This morning’s newspaper (1/28/2014) had a “tech quote” from Knightscope CEO William Li, whose company sells robotic security guards:

There are 7 billion people on the planet, and we’ll soon have a few billion more, and law enforcement is not going to scale at the same rate; we literally can’t afford it.

Li wants people to (1) imagine how to live more safely on a crowded planet, and (2) invest in his company.

Modeling and teaching what it means to be educated is another way to live more safely on a crowded planet. For those of us who are educators, the choice is ours. We can continue to ignore the six virtues, or we can make them the foundation for graduating a more educated citizenry.

If we ignore them, Li will be wealthy and his robotic security guards will be happy (if properly programmed). The rest of us will live in fear. I love irony.

Guest blog by Ryan Chandler

Social Studies Teacher

Jesse C. Carson HS, Rowan-Salisbury Schools, NC

Many adults believe high school students are self-absorbed and care only about themselves. I had a recent experience that shows the other side of adolescence. My story is about student generosity.

At the beginning of November, the mother of one of my students was hospitalized. Not long afterward, she passed away.

Once students heard about the mother’s passing, they told me they wanted to do something for their classmate. I thought it was a wonderful idea.

What happened the next few days blew my mind. I could not have been more proud of this class. For several days they took up collections. They even asked students from their other classes to contribute.

I was amazed at how generous the students were, and I know their classmate appreciated it. This also brought my class closer together as they shared their concern for the well-being of another student. It showed me that high schoolers care about others, too.

Guest blog by Loryn Morrison

Asst. Principal, Welcome Elementary School

Davidson County Schools, NC

I am a worrier. My husband often jokes with me, saying I am constantly waiting for the sky to fall. I try to prevent myself from worry by avoiding difficult situations. To clarify, though, I do not worry about everything. I worry about money.

My husband lost his job three years ago when we were eight months pregnant with our son. To say that I thought the sky had fallen would be an understatement. We have been recovering from financial hardship ever since, but money worries still haunt me.

While it is embarrassing to put these concerns into words, I am trying to be courageous so others can identify.  For the past year I have been using our hardship as an excuse to avoid giving to others who are less fortunate.

For the past five years, I was in a district leadership position for a rural school system. I worked in many schools, but was never part of their cultures. For example, students on free and reduced lunch were a number associated with Title I funding, rather than people struggling for proper nutrition. I believe I lost touch with the reality faced by many of our students.

This year, I am an assistant principal in a school with many free and reduced lunch participants. This school is teaching me about generosity and humility every day.

I believe in teaching the six virtues, but I have to model them before I can teach them. Specifically, I need to model generosity.

One of my responsibilities is to greet bus riders each morning. This has taught me about our students. Some don’t have gloves or cold weather coats. Some wear the same outfit every other day. When I pass the local food shelter on my way home, I sometimes see our parents in line.

I also met Kim (a pseudonym), when her mother enrolled her in kindergarten. Kim and her mother had just gotten an apartment after living in a homeless shelter. Each morning Kim came to school excited to learn.

In October, Kim’s mom was far along in a pregnancy, and Kim started being late for school. Each morning she would come in and just cry. Many thought she did not want to leave her mother.

In my old state of mind, I would have let someone else care about Kim’s situation, but my new state of mind said I should step forward. I found out Kim and her mother were living in their car. Her mother lost her job because she couldn’t stand for long hours (doctor’s orders). She couldn’t pay the rent, and Kim couldn’t ride the bus in the morning, which meant she missed breakfast.

Kim was crying because she was hungry. She was not eating dinner and now she was missing breakfast. Each morning, it became my mission to get Kim breakfast. Seeing Kim’s face when she got food in the morning showed me that my sky had never really fallen. Since meeting Kim, I have stopped avoiding situations that might cause me pain or worry.

I became an educator because I want students to love learning. I now realize children cannot love learning if their basic needs are not met. Children in our schools need to see that we care about their basic needs as well as their education. We need to model that caring, so others can see that our hearts are in it for all of them.

Our school now donates to the local food shelter on a regular basis. We have maximized our backpack program. And there is a large room where students can get clothes, if needed.

Last Tuesday a fourth grader saw that her classmate needed shoes. That night she gathered several pairs from her closet and brought them to school the next day. She asked the teacher if she could meet with her classmate privately. She and the other girl went into a quiet area during independent reading time. They probably did not read that day, but one girl got to go shoe shopping. The girl who donated the shoes told only her teacher, and the other girl has proper shoes because of her generosity. That is why I am in education.

Guest blog by Elizabeth Humphries

Grade 4 Teacher, Elizabeth Cashwell Elementary

Fayetteville, NC

I listen to the news on my way to school every morning. Reports are usually about crime and politics. One day this fall the reporter said a man raped, attacked, and maimed a woman while her two children tried to defend her. Utterly disgusted, I pulled into work and tried to forget this terrible news.

About an hour after I got to work I was shocked to discover that this incident involved my student and her mother.  One of my precious children had defended her mother while she was brutally attacked. Tears filled my eyes and sickness hit my stomach.

I was surprised when my student came to school the next day. She fell into my arms as she entered my room. We cried together. She explained her bravery, and she said she could overcome what had happened.

Since then, this girl has found the courage to move on. She has been placed in another home and she attends counseling. Throughout the whole ordeal she never stopped smiling. When I asked her how I could be brave, like her, she said: “Have teachers like you.”

This situation raised our awareness about students’ home circumstances. Their home lives can be difficult in many ways; so we have to provide a safe, caring environment at school. Being a teacher is not only about planning and presenting math and language lessons. It is also about building classroom communities and being the role models our children need.

In the Foreward to Educational Courage: Resisting the Ambush of Public Education (EC: RTAOPE) Deborah Meier wrote:

And we need resistance to the continuing assault on public education that reduces schools to market-driven factories that select and sort our students, distorting visions of communities of learning and growth and activism. We can’t internalize the norm that’s out there and can’t accept that this is “the way things have to be.” We mustn’t adjust to injustice, losing our visions, our hope and our active resistance. (pp. x-xi)

I’m on the side of resistance because I agree with Meier.

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An old friend of mine used to warn about analogies: “They can both clarify and distort relationships.”

I thought of that as I read the Asheville Citizen-Times column headlined, “Abstinence is the answer” (July 20, 2013, p. A6). The author is a woman who periodically argues against abortion in our local paper. In this column she quoted Reverend Dahl B. Seckinger:

There is an alternative for the unmarried, and that is through the practice of chastity. It is foolproof, it is not hazardous to your health, parental permission is not needed, it is nondiscriminatory between the sexes, as either can practice this form of birth control, it is cheaper than any other form of birth control. It is energy-saving, it is tax-free and does not require billions in federal spending, nor is any red tape involved. I might add that it eliminates much of the danger of contracting venereal disease. Is this too simplistic an answer to the problem? It is medically sound and safe in its practice. There is no question about its moral implications. It is biblical. Why not deal with the cause rather than effects?

Reverend Dahl’s answer to the abortion question is like my answer to the school improvement question. We both want to address the cause of the problem — he wants to eliminate unwanted pregnancies, I want to improve education. Refraining from sex (chastity) does, in fact, prevent unwanted pregnancies, just like bringing the six virtues to a learning situation does, in fact, improve education.

But neither is a viable solution to the problem. People often fail to be chaste and teachers can’t model virtues they don’t have. Opponents of these solutions don’t say we should not be chaste, or that teachers should not model the six virtues.  They say we sometimes fail to be chaste and teachers sometimes fail to be virtuous.

In other words, my argument for the six virtues is like the chastity argument because it does not solve the problem, even though it is based on what is true. Reverend Seckinger lists the truths of the chastity argument. And the six-virtue argument is based on the truth that all virtues are combinations of these six. But neither set of truths solves the problem because the problems are caused by another truth — people fail to be chaste, and teachers can’t model and teach the virtues they lack.

But let’s be careful with analogies.  The chastity and six-virtue solutions are not analogous in one important way. Chastity is only one thing. It is the absence of the act that causes pregnancy. That is why “abstinence” is in the headline. But bringing virtues to learning situations takes many forms. Education improves whenever teachers bring any of the virtues, even if they can’t always bring all six.

The headwaters of a river flow for a simple reason–gravity pulls water downhill. If rivers are like our beliefs, the reason we believe should be simple, too.  With the six virtue definition of the educated person, it is.  Beliefs bridge understanding and imagination in a way that gives purpose to life.  What does that look like?

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The previous blog described the belief that our definition of “educated” should always be open to democratic debate.  Where has that belief led us?  Here are examples from the Education Week article, “State Lawmakers Make Curricular Demands of Schools.”

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I boarded the aircraft and was pleased to see Osaka, Japan, featured in the airline magazine. I visited Osaka in 2000, so I wanted to see how my experience compared with the writer’s descriptions.

When I got to page 12, I discovered why Osaka was featured:

Sky editor Deborah Caulfield Rybek explores Japan’s Kansai region on p. 66. Fly Delta direct to Osaka from Detroit, Seattle, and Guam. Service from Los Angeles and Detroit to Haneda airport in Tokyo starts in early 2011.

The passage struck me because it revealed my naivete at believing, even for a second, that the Osaka article had anything to do with my good fortune at flying Delta when the in-flight magazine featured a place I had visited. Editors featured Osaka for the same reason they feature every destination — to advertise new routes and to entice flyers to purchase airfares.
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“Cut the Crap” blogs expose language (some call it “educationese”) that obscures more than it clarifies. This blog cuts the crap about labeling students “at risk.”

We are all inadequate in some ways, so there is nothing inherently wrong with a term that says some students are “at risk” of failure. There is something inherently wrong, however, with a term that highlights student vices while hiding both their virtues and the vices promoted in public schools.

In Education Policy Brief (2009, V7, N4) Cable, Plucker and Spradlin go further by suggesting the label itself harms students:

Negative stereotypes are detrimental to students. A recognized quote by Robert Bierstedt depicts how students feel they are perceived by others has a very profound effect: “I am not who I think I am. I am not who you think I am. I am who I think you think I am.” Calling students “at-risk” may place students in more jeopardy than any other factors that may be harming them.

This blog cuts the crap about “at risk” students by putting its meaning in the context of the six-virtue definition of the educated person.

“At risk” crap #1 – Students are “at risk” of school failure because they score poorly on standardized tests (ignorance), skip classes (weak character), or don’t cooperate (selfish).

Cut the crap – Although schools don’t tolerate ignorance, weak character and selfishness, they tolerate, model and teach three other vices — intellectual incompetence, fear of truth, and pride. “At risk” students are those who don’t display understanding that is unimaginative, strong character that is fearful of truth, and generosity that emerges from pride.

“At risk” crap #2 – Some alternative programs aim to return “at risk” students to regular school programs by re-doubling efforts to teach the public school combination of understanding that is unimaginative, strong character that is fearful of truth, and generosity that emerges from pride. These programs rarely succeed because the adults in the lives of “at-risk” students have always modeled ignorance, weak character, and selfishness.  That is why teachers often say: “Now that I have met ‘Johnny’s’ parents, I know why he acts the way he does.”

Cut the crap – Regular public school teachers model and teach understanding, strong character and generosity as they overlook intellectual incompetence, fear of truth, and pride. Teachers in successful “at risk” programs do the same thing with different virtues and vices. They value student imagination, courage and humility, as they overlook ignorance, weak character and selfishness in “at risk students.”

When the six virtues define what it means to be educated, and when school personnel recognize both the virtues and vices taught in public schools, they know how to program for “at risk” students. It is simple. Educators should value “at-risk” students’ virtues and overlook their vices, just as teachers do for students who are not labeled “at risk.”

The Associated Press story about Chicago Urban Prep School for Young Men describes what that looks like:

http://www.urbanprep.org/media/apArticle_June2010.pdf