The PC guy at the Radio & TV Correspondents' Dinner discusses tests Obama on his geekiness. (via lots of people).
Special education parents win an important case in the SC. Parents of special-education students may seek
government reimbursement for private school tuition, even if they have
never received special-education services in public school.
Ray Bradbury on the Internet:
The Internet? Donāt get him started. āThe Internet is a big
distraction,ā Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los
Angeles, which is jammed with enormous stuffed animals, videos, DVDs,
wooden toys, photographs and books, with things like the National Medal
of Arts sort of tossed on a table.
āYahoo called me eight weeks
ago,ā he said, voice rising. āThey wanted to put a book of mine on
Yahoo! You know what I told them? āTo hell with you. To hell with you
and to hell with the Internet.ā
He's right, you know.
Let's Panic About Babies. Their tag line — Welcome Tiny Overlords. (Via JPod)
Apt. 11d 
That kid in South Carolina was mid-way through his junior year when his parents pulled him out of school. It must have been a pretty dire situation for that to be the remedy.
Note also that Souter was one of the dissenters. I wonder which way the “empathetic” Sotomayor would go?
LikeLike
Oregon, not South Carolina. His parents decided to send him to a 60K/year private residential school, where he received a diagnosis of ADD. Then they sued the district for reimbursement. It’ll be interesting to see what effect the decision has on private placements and SpED availability.
LikeLike
Here’s a quote from Ross Greene (author of “The Explosive Child”) in his new book “Lost at School”:
“While diagnoses do tend to make adults take a kid’s difficulties more seriously, a kid doesn’t need a diagnosis, or a special education designation, to have a problem. He just needs a problem to have a problem.”
LikeLike
I think the abbreviation SC for Supreme Court led me astray. Thanks for the correction, bj.
“It’ll be interesting to see what effect the decision has on private placements and SpED availability.”
It could also potentially lead to public schools being much more accomodating earlier, leading to better working relationships and more kids’ staying in the public system.
I’m somehow remembering a quote from someone at KTM earlier this week. It went something like this: Teachers want to be treated like professionals and parents want to be treated like clients; why can’t we make this thing work?
LikeLike
The “ads” in the right sidebar of Let’s Panic About Babies are brilliant. 1-800-DINGOES indeed.
LikeLike
I’m in a position now where the school is working with my son even though he doesn’t have a diagnosis.
“Teachers want to be treated like professionals and parents want to be treated like clients; why can’t we make this thing work?”
Not a fan of that quote. What does “client” mean? Why would parents want to be treated like clients? I’m always leery about trying to analogize education to anything else. It’s its own special thing.
LikeLike
We’ve actually heard for some time that teachers want to be treated and paid like professionals. It’s hard to say what that means exactly (besides better pay). Roughly, a client is someone who seeks the services of a professional (accountant, doctor, lawyer, etc.–“client” in certain settings like social work is a bit of a euphemism) and is able to make choices as to which professional they hire and what they do with the information the professional provides. A professional is a person with specialized training who acts in the best interests of a client and is respected for their skills, has a code of professional conduct, but also enjoys some measure of freedom in how they go about doing their jobs.
I’m not saying that everybody in the professions that I’ve mentioned fits that profile, but that’s the sort of person that I’d want to work with. Interestingly, all of those professions involve conveying information and actually require a large educational effort to be really successful. The doctor needs to get across to a patient what’s wrong with him and what the patient needs to do (and this is one of the areas where I think current US medical practice stinks). As my radio guy says, an accountant or financial advisor needs to have “the heart of a teacher,” realizing that you the client need to be educated and offered choices rather than strong-armed.
LikeLike
Ray Bradbury has become your cranky great-uncle. He loves malls, and apparently hates the internet; at least it’s a weird combination. Has he always been this way?
LikeLike
During my brief sojourn as a unionized employee at a public sector human services used, we used ‘consumer’ to refer to the people who used the services. By ‘we’, I mean the people in the central administrative offices as I have no idea what the people who actually did the work called the consumers. If you got enough people together in one organization and could get
the attention of a newspaper editor, the group becomes a “stakeholder.” A stakeholder that doesn’t cause too much trouble for bureaucrats was an ‘advocate’. A stakeholder friendly to an important state legislator is invited to everything relevant and cc’ed a great deal of the time.
LikeLike
Termites are consumers.
LikeLike
Well, the main goal was to reduce the consumption of inpatient hospital days, not wood. (Someone in a state mental hospital gets $0 from the feds and whereas that same person at a community mental health center gets Medicaid, etc.) The previous phrase was ‘patient’, but that doesn’t work as well when the person you are seeing most frequently is a confused 22 year-old psych major trying to teach basic living skills.
LikeLike
I agree with Wendy; straight business analogies are not that useful when you are talking about education. Parents are not clients (unless of course theyāve engaged a governess). They are, in the best scenarios, strong advocates for their childrenās educational needs, and schools need to pay attention to what they have to say and figure out a way to capitalize on that energy and experience.
Given the credentialing standards in most states, Iād argue that teachers are professionals according to Amy Pās basic definition: āa person with specialized training who acts in the best interests of a client and is respected for their skills, has a code of professional conduct, but also enjoys some measure of freedom in how they go about doing their jobs.ā But there are sucky teachers, just as there are sucky lawyers, doctors, and accountants. Does the relatively low pay mean that a lot of potential teachers who wouldn’t be sucky do something more lucrative and respected? I think so. Does it mean that the excellent teachers are less respected than they should be? I think so.
Clients in the above definition would be students, not parents–still a flawed analogy–though unlike doctors and lawyers (and parents), teachers have to balance the best interests of each individual child with the best interests of the class as a whole. There are [hopefully!] no doctors or lawyers who would see 136 āclientsā each day, in groups of 34, while thatās usual for NYC high school teachers.
LikeLike
“straight business analogies are not that useful when you are talking about education.”
Business terms piss me off. I once worked for a professor who referred to me, in my presence, as a ‘resource.’ He apologized after I started laughing.
LikeLike
Catherine Johnson of KTM is talking about the analogy between doctors and teachers today, specifically the way in which the role of the doctor in our society has shifted away from godlike omniscience to something more like partnership with the patient and she talks about how she would like something similar to happen with schools.
http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2009/06/allison-on-trusting-schools-and-doctors.html
LikeLike
Would it have been better if he referred to you as “human resource”?
I think the term “professional” was actually invented to differentiate from business terms, not to align with them. Lawyers, for example, use it to mean that they have a responsibility to the profession (and what it stands for) separately from their duties to their client. They are also sworn to uphold the law (even if their client wishes to evade it). Doctors, too, take an oath that might conflict with the desires of their patients. Teachers are supposed to be educating the student (and, if we think of the minor student as their “clients” we see that they’re obviously answerable to goals other than that of the 5-year-old client). Oh, and, there’s no way that the parent is the teacher’s “client” — I’d argue that professionalism means that’s not true even when you’re hiring a personal teacher, independent of the school system. A teacher’s duty is to teach their student. Well, and a teacher’s duty in the classroom is to teach all the students, not just any particular one, or your kid in particular.
(that is, the “customer” is always right, but the consumer of professional services isn’t).
LikeLike
bj,
Note how in Jane Austen or other 19th century English novels, young men from the gentry go into the Army, the Navy, the Anglican priesthood, or the law or medicine, but would never dream of going into trade and dealing in corsets or beer. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but it’s a very old distinction in Anglo-Saxon culture.
If the parent isn’t the client and the minor child isn’t the client, who exactly is a teacher supposed to be accountable to when things aren’t going well?
LikeLike
As far as business-speak goes, I’m not a fan of ‘Human Resources’ as the name for the people who screw-up my benefit forms. I’d rather they call it ‘Personnel’ or something similarly direct. āHuman Resourcesā makes me think āsoylent green.ā Of course, given my interaction with various HR departments, cannibalism may be reflective of the mood they are trying to set.
LikeLike
I’m actually 100% agreement w/Amy P on this one. My taxes pay for the school system. My taxes pay for the service that the school provides. I am their client. My kids haven’t paid a cent and aren’t adults yet. They are not the client.
I think that parents should serve on tenure review committees, but that’s a topic for another day.
How else can you conceive of the relationship between schools and parents, if you don’t use business analogy? Are the schools supposed to grace to listen to me when they feel like it? Am I suppose to bow before their knowledge? I actually find that concept rather horrific. If I pay the bill, they answer to me. Period.
LikeLike
Laura, does that hold true for college, too?
LikeLike
Absolutely!
LikeLike
Actually, I think that college professors are really tuned into their students wants/needs. At least, the untenured ones. They have to fill up their classes and get good evals or no tenure. If the school doesn’t provide students with the classes/services they want, then the students leave for another school.
LikeLike
Laura, you’re bored and just want to see me explode, admit it. š
LikeLike
Heh. That’s always amusing.
LikeLike
Speaking of exploding Wendy, did you read the NCLB link from earlier? I’m now less of a fan of NCLB as I just discovered that “Dragon Tales” (on Sprout) is partially funded by NCLB. I get that PBS isn’t doing to get the kind of money for animation and music that Dora has, but it can’t possibly cost that much to get a better plot.
LikeLike
Wendy, I can join you in the explosion. A sure-fire way to get good reviews is to give everyone good grades and teach them nothing (and, my guess is that this method will work better and better as you go down the scale to less competitive colleges). It’s also good to teach qualitatively evaluated terminal classes, so that no one needs you to have taught students any particular content. Mind you, I think it’s wrong to go the next step and assume that any class that gets good reviews is also not rigorous (I think rigor & good evaluations can coexist). So, I’m not trying to make you explode Laura.
I think you & Amy are 100% wrong, and not just because parents aren’t the clients of pubic education, but because “giving students what they want (or even parents)” is an antithesis to what teaching is supposed to be about. I believe the customer culture ruins education (and, incidentally, medicine).
LikeLike
And, I’m horrified at the idea that parents have anything to do at all with college education (if they pay the bills, that’s an arrangement between them and their child, and one that confers them no rights whatsoever to the adult child’s education). How about graduate school? med school?
(K-12 is different, because the children are minors, and thus, their parents are entrusted as guardians of their interests).
LikeLike
“pubic education”
One time, a coworker just idly picked-up a letter we were sending to 500 people. They were sitting on the table the secretary was stuffing them into the envelopes. The mention of ‘pubic schools’ was the first thing she noticed.
On the substantive point, I’m closer to BJ than Amy or Laura.
LikeLike
“…parents aren’t the clients of pubic education…”
Catherine Johnson posted a while back on William Easterly’s “White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.” There’s a lot to the book, but one interesting problem is the problematic structure of aid: A (the West) gives B (developing countries and NGOs) money to help C (the poor). The problem is the lack of feedback and communication in this system and the way that B becomes more and more interested in cultivating A rather than in listening to and serving C. Obviously, US public education isn’t in quite the same situation as malaria-infected Malawians, but I think we suffer from a similar lack of feedback and communication because of structural issues. Various levels of government and Bill Gates (A) give money to schools (B) to educate children (C), but there is very little incentive structure for B to listen to C and C’s parents rather than to A. Note that it doesn’t matter in the original Easterly example how ignorant C is or how smart A and B are. C may be ignorant and superstitious etc., but one has to understand C deeply in order to get C to use mosquito netting or send children to school.
LikeLike
Unless you send your child to a private school, you don’t pay the bill for your child’s education. You contribute toward it with your taxes, but so do I, and I don’t have any children (and I’m not complaining about my taxes). Children, even though they don’t “pay a cent,” are autonomous beings with rights of their own (hence child protective services). Their parents advocate for them while they are minors, but this does not remove the teacher’s obligation to the student over the parent. But teachers and parents are supposed to be on the same side here, the side of the kids.
LikeLike
Sorry, MH, not yet. It’s been a tough week. *whimper* I’ve been avoiding stuff that might make me, you know, think.
No offense, Laura. š
LikeLike
I’ll make a full post about this another time. Some disclosure– my grad school adviser was a big part of the community-control movement of schools in NYC in the 1960s.
Rather than business terminology, I think of it more in terms of democratic theory. All employees of the state are accountable to the public. That means postal carriers, public libraries, senators, and teachers. This doesn’t mean that all teachers have to give all the kids As, but it does mean that the public has some say about school practices. If the school fails to function, then the public has the right to demand answers or to revoke the privileges. If we can impeach a president, then we can fire a principal.
In the suburbs, the public is usually the parents and that’s why I equate the two. The average person in my town is a middle aged parent. The seniors have had their property taxes frozen, so they barely contribute to the schools in the town.
Parents have a huge say in college education. They can’t demand As for their kids, but they can determine which school their kid attends.
LikeLike
“They can’t demand As for their kids, but they can determine which school their kid attends.”
Yes, though that used to be less true. One of the stories I’ve always loved about my alma mater (which first admitted women in the 1970’s) is the story about one of the women in the first four-year graduating class with women: “she ran away from her Philadelphia home to enroll against her parentsā wishes, and was supported the entire time by scholarship aid and work-study jobs.”
I understand why colleges won’t treat students as independent anymore (too much reason of creating the fiction that they are making plans against the parent’s wishes). But the reliance of college students on parent purse strings does muck up the waters.
And, Suze said it better than I did. The parent & teacher should be on the same side, so it shouldn’t, in general, matter that the teacher’s responsibility is to the child.
LikeLike
Principal or not, I think you pretty much have to sleep with a student or sell drugs to get fired from our schools. Enrollment is down 7,000 (20%) in the past five years. And those years cover the period when the introduced college scholarships for every graduate.
LikeLike
“The parent & teacher should be on the same side, so it shouldn’t, in general, matter that the teacher’s responsibility is to the child.” That sentence weirds me out for several different reasons.
When we’re talking about school governance, I’m not talking about teachers v. parents. The individual teachers don’t matter. Parents should have more control over the school system in general. They should be able to have more control over curriculum, staffing, and financial decisions. Right now, the system is rigged against parents. The school board elections are held at odd times. Mayors don’t have enough control over schools. When I talking about school governance and parental control, I am most certainly not talking about individual classrooms. I don’t care what teachers do; I care what the superintendent and school board do.
But let’s go back to the teacher-parent issue in Suze’s sentence. I am in charge of my kids, and, unless I do something horrific, no one else is in charge of them. I let teachers and babysitters and soccer coaches work with them during the day, but their responsibility is temporary and highly limited. Hopefully, the teachers are doing everything in the interest of my kids and we’re all on the same page, but I call the shots.
LikeLike
Here’s the discussion from last year on teachers as professionals:
http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2008/10/linda-darling-hammond-on-teaching-as.html
LikeLike
“Hopefully, the teachers are doing everything in the interest of my kids and we’re all on the same page, but I call the shots. ”
You call the shots, but, if teachers are professionals, they just don’t just do what you want them to do; they work with you in figuring out what’s in the best educational interest of your child. I’ve already mentioned that I have an extremely capable, over-achieving, approval junkie on my hands. She shows no signs of being a golf prodigy, but we could certainly prep her to, oh train for spelling bees. I could go searching for a coach for that purpose, and call the shots, but I would hope that the teacher wouldn’t just bow to the shots I called, but would instead consider what my daughter needs.
One can hire non-professional individuals to prep (I don’t want to call it “teach”) your children to produce a particular outcome if one wants to (well, as long as one does it with one’s own money). But, it’s not what I want. I think the lack of what I consider “professional” service (and I’m defining it as someone who has expertise about a subject out of my sphere, and who feels an ethical obligation to serve an “ideal” other than the person who is paying the bills), is one of the things I find most frustrating about my interactions with a wide variety of people who used to be professionals. Now they are being driven by market exigencies (well, and I guess by clients with different desires) to become “service providers.” That applies to doctors, lawyers, and even artists, and interior designers, among others. It’s not a change that’s making me happy.
Teachers, since they’re paid from the public purse are in a slightly different place — it’s always a bit dangerous to accept a patron. But I don’t think this patronage changes their ethical obligations to the child.
I think I disagree you about parent control of schools. I think I disagree mostly because I think that a lot of what parents call parent oversight is really the oversight of a few parents, and a lot of the conflicts arise from the fact that many active parents really care only about the education of their own children while the schools are entrusted with educating all the children.
But, I also disagree because I think that parents aren’t the only “stakeholders” in our schools (especially not the current parents, who may exclude other large groups of parents), but also excludes taxpayers, and others who have an interest in our public schools. If public schools are for parents, then, they really are a net income transfer (and, to parents, not the children), and we might as well be explicit about that (mind you, I think there’d be a lot less money that way, too).
I’m confused about what level of public involvement I think there should be in public services, because I think “none” or “very little” is clearly the wrong answer, since it can lead to paternalistic and bad service (I think this is the problem you’re trying to address in schools, and I understand that). But, I’m also wary of public control, if what that means is letting limited groups in the population run complicated things in a group-think/populist way. But, I’ll wait for you to frame that discussion.
LikeLike
Cool. Let’s wait for a good article to come my way before I write a post on this topic. Discussion is always more focused when we have something to chew on. I haven’t thought about this stuff in a while, but it was a chapter in my diss and my advisor was big into it.
I think it would make for a good debate.
LikeLike