Does TV impact how we view disabilities

 Does TV Impact how we view disabilities? 

 

In some ways TV is a window on our social mores and in other ways it can lead us into better understandings.   Five years ago the wonderful children’s show, Sesame Street introduced a character with autism.   The show also included an online resource with information about the condition and resources for families.

But did any of that make a difference?  

Last month the journal Autism published the results of a formal study to see if shows like Sesame Street could really change attitudes.

The idea of the study was to see if viewing the website, “Amazing” that described autism and provided resources would change the attitudes of both families with children with autism and families with no children with autism.

Before viewing the website, families were assessed regarding their attitudes towards children with autism.   Not surprisingly, families who had children with autism were more positive toward the condition than were families without these children.

But here is what is very interesting.   The 473 families of children with autism and the 707 families without autism both had attitudinal changes after viewing the website.  Parents of children with autism commented that the information helped them to feel empowered and less helpless in dealing with their children.  Parents of children without autism said that the website information made them feel less frightened of not just the condition but of children with the condition.  Perhaps, previous iterations of people with autism on TV led to those fears?  The authors of the study concluded that “acquiring knowledge from a website may serve as an easy, quick way to reduce bias without potential harmful consequences toward individuals with autism”.   

These results can be extended lots of way.   Characters with disabilities on other TV shows, not just those aimed at children, could go a long way to improving employment opportunities for people with disabilities. These characters could be whatever the role demanded of them but that they just “happened” to have a disability.   The disability would not be significant to the character as it is on shows like Monk or other shows that use the disability as a character flaw that has some good to it as well.

TV is very powerful.  It is powerful when we include people of color in not stereotypical roles.  It is powerful when we show people with physical disabilities fully active and engaged (think the old show Ironside).   Imagine what it could do for people with other disabiities if they were just plain folk doing a job.

 

 

Oh my! Our kids are Cheating online

 Oh My- kids are cheating during online learning

Once we get past the reality that virtual learning is an oxymoron, we might be able to address the problem.

Cheating, as defined in a recent Education Week article, is when kids get help during virtual instruction.  They may get the help from family or friends or other students.  Somehow this is bad.  Some teachers are calling out kids and saying that the students are cheating.  

In the workplace, staff are not expected to do all the problem solving themselves.  In fact, it is considered a great workplace skill if a person knows how to collaborate with colleagues and come up with a solution.

Maybe the problem isn’t that kids “cheat”, but that the kind of learning teachers are asking of kids lends itself to children seeking the one right answer from whatever source is available.

What if teachers stopped asking one right answer questions.  What if they stopped asking multiple choice or true/false questions or questions that asked for the one right answer.  What would happen if teachers took the harder way out and asked questions that required children to not only problem solve but to also require that they collaborate with peers.  With one switch of the question, a child could go from being a cheater to being a problem solver.

In the early days, we had kids write a pledge that said, “I have neither given nor received help during this work”.   I always thought that was pretty stupid.  If you were passing someone else’s work off as your own, what would keep you from not being honest about the pledge?

This switch to online learning could be a wonderful time to get rid of grades.  Teachers (and school districts) like to fool themselves into believing that grades are a precise measurement of what a child has learned.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  What if a teacher asks a child to look at the geography, weather of a state, educational and income levels of the population and based on that information to predict what the economy of that state might look like?   Or, on the other hand, if a teacher asks a child to research the principal products of a state, describe its geographic features, the population and the name of the capital.  Which activity will be less open to “cheating” and more importantly, which activity will require more thinking and problem solving?   Clearly it is the first activity since that requires conjecture on the part of the student and there is no right answer.

It isn’t the kids who are cheating, it is the teachers who are cheating the kids out of productive learning activities. 

Unequal is even more unequal

Unequal is even more Unequal

 

Life is not fair.  We all know that.  But the virus has made those disparities even more obvious.  The vast majority of students in the United States attend public schools.   Public schools by their nature are required to serve the public-with all the good news and challenging news that implies.  So if you have a disability, practice a faith tradition, or no tradition at all, or if you have sexual identity issues, the public schools will accept you and provide an education for you.  Private schools by their very private nature can exclude pretty much at will.  So a private school may chose not to serve kids with disabilities.   Or it may choose to serve a particular faith tradition and no other.   It may take a “moral” stand against children who are homosexual or transgender and exclude those children.   In a typical year, about 10% of our nation’s children attend private schools.

But this is not a typical year.   Many public schools are doing virtual learning.   Others are opening on a hybrid schedule with some students in the building and some virtual.   Some schools have opened and then closed because of a virus outbreak.

Parents are addressing the virtual learning approach in differing ways.  Some families are investing in pod groups where several families hire a teacher and set up 3-5 children of similar ages in a pod for learning.   That takes money.  Other families are looking into private schools that are opening with enhanced safety precautions.  Private schools which had seen a decline in enrollment during the great recession that has to some extent continued  were quick to jump on the bandwagon, extending application dates and openly advertising for families who did not want virtual learning.   Surveys have found that higher income families are more concerned with a structured formal education program than they are afraid of the virus or hospitalization.  The ability of a private school to cherry pick its students has upset teachers’ unions and public education advocates who are opposed to tax credits for private school tuition or scholarships for these reasons.

Parents ask why private schools can open safely and public schools cannot.  There are multiple reasons.  Most public schools are big and they can’t pivot to social distancing within the buildings.   Public schools are also not nimble and they need to appease a teachers’ union before they can make major decisions.  Public schools also answer to multiple publics, whereas private schools usually have less diverse populations and do not need to please as many different viewpoints.

Public schools are starting to notice that families are voting with their feet.  A major public school system has seen enrollment for this school year drop by over 2000 students. Public schools are often funded based on a head count of students, lower enrollment means fewer dollars for the system.  This past June the seniors graduated albeit without much of a ceremony.   In September, there were not enough kindergarten children to replace the seniors who had graduated.   Many of those kids went to private kindergarten rather than the public online option.

Children whose families can afford private education, live in an area where private schools are geographically close or who have fairly mainstream typical kids will have options that others do not.   

Children are learning all of the many ways unequal has become more so during the pandemic.

What's Wrong With Labor?

 What’s Wrong with Labor?

 

This is an important question.   We have all just enjoyed a beautiful Labor Day weekend holiday with picture perfect weather.   Yet we seem of late to be adverse to actual labor.

State departments of education are pushing hard that every student be college ready.  They completely ignore the fact that there are some students who may not have the interest nor the academic skill to go to college.  Yet somehow the college and careers programs give very short attention to the career part of that training.   The facts tell us we might be doing something wrong.

 

As of the end of August the unemployment rate for all members of the workforce was 8.4%.   In spite of the Great Recession, when Obama left office the rate was 4.7%.  The federal reserve tells us that the natural rate for the U.S. should be between 3.5 and 4.5%.

 

But let’s unpack those numbers.  In spite of our huge push to send everyone to college, 41% of recent college grads are  working in a field that does NOT require the college degree for which they continue to be in debt!   And 12% of college grads are unemployed.   That information contradicts the common wisdom that you need a college degree to get a job.  In fact, right now, college educated people are unemployed at a higher rate than those less educated. 

 

What about those people who in spite of the pressure to go to college went into a career.   A job where they learned a skill.  A job that gives them a skill that is in demand.   Even with the high unemployment rate brought on by the pandemic, the skilled trades are doing quite well.  Looking at those numbers, we find only 6% of plumbers, 3.6% of HVAC techs, and 6% of electricians are unemployed, numbers well below those of their college graduate peers.

 

Students can learn a skill trade without a college degree and in many cases with the high school certificate.   The community colleges offer many technical degrees that  yield a high income job and do not require a high school diploma.

Do NOT decide that I am advocating against going to college, because I am not.  What is being advocated is that there are multiple paths to successful employment and those paths do not all start with a college degree.

 

We are all happy to have a 3-day weekend to celebrate.   But when it comes to celebrating labor itself- well that’s another paycheck.

Who's in Charge?

 Who’s In Charge?

 

Last week the Governor of Maryland held a press conference in which he strongly encouraged local school districts to open at least partially for the upcoming fall semester. He offered some metrics guidance with regard to positivity rates and percentage of cases within the local population   He dangled a few million extra dollars as incentive (although there were those who called it a bribe). 

  There were several issues with the admonition.

First of all, the way the system is set up in Maryland, the Governor has no authority over public school systems.  That authority rests with the Maryland State Board of Education.  While it is true that the present Governor has now appointed a majority of the members of the Board, once appointed they seem to have developed minds of their own.

Secondly, some school systems opened on August 31, so telling folks to make a major change four days before they were scheduled to open seemed a bit pushy to say the least.  The rest of the districts will open in about eight days.  Not exactly a lot of time.

Then there were the superintendents of the local districts.  These people had put a lot of time, energy and consultation with their staffs to determine the best way forward considering safety of kids and staff and their recognition that distance learning is often not learning.  They know they are trying to strike a balance between safety and learning. This is not exactly a path that anyone has travelled before so there are no historical markers to guide the way.

Thirdly, there are these entities called teachers’ unions.   They are very powerful and for the most part are resistant to returning to in-the-building learning.  Although the officers do acknowledge that some teachers do want to be in school and teaching.

And finally there are the parents and their children. Remember them?   The children are supposed to be the point of the whole system.  What do they want?  I am comfortable thinking that a big part of the Governor’s push is that parents need child care if they are going to get back to work.   And employers need workers if the state economy is going to start moving again.  Some parents very much want schools to open or at the very minimum some other public funded child care program.  But there are parents who do not think it is safe for their children to be in a public school and don’t want them there, education be damned.

So who does that leave in charge?   Truth is that in Maryland the local school districts are pretty much the place where the rubber meets the road.  After months of little to no state leadership through this crisis, now is probably not the best time to change the rules of who is in charge.