Flashback - Getting What We Pay For

[Back at the end of 2012, I wrote a piece I called “Green Schools - A Questionable Investment.” It was just one example of how key words can get people charging off on a mission without first figuring out if it makes economic sense. It happens in government and in personal lives. We hear words like “green” or “natural” or “sustainable” and many more, and we automatically read it as positive. Emotional decision making takes over and the damage results, sometimes minor expenses, sometimes a major waste. Here is the story.]

This rather long USA Today article is worth reading. It tells of a review of green schools, those that were built to meet standards set by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), an organization that promotes and certifies green construction not only for schools but for other commercial and government buildings. Green construction is promoted by school boards and by governments at  all levels. “[T]housands of commercial developers have won state and local tax breaks, grants, expedited permitting and waivers from development laws for LEED-certified buildings. More than 200 states, federal agencies and municipalities require LEED certification for public buildings.”

School districts that paid higher construction costs for LEED-certified buildings in return for promised energy savings and better student performance found that they fell short in both categories.  They were told up front that the improved environment would lead to both future utility savings and better learning and teacher success, but “a USA TODAY review of school-test records, LEED-certification documents and research reports shows little correlation between 'green schools' and student performance or energy use.”  Often they made the investment but did not get near the expected return.

This is another strong case for critical thinking, asking for evidence over promises; that behavior is lacking in America today. We have developed a kind of fairytale mentality that everything will be grand because our intentions are noble and our hearts are in the right place. People are lured by feel-good words that entice them into making instant value judgments without evidence, words like green, sustainable, all-natural, justice and fairness, holistic, anti-oxidants, probiotics, diversity, and others.  They hear the word and automatically expect better outcomes. It causes them to show an irrational preference for such things as natural/organic foods, dietary supplements, bottled water, complimentary medicine, and now, construction techniques that promise much, but  fail to deliver.  Even when faced with strong evidence of this failure, hype wins out over reality.

Many years ago a scheme to sell more of a product (or service) was to label it in bold letters as “New and Improved.”  Eventually consumers realized that changes were often minor as was any improvement in performance. Now the approach is the same but the words have changed. A critical thinking America must begin to demand more than just promises. Otherwise we will continue to be duped, wasting time, energy and money for little or nothing in return.

[By seeing enough examples like this I have personally become sensitive to these words. They set off alarms in my brain telling me to be careful and check the details before committing. But all these years later the packaging and advertising stays the same.] 

Some Odd Thoughts

As I write these little essays, I get the impression that I often have thoughts that are out of sync with the rest of the world. Perhaps I think too hard about things, but here are a few more random observations.

I picked up a small card advertising a kind of school system open house and presentation. In part it read, “Come hear about some of the new and exciting things happening at our schools.” This is probably a symptom of current advertising where everything has to be new and exciting or new and improved or innovative and sustainable. Buzzwords fill all advertising from shoes to cars to doctor’s offices.

But if I were a parent of a child attending one of these schools, I wouldn’t care two pins about new and exciting. I would want the school to teach my children how to read, write, add and subtract. These are basic skills that anyone needs in any profession or just to live a reasonably stress-free life. Instead, in another case I see a television news segment featuring kids in the early grades crawling around on the floor to get an appreciation of STEM subjects with “educators” gushing about how wonderful it is and how it “keeps them engaged.”

Shouldn’t it be the child’s responsibility to learn and the parent’s responsibility to ensure they do? It seems in too many cases teachers are entertainers, the students are the audience and the parents are automatic advocates for their children when they step out of line, setting up an unproductive dynamic.

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Some research shows that patients in nursing homes can be comforted by dogs and other pets, but can be equally comforted and cheered up by mechanical dog-like robots. What if airlines developed a policy that so-called support animals were no longer allowed on planes. Instead people could rent a teddy bear of other stuffed comfort animal at the departing airport and turn it in when they landed. (This would not apply to legitimate service animals.) That’s never going to happen. Society is headed in the opposite direction.

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CBS Sunday Morning ran a segment a few weeks ago about the $450 million makeover of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City. In it the museum director mentioned that they “will also increase the number of works by female artists – five times as many [as] before.” Wow, that’s really a good thing – or is it?

Apparently the art world today harbors some resentment that the art world of the past judged art, at least in part, on the basis of whether the artist was a man or a woman, giving preference not to the quality of the art but to the sex of the artist. The quality of the art (as subjective as that can be) should be the criterion for judging what gets displayed and what is rejected, not the appearance, the status, the reputation or the political connections of the artist. That would be the really good thing.

So why is MOMA making it a point to call attention to the number of female artists? Isn’t that the same kind of objectionable thinking that prevailed in the past dressed up in a different costume? They express their objection to past flaws in the system by doing the same thing in the opposite direction and call it progress.

Parents and Homework

As another school year has begun, I saw in a syndicated advice column called Living With Children a question that addresses the idea of parental responsibility and school homework.  I had mixed reactions.

The letter writer, the parent of a child entering the first grade, says that they were notified that the local school expects all parents to check a website, called the Parent Portal, every night to keep up with their children’s homework assignments and to help them when they get stuck.  This parent doesn’t like the idea, feeling that “in effect, we are being made responsible for what, in our estimation, is a teacher’s responsibility.”  Other parents agree.

The columnist also agrees, arguing that such websites take advantage of parental anxiety based on an erroneous belief that “children’s grades reflect the quality of their parenting.”  He worries that these setups will turn parents into “micromanaging enablers” by transferring “a significant amount of responsibility for academic instruction to the home.”  The column continues that enabling in any form shifts responsibility off the children (and possibly the teachers) producing over the long term less mature and effective adults.

The final advice is to not check every night but to help occasionally, letting the “children know that they are responsible for their homework and that there will be consequences should they require [their parents] to get involved." 

My mixed feelings arose from the columnist letting the parents too much off the hook.  The writer seems to want to ignore the website, which was probably too aggressively pushed on them; but this website could also be seen as a tool.  Should those parents wait around as in pre-Internet days for a teacher’s conference to find out their child is lagging behind or not doing assignments as expected?  With this modern tool, parents can spot check what is expected and reinforce those expectations without becoming overly involved.  When parents ask, “Do you have any homework?” and are met with the shrug or the vague answer, they have a tool to fall back on to find the answer.  Reinforcing expectations or answering questions is not enabling.  Nagging constantly and checking answers before they are turned in is.

I also don’t buy the idea that parental involvement has no impact on student performance.  In their book, The Why Axis, Gneezy and List studied the effect of motivation and incentives on student performance.  They tried different incentive programs with students, parents and teachers in Chicago Heights public schools and found that when the incentives were properly designed, the minority students performed just as well as their suburban counterparts in rich, white neighborhoods.  All three parties:  students, parents and teachers, must be motivated and involved.

It’s true enabling weakens – if only Washington could figure that out – but parents should not use the fear of enabling as an excuse to drop the ball or pass all the responsibility back to the teachers.  This lack of parental involvement is one reason more and more decisions about our schools are moving away from the local level toward state capitals and Washington.

What's a Parent To Do?

At first many people thought this was so unbelievable that it must be fake news, but I found it in the Chicago Tribune, and other reputable sources.  “Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants Chicago public high school students to show they have a plan for what's next before they can get a diploma.”  This adds a requirement for graduation, to become effective for the class of 2020 if approved by the school board.

His justification is to set expectations that the kids actually have a plan.  The article quoted Mayor Emanuel, "Just like you do with your children, college, post-high school, that is what's expected. If you change expectations, it's not hard for kids to adapt."  So apparently the city is taking over the job of the parents whose kids attend Chicago public schools (CPS).

If it is approved, Chicago will be the “first large urban school district to require students to develop a plan for their lives after high school.”  I guess there will be no more backpacking around Europe looking for your head that was popular among some in the generation of these kids’ grandparents.

But the idea of the city and the schools taking over parental responsibility is not new to Chicago.  An earlier article from the Tribune explains, “Starting this fall [2014], all Chicago Public Schools students will be able to get free breakfast and lunch at school.”  They had so much trouble with fraud in their reduced and free lunch programs that it became easier just to feed everyone.  For the past three years the parents need only provide one meal a day for their own children.

But it doesn’t stop there.  From the CPS website:  “Since 1998, Chicago Public Schools has required students to complete 40 service-learning hours in order to graduate.”  Since then parents don’t have to worry about instilling compassionate values or setting an example.  (In this case, the question always is whether required service makes people more generous.  We don’t celebrate those doing court-ordered community service as selfless volunteering.)

How are all these initiatives working out for the city?  From a report in September 2016 – “The latest five-year graduation rate is 73.5 percent, CPS said. The rate has been rising steadily over the past five years, according to district figures, and in 2014-15 was 69.9 percent.”  Note that even with an extra year to graduate more than one-quarter fail to do so.  Compare that to the national high school graduation rate in four years of 83.2 percent.

So it’s not fake news, just sad news.  And they are working on the wrong things.  In their book The Why Axis, authors Gneezy and List, who were working at the University of Chicago, report on various studies of motivation and incentives.  One was to try different incentive programs with students, parents and teachers in Chicago Heights public schools.  (It is not a pure comparison.  They wanted to study the CPS, but the teachers' union would not approve.)  They found that when the incentives were properly designed, minority students in this system performed just as well as their suburban counterparts in "rich, white neighborhoods."

Maybe with all that extra time on their hands the parents should take the school system to task, demand more and better education with less city and school board interference in their responsibilities.  Of course, giving up responsibilities to someone else is the easy way out – until we discover that it also means giving up control or freedom to choose.

It's the Behavior!

I don’t write about political topics, which is difficult these days as nearly everything seems to turn into a political topic; but with the presidential elections only about 15 months away and more candidates than you can shake a stick at, I started thinking about how very curious the election process in America is.

It’s like sitting at a play.  The lights dim and the cast comes on stage and starts to bow to the audience whereupon the audience starts clapping and cheering.  You nudge the person next to you and ask why is there what appears to be a curtain call when the play hasn’t even begun.  He explains that there are two very similar plays but only room on the stage for one, so each cast comes out and whoever gets the loudest applause gets to do their play.  “But how do you know if either of them are any good when they haven’t started yet?” you ask.  “Well you are supposed to read the reviews and decide, or look at plays from previous years to judge the quality.”

As it turns out most of the people in the audience haven’t read the reviews and aren’t really interested in the theater.  Some just go along with what their friends are telling them.  Some don’t feel like it but were told it was their duty to show up for the opening curtain call.  Others were picked up in vans or busses and brought to the theater by people who think everyone should see one or the other of the plays.  Some walk in the door for each performance with their mind made up about which play they want to see because they have grown up believing that the one is good and the other is subversive or evil or naïve.

When the curtain goes up, the star of each play had better be a good-looking actor with a smooth confident delivery and lots of charm, because that will draw the most applause.  If he or she looks or sounds like a certain segment of the audience, it can also elicit louder applause.  Comparative acting ability will be a mystery until the play actually starts.

Once the initial curtain call is over, part of the audience feels smug because they got what they wanted; the other part feels cheated.  In reality most will not pay close attention to what is going on after the play begins.  The play is supposed to make people happy so they can go on living their lives and not worry about any big outside problems and issues. 

Unfortunately, for at least the past 25 years, if you ask Americans what they think of the “play,” most of the people most of the time will say they are not satisfied.  Polls put it this way:  Do you think America is headed in the right or wrong direction.  No matter who the “actors” are or what “play” they are doing, the response has been consistently negative.

That is what these bi-weekly essays are about.  The answers to most of our problems can and should be found outside the “theater.”  Fighting terrorism is best done by the government.  Most of our other problems are not, as these hundreds of examples over the past 4 years easily show.  What children eat in school or what they learn or how well prepared they are should be issues for educators and parents.  How overweight we are and how unprepared we are to retire are problems we created ourselves.  Whether we make careful and mature choices cannot be guaranteed by “consumer protections.”  The added cost of insurance and everything else we buy resulting from frivolous lawsuits and the justifiably paranoid reaction to a litigious society is part of regular business practices.  Parents having children without the means to feed them is not solved merely by feeding those children.  Courtrooms used as a weapon of delay and intimidation by advocates and special interests rather than as a path to justice threaten progress and rational judgment pushing common sense by default into the realm of zero-tolerance.  Charlatans with ever more sophisticated communication tools continue to prey on a credulous populace with promises of miracle foods and miracle cures, with warnings of health dangers and evil conspiracies, with get-rich-quick schemes and with hype of all kinds to sell us goods, services and entertainment that don’t add to our happiness.

America is headed in the wrong direction because we have a society awash in often-unconscious destructive behavior.  Government can’t legislate proper behavior, yet Americans go to the polls every couple of years hoping for a miracle, applauding the “actors” and expecting to be able to idly sit back and enjoy the show.

Hiding Behind a Policy

There is a difference between justice and fairness.  Fairness calls on us to treat everyone alike.  We award all the children trophies or medals for participation in a sport.  We recognize that they all tried hard and did their best.  We agonize over self-esteem issues.  This is fair, but is it just?  Try giving trophies to adult bowlers or softball players regardless of their scores or how they fared in the tournament.  They would see it as a sham and an insult.  Why would they bother to compete if everyone is treated the same.  This is not a reward for skill.  It is not justice.

Somehow we have gotten it into our heads that we must treat everyone the same and be fair, but especially in more complex situations than sporting events, the objective is to solve a problem in a way that treats everyone involved in the way they deserve to be treated.  Justice does not treat everyone the same.  Justice requires wisdom and leadership.

This is why the trend toward “zero tolerance” policies is disturbing.  They are designed to be fair, but not necessarily just.  They do not take individual situations into account.  They require no wisdom or leadership, only that the administrator follows the rules.  They require no thinking and insulate the administration or bureaucracy from blame.

So we end up with situations like this one, where two second graders were suspended for pointing pencils at each other while making shooting noises.  (The policy “also bans drawing a picture of a gun and pointing a finger in a threatening manner.”)  Earlier this year a seven-year-old in Maryland was disciplined for chewing a pop tart into the shape of a gun.  Are these examples of justice, leadership and wisdom that solve a problem, or one of teachers and principles hiding behind a policy to avoid conflicts in future situations?  Shouldn’t we expect more of public schools officials?

My 75-year-old friend told me that in his third grade class picture, one of the students was wearing a holster with his “pearl-handle” cap pistol.  Ah, but those were simpler times; today the world is more dangerous and frightening.  It makes me wonder, where did all those dangerous and frightening people come from?  Presumably they had parents.  Did we as a society let them drop the ball on being responsible parents?  The children today also have parents, parents who are ready to jump to the defense of their child before hearing all the evidence, ready to trust the word of a child over that of an adult, the teacher or principle.  Thus, public school officials are backed into a corner, forced to hide behind zero tolerance to avoid arguments or possible legal action.  Yes, it’s crazy, but we’ve made it that way by our past and continuing behavior.