. By 1967, I had decided to do my part by teaching school. I’d make sure kids could read, write, and compute, and I’d also inoculate them with peace and justice. I didn’t plan on, or even imagine, being a principal.

    Thirty years after I chose to teach, the era that raised me had run into trouble. While racial and gender equality increased in that time, peace did not last. Prosperity became a more elusive goal, less a value of community than a contest to be won by individuals. I did not foresee that in the last years of the Twentieth Century, public education would no longer be everyone’s favorite democratic institution. 

More bad news from Chicago Public Schools

While I was out walking this morning, I heard a story on NPR about school librarian positions being cut in the Chicago Public Schools.

Find radio story here

Chicago Public Schools has delegated staffing decisions to local school councils, supposedly a good thing. But the councils are frequently cutting their librarian positions, not a good thing at all. The Chicago schools CEO isn't helping by mis-stating the issue.

Research studies have shown that active school libraries with teacher-librarians boost reading achievement. Those of us who've worked in schools know that librarians also give teachers a hand in offering kids some particularly wonderful learning experiences. School libraries are far more than a roomful of books for kids to check out. As just one example of what a school library offers that a classroom teacher may not: Many kids don't even know about nonfiction books until their first encounter with a school library. Even the most wonderful teachers tend to read story books when they read to kids because nonfiction isn't always suitable for this. For many kids, the nonfiction books they find in the school library give them their entry point to reading.

School libraries are now the high-tech, complex sister of public libraries, and volunteers can rarely staff them at the level needed to complement and support classroom learning. A school librarian is an investment in student achievement that is next in importance only to the classroom teacher.

How Does Life Become a Book?

One day in January of 2001, a friend of a friend passed my name along to an editor at USA Today. This editor asked me to write a one-thousand word Day in the Life piece to go along with a story they were going to publish about the work of school principals. Eager to expose the inner workings of a job that just kept on getting harder, I agreed.

Within a few weeks, I realized that a thousand words wouldn't even come close to showing what actually happened in a typical day, or even an easy day.That short a format wouldn't have allowed me to summarize or list the hundred conversations, the hundreds of people, the sounds, smells, mishaps, surprises, small and large victories, that never stop happening in a public elementary school. 

By the time I started writing what turned into my memoir Principal: A Personal History, I had put in fifteen years as leader of first one elementary school, and then another, in Tucson, my hometown. I had grown puzzled and frustrated by how much more difficult my job had gotten over that time. You might expect that it would be a simple matter of accumulating experience and then applying the wisdom gained as each new school year came around.

I believe that school leadership is crucial to the success of our democracy, and that if we don't get this sorted out pretty soon, our troubles will grow. My book, Principal, does not provide the answers, but provides for the first time in the current era an inside look at what happens in schools from the perspective of the school leader. The answers to the questions raised, I believe, need to come from informed conversation, one that I hope to start. 

In future posts, I'll include some excerpts, some thoughts about what's not in the book, the occasional rant or thoughtful reflection about current issues, and updates on the process and progress of publication.

Since this is my first experience blogging, I hope you will bear with me as I figure it all out!

Contact me at PrincipalTheBook [at] cox.net to get on my mailing list.