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Bias in School Discipline

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A recent study from Stanford University took pains to empirically prove that there is a significant bias among teachers when disciplining students from diverse racial backgrounds. The study, performed by Jason Okonofua and Jennifer L Eberhardt and chronicled in the journal Psychological Science, tracked discipline responses from 57 current teachers based on fabricated discipline referrals.

In the study, teachers were randomly given reports of student misbehavior and asked to rate the child as “troubled.” In a second experiment, the teachers were asked to decide whether to suspend the student from school based on their behavior.

Each report was assigned to a student name that would artificially assign the student a race. According to the author, “We manipulated student race by using stereotypically Black (Darnell or Deshawn) or White (Greg or Jake) names.” After receiving the discipline report, teachers were asked, “How severe was the student’s misbehavior? To what extent is the student hindering you from maintaining order in your class? How irritated do you feel by the student? and How severely should the student be disciplined?”

Initially, there was little difference between students who had stereotypical White names and stereotypical Black names. However, when teachers were presented with a second discipline report with the same name from each student, they were much more likely to believe the student identified as Black to be “troubled” and were even more likely to suspend the student from school.

study 1 TWO STRIKES Study 2 TWO STRIKES

As educators, we have a responsibility to take a hard look at our implicit bias and do what needs to be done to eliminate them.

This study provides further evidence to support a long-held belief, that a student’s race can play a significant role in how they are treated in school. Minority children are exponentially more likely to receive discipline consequences and be suspended from school for misbehavior than their White classmates. This study helps to prove that this problem has little to do with actual levels of misbehavior, and much more to do with inherent bias among educators.

The solution is certainly not simple. One significant step would be to rethink school discipline in general. Perhaps all children, regardless of race, should spend less time “in trouble” and more time figuring out how to function within their community (i.e. the school). This would require teachers and administrators to stop slamming kids with meaningless detentions, suspensions, and other disciplinary measures and replace it with a system of restorative justice and reconciliation designed to integrate kids into the classroom, rather than remove them from it.

This is hard work. But it needs to be done. The current study adds to a growing body of evidence that minority children (whether they be minorities of ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, religion or economic status) face a cornucopia of challenges each day when they walk on campus. The bias of people tasked with caring for and educating them should not be one of these challenges. As educators, we have a responsibility to take a hard look at our implicit bias and do what needs to be done to eliminate them. This will do more than just help our schools, it will help to quell the rampant school to prison pipeline in our country. Again, to quote the authors,

“Racial disparities in discipline are particular problematic because they contribute to the racial-achievement gap, increase the likelihood that Black students will drop out of school, and may then increase the probability that such youths will be incarcerated.”

Too often, we get bogged down with the challenges our students create in our classroom. Rarely to we take the time in those moments to consider the challenges these same children bring with them to our classroom. Perhaps if we did, we could stop labeling kids, and start helping them.

For more on this study,

Psychological Science. Okonofua, Jason A and Jennifer Eberhardt; Two Strikes: Race and the Disciplining of Young Students. May 2015. Vol. 26(5) 617-624.

Learning to See without Eyes

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Daniel Kish on his way to speak to a TED audience about reaching new possibilities

I was listening to a TED talk from Daniel Kish, a man who, by his 2nd birthday, had lost both of his eyes to cancer. Mr. Kish describes in the talk how he has learned to use a variety of techniques, including echolocation, to paint rich landscapes in his mind’s eye and, in a sense, see the world around him. He now teaches these techniques across the globe and is changing the lives of many blind people.

I suggest you take the time to watch the talk in its entirety. He’s a remarkable human being.

Daniel Kish: How I use sonar to navigate the world

Early in the talk, Daniel speaks of his first days of blindness. While still in his hospital nursery, he climbed out of his crib and began to stumble around the room. “Wandering around the nursery without eyes,” he states, “was not a problem to me. The problem was getting caught.” He would soon learn that adults would try to protect him from the dangers of the world around him.

Kish speaks about the early role of fear in his life. He speaks to the common misconception that “blindness is thought to epitomize ignorance.” I believe we often make the mistake of thinking people who are “handicapped” in some way are less able to conceive of the world as we do, or at the very least to navigate it. We treat difference as something to be feared and avoided. Fear and ignorance were powerful forces in the lives of the people who surrounded this blind baby. Fear and ignorance are powerful forces in all of our lives. Amazingly, as is often the case of people who take on the world differently, Daniel Kish sees things in another light. And he sees things quite clearly.

He credits his earliest teachers with helping him gain this perspective.

“Fortunately for me, my parents knew ignorance and fear were but matters of the mind. And the mind was adaptable.”

Matters of the mind. What poetic thought: That we can simply change our minds and be freed from our fear and ignorance. Too often we are trapped by the idea of “truth.” To be blind is a fact. It seems immutable to so many of us. And yet, to this little family, it was simply a challenge to be faced. He goes on to say, “they knew the difference between love and fear.” He describes a childhood where his parents pushed him, rather than protecting him. He speaks of parenting that fosters bravery, rather than accepting limits. To Daniel’s parents, “love” meant teaching their sightless child to walk his own path, and set his own course. And to quite remarkable effect.

“Fear,” Kish says, “immobilizes us in the face of challenges.” We have a biological predisposition to self-preservation. This is often driven by fear and a desire to remain “safe.” Most species combat this trait with a laissez faire parenting style…pushing the birds out of the nest quickly so they learn to fly. Humans, for the most part, feel compelled to “protect” our young from the dangers of the world. Often, this continues through early childhood into school, where many teachers encourage students to find the “right” answer, rather than exploring new answers. Unless something has been “proven,” it has little merit in the education system. We see that in a world where a student’s ticket out of high school is based on her ability to get the “right” answers to a test, instead of her ability to find a solution to a challenge that is innovative and unique.

If we want to see what works in the modern world, we have to look to people like Daniel Kish. Rather than letting fear back him into a dark and sightless world, Daniel learned to use his other senses, including the often-ignored “sense of imagination,” to see the world in a way that we could never conceive. Along the way, I’m sure he stumbled more than once. I’m sure he got the answers wrong a few times. Most great people do. What makes Kish most remarkable, however, was that he did not let fear define him. With the help of adults who showed him what real love meant, he chose his strengths over his limitations, and found new ways to see the world. This is learning at its best. It’s amazing what you can learn when you are taught not to be afraid of making the wrong choice, but rather to see the unlimited choices that lay before us.

The Right and the Best

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Recent stories from NPR and Huffington Post have called to mind some things that I believe were formative in my life and representative of my generations’ experience with education. Often, children born in the 80’s and beyond have been critiqued as being “lazy” and “weak;” too prone to “instant gratification” and needing “constant encouragement.” As an educator, I see increasing insecurity in students and acknowledge its birth in my generation. The question is: if we see it getting worse, why aren’t we doing anything about it?

To illustrate my point, I’d like to tell three stories from my own past. The first was a parent-teacher conference that happened when I was in the third grade. I distinctly remember the sights, sounds, and smells of the classroom as my parents, teacher, and I gathered around the table. My teacher had some specific concerns about my academic performance in math. I was quite competent in other content areas, but my math grades were not as outstanding as my other achievements and my teacher felt they deserved some additional attention from my parents. From that moment on, I accepted the fact that I was “bad at math,” a label that I carry into adulthood. I realized at this moment that there was a “right” way to do things. 2+2=4. There was linear logic to math. It didn’t make sense to me. So I was “wrong.” This followed me through fractions, long division, algebra, and geometry. In fact, I had to take a math course 3 times in college before I found one that I could pass.

Fast forward to my first years as a choir teacher. Despite my poor math performance, I have enjoyed a successful academic career. Graduating from high school at the top of my class, I attended outstanding colleges for both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and was ready to embark on a successful career in teaching. Luckily, there wouldn’t be much math in my new profession. I had found ways to live a life where I could be “right,” at least in my mind. I had always been among the “best” in music, so I was excited to prove my worth.

Of course, as is often the case, the real world doesn’t reflect what we learn in school. Faced with the normal challenges of teaching human beings who were not entirely within my control, my first several years of teaching were a struggle. I felt that there was a “right” way to do things, and set about perfecting it in my little world. The first year I took choirs to the annual assessment, I longed for the validation that what my choirs and I were doing was “right.” I hoped that we would be among the “best.”

This was not what happened. I listen back on recordings from my first years teaching and hear choirs that were trying really hard. I had instilled in them a desire to be the best, as I think most teachers do in our current system. Sadly, we did not live up to the expectations for such a standard. I still remember being taken aside by the judges of that first contest after it was over. I’m sure they wanted to offer advice that would help me grow as a teacher and help my student’s succeed. All I heard from them was, “You were not the best. You were not right. This is what’s right. You were wrong.”

I would spend the next 3 years seeking out the advice of people in my field who I felt were the best. I would send recordings, literature selections, teaching techniques to them. I would spend hours listening to their advice. All the while, these well-intentioned mentors told me how they felt I could improve and the “best plan of action.” With each passing day, however, I came to realize that I was not the best. My conclusion then was, “since I’m not the best, I must be the worst.” I wandered through those days, disillusioned, and feeling like a failure. My students suffered from my insecure teaching.

The worldview that I present isn’t unique to my experience. Many people my age and younger can resonate with similar stories in their lives. From the first failed job interview to the first bad date, we all seek validation on what is “right” and many of us assume that failure must mean that we are “wrong.”

This perspective on this world is born out of what Ferdinand de Saussure, Jaques Lacan, and Claude Levi-Strauss would come to tern Structuralism. My armchair philosopher’s view of this is that, as people became aware of an increasingly complex and chaotic world in the face of World Wars and global economies, they sought out a way to create order. Looking to the past, they began to categorize things as either/or. The further down this path you go, you see a world where everything is on one of two sides of the coin. It simplifies a world with too many faces to handle.

Of course, as Jacques Derrida famously said, it also creates, ” a violent hierarchy” where “one of the two terms governs the other.” Post-structuralists like Derrida, Michael Foucault, and Roland Barthes have critiqued the structuralist world view. Also faced with the chaos of the 20th and 21st centuries, these writers suggest that chaos will prevail no matter how much order you impose upon it; a reality that is hard to dispute.

Couched in the arms of the structuralist world view, and aided by economic models designed by Henry Ford and the like, Sir Ken Robinson argues in his book Out of Our Minds , that modern education is designed to follow an assembly-line based system that,

…operate on the manufacturing principle of linearity; in that there are distinct sequential stages to the process. Each stage is meant to build logically on the one that precedes it; overall outcomes can be predicted with reasonable reliability. The idea is that if students progress in the prescribed way through the system, and especially if they complete college, they will emerge at the far end educated and prepared for whatever the world throws at them.

We see here that perhaps this problem isn’t simply the fault of a single generation. Perhaps this is just the logical conclusion of an education system born out of the industrial revolution and structuralist philosophy.

The aforementioned article by Mickey Goodman in Huffington Post would argue that this problem is more recent. She also might suggest that it is entirely my parents’ fault. She paints a picture of Generation X and Generation Y children plagued by “Helicopter Parenting.” Her belief is that this all stems from a tragic event in 1982 when several children died from poisoning in tampered Children’s Tylenol. She paints the picture of parents throwing away Halloween candy for fear that it might be poisoned. To this I would add my third story.

I grew up close to a major theme-park. I loved the roller coasters and would ride each of them with my mom and dad, never considering the danger we were in. I have a very vivid memory from one day in line for one of the rides. This was when I was 4 or 5 years old. Ahead of us in line was a young man who’s face I still recall. It was gaunt and pale. He was tall and bony, with hair that was prematurely thin. You could tell from looking at him that something was wrong. Though he looked to be no more than 30, his body looked aged and weary. He was leaning on the railing of the line ahead of us. Suddenly, my mother told me not to touch the railing anymore. I didn’t realize until much later that it was because she was afraid that the man might have AIDS, and didn’t know if I could catch it from touching the railing after him. This was one of the other consequences of being a member of Generation X. I was born in 1982, the same year the first reported case of HIV was made public.

Since then, we have been given more and more opportunities to be afraid. In a post- 9/11 culture, we are always on our guard for things to fear. And here we see another binary. The opposite of fear is safety. And so we create a list of either/ors:

Fear/Safety

Bad/Good

Wrong/Right

All of this leads to generations of children, not defined by a culture of “instant gratification,” as Goodman suggests, but rather by fear. Technology presents a wealth of things to be afraid of, to see as different, foreign, and other. As such, we see a world full of the other side of the coin. Using our trusty binary model, where everything is either a 1 or a 0, if it isn’t like us, it must be something to fear, something that is bad, something that is wrong. Coupled with an assembly-line education, we spend our entire lives avoiding the wrong, seeking out the right, and headed towards the best. Parents then encourage this way of life. Look both ways before crossing the street. Don’t talk to strangers.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

How do we encourage this way of thinking? By rewarding the best, of course. And so we create grading systems that say that Sally is smarter than John, all based on one child’s ability to find the “right” answer. We want to encourage as many children as possible, of course, and so now both Sally and John are smarter than Lupe, and so on and so forth until, as Corey Turner presents in a piece on Weekend Edition, everyone gets a trophy just for showing up. We have come to believe that anyone who doesn’t get a reward must in some way be weak, wrong, or worst. And so, in a desire to encourage every child, we lower standards, increase the chance to PERFORM on those standards, and hand out ribbons to everyone.

It’s hard to argue with.

No parent or teacher wants to tell a child that they aren’t worthy. And any school system that is designed to “produce” people who are “ready” for the world must be held to a standard. The question is, does the standard have to be something that can simply be said to be “right.”

A great deal of recent research in education points to the fact that we learn far more from making mistakes than we do from getting the right answer. Carol Dweck, in her book Mindset, suggests that a “fixed-mindset,” in which there is a commonly accepted view that there must be one right answer, and that learners are either smart or not, right or wrong, best or worst, results in a culture of learning where people decide very early on what they can and can’t do. I believe this mindset’s natural consequence is the generation outlined by my stories here. Her suggestion is that perhaps we should look for a “growth-mindset” approach, in which learners are encouraged to assume that they are always capable of being better, and that there is always room for improvement. Educational theorists from Piaget, to Erikson, to Bloom’s taxonomy and Garnder’s Multiple Intelligences all support this idea. Salman Khan recently published an article entitled “The Learning Myth: Why I’ll Never Tell My Son He’s Smart” that I think eloquently illustrates a sea-change in the way we look at learning.

Modern-day economics is also supporting the innovation model. Successful companies in the 21st century are not those that follow a “proven” method for success. They don’t seek to replicate what is “right.” Rather Giants of contemporary industry like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are always looking for a chance to fail and learn. In his Book Creativity, Inc.  Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar, recounts a history and culture of failure that has led to two of the largest companies in their respective industries: Apple and Pixar. In it, he presents Kiichiro Toyoda as a successor to Henry Ford. In the existing industrial model, workers are discouraged from looking for error, but rather to mindlessly do the “right” thing over and over. In Toyota’s model, each member of the team is tasked with looking for something wrong, seeking out improvements, and chances to learn. There is less order in this model, but if you look at the innovation of Ford vs. Toyota in the last 30 years, I would argue that you could see which one works.

These ideas have been supported by authors like Sir Ken Robinson, Daniel Pink, Thomas Friedman, and Daniel Coyle. Each author presents a world where learners are encouraged to create, to innovate, and to explore. Children are taught to fail, to look for what’s wrong, and to embrace it. These are the qualities we should seek out in our next generation.

It turns out that the helicopter parenting, or tech-ridden desire for instant gratification are not the ultimate culprit. We should stop looking at whether participation trophies are the problem. Rather, we should see them all as symptoms of an economic, political, and educational system based in a bygone industrial model and influenced by a dying philosophy of structuralism.

What’s the answer then?

Teach kids to fail.

The next generation will need to know better than anyone that there isn’t a right answer to most questions but rather that each of us has our own perspective on the world. I often like to use two analogies to prove this point. The first is a famous illustration

old-lady-young-optical-illusion[1]

Upon encountering this picture, each of us can see a woman. We have a fixed idea on what age this woman is. If you have seen this picture before, then you know that there are actually two women pictured here. One of them is old and the other is young. If you look at it long enough, you might be able to see both. Here we have a binary: old/young. Whether you initially see the young woman or the old woman, you are right. There isn’t a “correct” answer here. One is not the “best.” Both perspectives are just different. We have to teach kids to seek out people who view the world from a different perspective and to learn from them. We have to teach kids to seek out “diverse” instead of “correct.”

Lastly, a story that I like to share with my students right before we get on the bus for the contest I mentioned at the beginning of this post. There is no better place to seek out failure than in the arts. What I learned after those first few years of struggling is that there was never going to be a right answer in how my choirs sang. I was never going to be the best, but neither was anyone else. That didn’t mean I should stop trying. Ultimately, what we seek out in the arts is beauty, not perfection. And much like the picture above, our perspective on beauty varies widely. So I ask my students, after months of seeking our idea of beauty, a simple question:

Raise your hand if you like sandwiches

Invariably, after I point out that a sandwich is any food that is held together between two other foods, every hand shoots up. Whether it be a hoagie, or a quesadilla, or a PB&J everyone likes some kind of sandwich. But if you gathered any three people in the same room, you would be hard pressed to find a group that could agree on which sandwich is the best. This is how I present our performance to them. We go to a room, and we sing music for people that we think is beautiful and compelling. The judges then give us a rating. This rating is based on their perspective of what is beautiful and compelling. It doesn’t mean that they are right and we are wrong or we are right and they are wrong any more than someone who likes Limburger cheese on a tortilla is right compared to someone who prefers beef-tongue on rye.  We all agree on the big picture: sandwiches are good, music is good. Or, pertaining to the wider theme here: learning is good. Our job isn’t to define what is right or wrong, but rather to encourage the dialogue. Insomuch as that means everyone gets a trophy for trying, then sign me up!

But that doesn’t mean that there are no standards.

It simply means that, rather than seeking the best, we should always seek to be better. We should encourage our students to seek rigor rather than right. We should reward kids for showing up, failing, and showing up again. This will instill in the coming generation a sense of strength, confidence, and grit that will prepare them confront their fear of the world, and ultimately conquer it.

 

And we teach anyway

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I had a student visit me at lunch the other day.

Let’s call him Robert.

Robert was in my class for two years. Now, in my class, you were expected to come to class and participate by singing. That’s what we do in a choir class, we sing. And when I tell people that I teach choir, I get one of two responses:

1. “OH! Like Glee!”

2. “What fun! All you have to do is sing all day long!”

And I smile at them, because it’s not worth spoiling the delusion.

Now don’t get me wrong. Much of what happens in a music class is joyful, and artful, and beautiful. There wasn’t a day in my 8 years in music education that I didn’t experience the bliss of hearing my students make magic.

And I lived for it.

And I live for it still.

Sometimes, the magic was a melody or a harmony. Mostly, though, it was an expression. It isa realization that I share with a student: we are both human, and that there was very little else in the world that would unite us more than that moment. Moreover, the moment meant that we both had more to learn. That’s where the magic lies, in the realization that, as people, none of us are done learning, and all of us have something to teach.

So back to Robert. My first days with Robert were quite hopeful. I taught his sister a few years earlier and she had been a remarkable student. She had gone on to college and was well on her way to a successful life in the medical industry. So my expectations for Robert were similar.  Right off the bat, I knew that he was a bright and insightful. And boy was he eager! He wanted my attention and he wanted it NOW. He loved to dance, and he loved music. I was excited for the things he would teach me, and the possibility of what I could teach him.

It’s rarely that simple, though.

Robert would spend the next two years in and out of offices. First it was my office. Then it was the principal’s office. Then it was the police station. Then a probation officer. Suddenly, Robert’s priorities weren’t break-dancing and basketball. I was amazed how quickly his attention turned to making money, finding a job, and getting out of school. Robert became a “problem kid.” He became a burden to the classroom. You see, he was still bright and insightful. He was still eager. But now he was also obstinate. And angry. Being a criminal is expensive, especially when you’re 16.

It would be easy for me to write him off, as many of the adults in his life did. But I couldn’t. The magic had already happened. I had seen him at his best. I knew who he was underneath the trappings hoisted on him by the world. So I fought to help him chip away at that exterior and find who he was. He never sang much, but he read a lot. He would download Aristotle, and John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson on his phone. Each day he had some new thought to discuss with me about the world. He also had some horrible story about a probation officer, or one of his pot-smoking buddies, or, sadly, about another teacher. He was a pain. He always had been. He was NOT his sister. But he was himself. With all of his flaws, and all of his challenges, there was something remarkable about him.

Our time together became much less about making music, and much more about his future. He had very little guidance at home. His family was too busy to deal with a problem child and continue to struggle with abject poverty. Their continued survival became a bigger priority than their son’s future. So Robert and I talked about college. We talked about working. We talked about the difference between a job and a career. He asked me about Aristotle, and John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson. And he taught me so much.

Robert is a senior now and has gone on to bigger and better things. He is working in a pharmacy tech program and applying to get a job at a local pharmacy. He plans on going to school next year to work in medicine, just like his sister. His struggles are far from over, but when he came to visit me during lunch the other day, his eyes looked a little less weary than they have in a while. There was hope. There was magic.

Teaching is hard. For every two model students there are a hundred others. Some of them are a mild challenge. Some of them make you want to run from the room screaming. There is so much to teach them and almost no time to do it in. There isn’t any money. There isn’t enough space. And everyone is mad at you. There are tests, and parents who yell, and stressed out administrators that are just as overworked as you are. There are 14 hour days, and 6 day weeks, and “vacations” where you work as much as you do when school is in session. And, as Rita Pierson says, “we come to work when don’t feel like it, and we listen to policy that doesn’t make sense…”

“…and we teach anyway.”

We teach because we have to. Educators are educators because they have to be. Teachers get a job. Educators change the world. Not because they want to. Not because they have to. Because we need to.

Robert wishes he could be in choir class this year. He told me so at lunch. It’s not because we get to sing every day. It isn’t because it’s like Glee. Robert comes to choir class for the same reason I get up at 5:30 every morning and drive to school.

The magic.

I am lucky. Being a music teacher never made me lucky. It wasn’t because I “got to teach a subject the kids actually liked.” It doesn’t matter if you’re teaching choir, or dance, or math models, or AP lit, or world geography.

We don’t teach subjects.

We teach people.

And they teach us.

THAT is why I get up at 5:30 in the morning. THAT is why I do this job for not enough money and for not enough time and for not enough thanks. Because that moment at lunch that Robert and I share is worth all the gold in Solomon’s temple. It’s my national monument. For every 300 “challenging” kids I get to teach, I only need a moment. How much magic do you want, anyway?