10. Your guidance counselor gave you a booklet on how to operate a fryolator

9. In History Class, you identified Roe v. Wade as “Two ways to cross a stream”

8. On the true/false test, you answered every question “C”

7. In your high school yearbook, you were voted ‘Most Likely to Appear in Next Year’s Yearbook”

6. Nobody believes the dead hooker in your locker was planted there by the Secret Service

5. Every paper you handed in was limited to 140 characters

4. During your Computer Science final, you were caught Googling yourself

3. The last time you picked up a book, before you finished it you ran out of crayons

2. You’ve been in the tenth grade since the first Bush Administration

1. You were caught cheating – with the principal’s wife
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Here in New Jersey, education is a front-and-center topic. Public schools are under pressure. I live in Riverton, a small town with its own K8 grammar school that sends its students to a high school in the town next to us, Palmyra. Palmyra and Riverton are in many ways a unified community of 3.5 total square miles, sharing activities and services, like our youth sports teams.

Palmyra High School is full of great students who go on to do all kinds of amazing things, but because it’s a small school that could use more cash, it has some challenges. Mainly, though, it suffers from an image problem. As a result, many children in both communities are sent to private high schools. Five years ago, three other Riverton parents and I started RivertonK12, a group whose aim was to explore local high school choices and share that information with parents. We were objective, but we thought that with accurate information about PHS, many parents would stay. We chose the name “RivertonK12″ to represent the unifying educational/community experience we were seeking for our children.

We did some good. We conducted a survey, held two informational forums, set up committees. Ultimately, though, many people continue to choose private.

Discouraged, I wondered what we could have done differently. For my part, I realized I had the argument wrong from the start. I assumed people conceptualized our two-town community in ways that, well, they just don’t, and that their educational choices were framed under this mistaken conceptualization. To me what is clear and alarming is that when children leave a school their family’s energy and interest go too, a slow draining away from the community. This is not the way most people see things.

See, people choose private schools for various reasons. Some I didn’t worry about from RivertonK12’s beginning, but, to be fair, few of these people live around us. These are the people who like the sweatshirt that comes with certain schools. They like dropping their kids off and seeing expensive cars. They like their kids going to school with kids who look like their kid. These people are not interested in arguments about the connections between educational outcomes and family incomes (i.e., wealthier children may succeed academically largely because they are rich). They don’t care about economic segregation. They don’t care that children who do well in elite private schools are self-selected and would have likely succeeded anywhere. They parent by check, replacing parenting time, effort, and interest with money. These folks were untouchable from the beginning. My co-founders and I knew that.

(Interestingly, our limited RivertonK12 research analyzing college attendance depending on which high school students attended largely supported these self-selection educational arguments.)

Others were untouchable for different reasons. They want a specific religious or moral structure. They want their kids to attend the school they attended. It wasn’t necessarily about academics, but these people think it over and can’t find what they mainly want in public school.

But another group, probably the largest, was the toughest to lose. They love their children, of course. They love our community. They care. They thought their decision over. Finally, they still choose private. You only get one shot to educate your children, and they made the choice they felt was best.

But the big problem is that the moment their children sign on to a school outside the community, their interest and energy begins to drain away too. It has to.

They’re great people, so they still buy Girl Scout cookies and coach a team or two, but their interest seeps away. The school loses their energy, passion, and talent, draining the community’s talent and resource pool. These people tend to have a little more money, so their kids do well in school. The school loses these academic achievers. And the school loses that money too.

Riverton has a superbly run, extremely high-quality public elementary school. Like many small, high-functioning schools in New Jersey, we are the target of vicious budget cuts. It’s tough to survive. When I roughly calculated the dollars that leave our community to educate elementary children at private schools, I was stunned. And this isn’t even for high school.

I can’t imagine the magnitude of the problem elsewhere, where wealth disparities are greater and what’s left behind much shallower. People aren’t going to turn their private school tuitions over to the public school — they still pay taxes — but what if all that money was put together? We could revolutionize things even in our high-functioning little school.What must it be like elsewhere?

Luckily, in my two-town community, there are more than enough caring, smart, affluent people to make the schools and community strong. But what about these other places. After a while, after so much has drained away, what is left behind?

We’re all running scared in the U.S., listening to fear mongers telling us how the world is outpacing us educationally (often measured by standardized tests, of course. Is our goal really beat China in standardized tests?). In response, while we’re chasing this elite schooling phantasm, there are real consequences for our whole society. Because communities are being drained, and real kids are being left behind.

In helping launch RivertonK12, I was too pollyannaish to understand why some of the best people would leave. I’m still idealistic, believing that if our collective will changed, we could abruptly change education. But maybe the problem is not dire enough for me. As I said, our towns, our kids are going to do just fine. But in so many other places, the steady draining leaves behind all these slowly drying-up little souls, who, through no fault of their own, don’t stand much of a chance.

The art of writing. The mysterious skill of writing. Writer Jack Dann once said, “For me, writing is exploration; and most of the time, I’m surprised where the journey takes me.” Alas, for many of our children, writing will never be about exploration, discovery, art, or the challenge of learning complex technical skill. Instead, writing will be standardized, boxed-in, formulaic. It will be an obstacle they need to figure out strategies to get around. Lucky for me, a pre-teen who may or may not live in my home, bless her heart, always has it all figured out. More about that in a moment.

You know that writing components have been added to many standardized testing systems, including the SAT. It’s just a part of the broader movement to narrow the band of education.

Now, using valuable time they might have spent gaming the multiple choice sections of tests like the SAT, students have to figure out how to game the writing sections. They learn to throw in big words. They learn to write long sentences. They learn to make arguments fit five-paragraph essays: Thesis, point one, point two, point three, conclusion. They learn the value of writing a lot, no matter how much they really have to say. They learn the preeminence of neat handwriting.

But what they don’t learn is how to write. They don’t get better at writing by thinking about these writing tests, by practicing for them, or by being evaluated for them.

Evaluated? They just get a number, and there is increasing interest in having that number generated by a machine. In a recent New York Times article about these “robo-readers,” writing researcher Les Perelman discusses his analysis of some of these automated graders, based on his own experiences writing for them. One slight problem, Perelman says, is that truth is unimportant. Robo-graders don’t care if you don’t know your facts. They can’t tell. Also, they like long sentences (sorry Hemingway). They prefer longer essays. They don’t notice if you throw in a random line or two about an unrelated topic. If you take your sentences that start with “and” and “or” and switch them to “however” and “moreover,” Perelman says, these machines see you as having more “complex thinking.”

And so on.

These students learn strategies revolving around using big words and writing long. They learn writing formulas that help them write exactly one kind of writing: The standardized test. Forget the damning generational accusation I often hear: “These kids can’t write.” For every 18-year-old you show me who has writing issues, I’ll show you two forty-somethings with similar issues, even if clear writing is crucial to their field. The students I know are extremely smart, and what they are lacking — when they are lacking— in their writing is not the skill, broadly conceived, but instead the creativity to think outside the five-paragraph format of the standardized test. Gun control: Good. Pollution: Bad.

These students, bred in the era of the five-paragraph standardized testing essay, can produce that five-paragraph argument about almost anything. But I find that when I ask them to say, toss in that sixth paragraph, they’re confused, cagey. “But where would it go?” they wonder. “In an appendix?”

The world, of course, is not broken up into five-paragraph problems. Yet make no mistake about it: The form in which you are trained to write becomes a form that governs the way you think. So they try to see the world in terms of the five-paragraph essay: Contained, neat, easy.

I’m not blaming them. I don’t blame their teachers, either. The stakes in this mad game of educational assessment are too high for their individual classes. It’s hard to blame administrators. In the absence of thoughtful ways of evaluating the overall success of their schools, these tests carry incredible weight; the results are connected to real dollars.

I want to blame the government, but this is the US, and we are the government. Anyway, in his January State of the Union Address, President Obama said, “Stop teaching to the test.” In a February interview with Jon Stewart, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said the same thing. Yet teacher-blogger Anthony Cody asked a reasonable question: “How is it that with both our President and Secretary of Education so firmly against teaching to the test that we have states dramatically increasing the stakes for these tests?”

I suppose, like with most things, we only have ourselves to blame for the growth of this testing farce. So our kids are just going to have to continue to figure out ways to please/beat the system.

Which brings me back to that pre-teen who may or may not live with me. She was getting ready for the written component of her recent battery of standardized tests. “Are you ready for your writing test?” I asked. “Oh yes, I’m ready,” she said, eyes gleaming with confidence, lips pursed, head nodding wisely. “I’m going to use the word ‘plethora’.”

As an alumnus of Rutgers Camden (BA, ’91; MA, ’95), I have received a lot of information through alumni channels and talked with many former classmates about Governor Chris Christie’s proposed “merger” of Rutgers University Camden with Rowan University. After digesting this information as best I could, I realize I am against this forced joining, for many reasons. But being faced with this issue has rekindled an embarrassing aspect of my thinking: My utter ignorance about educational branding. No, that’s being too generous: When it comes to educational branding, I’m stupid, naïve, and pathetically out of step with my fellow humans.

In case you don’t know, Governor Christie proposed linking these two southern New Jersey institutions as part of a larger plan for NJ higher education that includes incorporating many components of the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey into Rutgers University. Rutgers Camden is fighting back vigorously, and many prominent people in South Jersey have voiced disapproval, saying the move would hurt the City of Camden, disrupt the education of current Rutgers Camden students, and fuse two institutions with different pedagogical and research agendas. This site provides more information from the Rutgers Camden side.

Another prominent anti-merger reason that keeps surfacing is about the “brand” of Rutgers. And this is the part that just leaves poor me, in all my ignorance, adrift. But by writing this, I am confessing my wrongness, because I dimly know how important people think your educational brand is, and Rutgers has a great one. I also know people will think less of you at parties and job interviewers will throw your resume in the trash and grad schools will snicker at you because of your institutional brand. And I know this branding can now start in preschool.

But I still don’t get it.

People of a certain stripe are scrambling like never before to send their kids to places like Elite Zenith University (EZU). Do they really know in a concrete way not only that EZU is a great place to learn but that it’s a great place to learn for their children? Usually no. They do know there is a mythical aura – constructed and supported mainly, of course, by people just like them – around EZU. They may not know anything concrete about EZU educationally, but they know that with EZU you get a cool bumper sticker, a secret society-like alumni association, and the opportunity for their kid to hang out with rich folks. They can tell people “My children go to EZU” and get the buzz of seeing others feel all gushy and amazed.

But due to some cerebral shortcoming on my part, the EZU educational brand doesn’t register. (This shortcoming may contribute to my having driven some crappy cars and being a bad dresser.) Certainly, I’m a linguistic animal, so words do affect me, but for me, when I hear “I go to EZU,” my associations, as a result no doubt of my cerebral miswiring, go kind of like this:

• Your parents might be rich.
• Your uncle might have paid for a building at EZU, maybe a library or gym.
• You might be smart.
• You might be talented.
• You might be really good at doing what teachers and other authorities tell you to do and at taking standardized tests.
• You might have been able to pay someone who was good at taking standardized tests.
• You might be an out-of-the-box thinker.
• You might be lying.

Alas, in my life, in my experience with EZUites (the school name is actually the Apogees, which illustrates the beyond-the-mortal-coil perception in which this group should be held), some of them have been super smart and successful. Some have been losers. Unfortunately, they fall into these categories in about the same ratios as my non-EZU acquaintances.

This is not to say that certain programs at certain schools would be better for certain people. If your kid is a great cello player, you might want her around the best cello players. Pick that school. If your kid is researching toxoplasmosis prevention (and if you read this article, you will most definitely encourage your kid to pursue this line of research), then the best toxoplasmosis lab in the world would be good. Pick that school. If your kid has 4.3 speed and when he tackles people the earth shakes, you might want him around great football players. Pick that school.

But, starting when they’re little, kids are being shepherded to elite places because of perceived eliteness. Period. What the schools actually do for these kids is a hard question, once you sort out self-selection bias and money.

Because of my naiveté, regardless of your EZU sweatshirt or Apogee forehead tattoo, I will take some time to get to know you, whether I meet you in a diner or you’re interviewing for a job with me, before I really know what you’re all about.

Despite my perceptual problem and my embarrassment about it, I still think the idea that the very air of EZU is going to make your kid, just by virtue of strolling around the ground, better, is bad. While there’s something harmlessly pathetic about thinking a brand of sneakers or a type of car makes you a better person, it seems insidious when we apply the same idea to education, considering how complex the outcome of educational “success” is when applied to a particular child.

But, of course, I think that because I’m missing something about how the world works.

I am proud I went to Rutgers Camden. I had a great experience and learned a ton. I don’t want Rutgers Camden and Rowan to merge. But it makes me a little sad that Rutgers people are so worried about the brand on their degree and that they would be judged by the name of the institution on their resume or sweatshirt. But, I’m even sadder because despite my ignorance about this topic, I do realize they are absolutely right.

I was talking to a teaching colleague the other day — a man I respect and who I would unreservedly call the finest teacher I know. We were discussing a slight drop in our school’s SAT scores, particularly in the area of “Critical Reading” and he said, “The only way to improve this is to drill the kids on critical reading questions until they get good at them. Making them write a lot is not going to do it.”

This might have been a slight “dig” at me. I am not a giver of objective tests. I have my students write until their eyes fall out and roll off of the desk. I have them reach for Bloom’s higher levels of learning (analysis, synthesis and creativity) every day. The reason I have them do this is because no one else does — at least not enough teachers do. They don’t do it enough in grade school and they don’t do it enough in high school.

So, here we are in that all-too-talked-about place: being put in a position of “teaching to the test” so that we will look like a good school — so that our success with our students can be measured; so that benchmarks can be set in order for us to follow growth. Measuring progress and analyzing data can be really, really helpful, but when the principle behind producing the data is flawed, you have a problem.

My colleague is right, of course. But he is only right (and I think he would agree) because of a failure in our educational system: the fact that mediocre teachers are doing mediocre teaching that is lifting our kids only to the level of mediocrity — a level that is being relabeled as excellence. This is a brilliant commentary on that, by the way:

Students cannot analyze well and they cannot reason well by the time they get to high school, so we need to teach them tricks that will enable them to take a standardized test that means way too much for both them and the schools they attend.

Before I continue, I need to tell you: I’m not one of those bandwagon thinkers who claims that the American educational system is “failing” — one of those people who bases his conclusion on some whisper-down-the-lane anecdote about Japanese kids going to school sixteen hours a day, thirteen days a week and sitting on broken glass as they do calculus at the age of seven.  We have a good educational system whose worth is proven, I believe, by a pretty good country to live in, not to mention an amazing literacy rate.

And, please, don’t fall victim to those phony emails that show you what kids did in the third grade in 1895 as compared to today. (Their phoniness is a whole other article, but check Snopes.com if you want to pursue it.) Don’t fall into the trap, either, of seeing newspaper articles from, say, 1724 and being amazed at how much better educated people were then than now. The truth is, in 1724, there were two types of people: the highly educated few (those for whom the papers were written) and the illiterates. Newspapers are written on a lower level today because more people are literate. That’s a good thing (unless you are an aspiring tyrannical king).

In short, please notice I didn’t refer to “the failure of our educational system” but, rather, to “a failure in our educational system.” I do believe we should seek out flaws in our system and correct them. The SAT issue is just that: a flaw.

Did you know that the SATs are supposed to be a reasoning test? Theoretically, a good reasoner (with a prerequisite amount of education in math and English, of course) should be able to get a good score on the test. And, theoretically, he or she should be able to do this without SAT training.

But, because our K through 12 educators are not teaching our kids to think — really think – parents find themselves lining the pockets of “SAT prep.” teachers, sometimes to the tune of thousands of dollars.

So, now it is up to us — the high school teachers, along with the “SAT prep.” people  – to do damage recovery. (Hence, the conversation with my esteemed colleague.)

I taught “SAT prep” for several years. I was trained by Kaplan. It works. For instance, using Kaplan’s methods, just  a few years ago, I helped a senior: She needed fifty more points to get a “full ride” to the college of her choice. She had taken the SATs multiple times and her score had not budged. We sat for no more than an hour and I taught her some critical reading ”tricks” that I learned from Kaplan. The next weekend, she scored one-hundred-fifty more points. She got her “full ride.”

That’s great, and all, but does this make sense? How was her intellect measured? How was her educational achievement measured? It all came down to “tricks” — approaches to individual types of questions.

There are a lot of how-dare-yous forming on the lips of teachers who are reading this. I know: I said “mediocre teachers” are the problem. But let’s face it: most people are mediocre, or the term would not exist, right? Exceptional people are few and far-between. That’s what makes them exceptional. (Unless you are in school; there, everyone is exceptional, because “Cs” are simply “unacceptable.”)

The people who make these standardized tests are exceptional thinkers. One of these test-makers (professors; hyper-educated educators) competing against the average teacher is unfair. My dad, for instance, is a pretty good chess player — very good, in fact — but, he would be destroyed by a Kasparov. There’s no shame in that. A fact is a fact.

What do I propose? Damned if I know. I just know that we have boiled teacher-training the same way we boil down everything in our society: We believe that anyone can be a teacher if he is taught the proper procedures, passes the proper tests (the most difficult of which, in most states, is simply navigating the labyrinthine corridors of the certification process) and gathers the proper credentials. And this is true: anyone can learn to teach, if not exceptionally.

But can one teach another human being to be analytical and creative if one is actually neither? Can one teach deep reasoning skills if one doesn’t possess them?

Somehow, we need to figure out a way to produce teachers who can reach Bloom’s highest levels so they can teach their students to do so. Teachers need to be brilliant, not just smart. I’m not sure how we get there, but until we do, high school teachers will find themselves scrambling to make up for years of mediocrity by teaching cheap testing tricks.

Whatever the approach, the standards for teachers need to be raised. Requiring a masters degree in the content of the field in which one teaches (not in “education”) would be a good start. (Now, of course — and I say this without the least intention of sarcasm – we need to talk about pay increases for teachers…)

Yeah, I’ll do it. I’ll teach tricks because I have to. In the meantime, though, out the window goes one more lesson that might give my kids a map to the heart of poetry. If you think that’s good — that it leaves time for more practical things like SAT prep. — you are part of the problem, my friend.

Wikipedia, for most, resides on the Web like a neighbor we see and interact with often, so we may be surprised to learn that this seemingly friendly presence has caused all kinds of trouble with schools. Some teachers and even a few institutions have considered banning their students’ from having a relationship with Wikipedia at all.

Banning is pretty serious. Is Wikipedia that dangerous for students?

As some of you may know, I am a teacher and writing researcher at Drexel University. I have been involved with several research projects over the past few years that try to see, basically, how well students write. Two large studies of Drexel undergrads showed us some interesting things. Let me ask you this: What writing area do you think seems to cause the biggest struggle for the thousands of students we studied? Grammar? Creating a good main idea/thesis? Organization?

Nope, nope, and nope.

We found that the most difficult challenge the students we studied came up against in their writing projects was using evidence and research. These bright students write clearly for the most part and have good ideas, but they have real trouble supporting their thoughts with evidence. This is not (just) about correct citation — “Where does that comma go again?” — but about thinking how to support claims and ideas.

This might surprise you until you really think about it, because making a good evidence-based argument is very difficult, and where are good models in our culture for students? Advertising? (“Wear these shoes and you’ll jump higher and people will like you!”) Political campaigns? (I don’t need to say much here, do I?) Marriages? (Perhaps the true hotbed of non-evidence-based argumentation in human history: To quote the dad in A Christmas Story, “You used up all the glue…on purpose!”)

When students Google just about anything, Wikipedia pops up first. It’s just so easy to use to fill in that little research requirement part of a paper. So teachers can ban students from citing it, but in doing so, have they taught them a darn thing about why and how it works?

They need to see that it’s a wiki, which means people can edit and change information on it. Yet all information has some kind of gatekeeper, and they also need to understand that Wikipedia has some remarkable editorial controls built in. As a teacher, I wondered how I could have students think hard about Wikipedia so it just wasn’t forbidden fruit. Working with fellow teachers Andrew McCann and Dan Driscoll, we developed some assignments to try to help students do just that.

First, we asked students to search Wikipedia and find something worth knowing about that is not on the site. This turns out to be incredibly difficult, because Wikipedia has marvelous scope. Try it some time. If they can’t find something, and most don’t, then their task is to look at a Wikipedia entry about something they know a lot about and evaluate how accurate and comprehensive it is. Is there anything they would add or change?

However, if they did find some gap, something not on the site, they could write up, just for our class, a “stub” of a Wikipedia entry. This was a good experience. But here’s what’s cool: If they desired, they could create a Wikipedia account and, for real, try to add their entry. For instance, this Wikipedia entry, about the specific building that served as the U.S. “Capital for a Day” during the War of 1812, was created by a student in my class who happened to live near Brookeville: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookeville_Academy. This student added a little piece to the knowledge of the world as represented by Wikipedia.

Students learned a lot from this experience, but perhaps the most remarkable thing was an awareness of how Wikipedia’s gatekeeping function operates. Above all Wikipedia entries is a little “View History” link. You probably never clicked on it, but that “History” provides a record of the commentary about that article by Wikipedia’s editors and contributors. I knew Wikipedia had a massive, vigilant network of editors, (check out this great article by writer Marshall Poe, which describes his efforts to create his own entry on Wikipedia), but even I was shocked at how quickly editors began checking in on, for instance, the Brookeville Academy entry. Within hours, there was a conversation about the validity of this entry and what it needed to be officially published.

So it comes down to not being afraid of Wikipedia or frustrated with it, but, instead, taking a critical look at how it works and maybe even getting involved ourselves.

As I teacher, I don’t ban Wikipedia. Despite its vast controls, it is still an open wiki, so I don’t want to see direct references to Wikipedia in student papers. But where else can you easily go for the remarkable neutrality that Wikipedia represents on so many topics? Why can’t students read a Wikipedia page and use it to move into further research, perhaps encouraged by Wikipedia’s normally pretty expansive list of references for many entries? In fact, after we’ve talked it over, I encourage them to use it as one of many places they could get or build on a good idea.

Because I think Wikipedia can be a great place to get started, but you just don’t want to end there. If we understand that, the digital natives and their teachers will get along just fine.

Early in 2011, New Jersey instituted rigid school anti-bullying laws that require schools to follow strict guidelines about HIB: harassment, intimidation, and bullying. While the intention is good, HIB’s over-zealousness creates a stifling bureaucracy for educators, and these blanket regulations, in their effort to eliminate the child bully, are perhaps empowering other types of bullies.

Before I proceed, I want to make a few things clear. I don’t want three kids beating up one kid after school. I don’t want 100-pound second graders tilting other kids upside down until lunch money pours on the floor. I don’t want a kid or groups of kids using digital venom to poison another child’s reputation. More than anything, I don’t want children to do something drastic to themselves or others because of unchecked malice. No one wants these things.

However, I do want us to allow educators to educate children. HIB has created a new level of bureaucracy—right in your school, folks!—requiring high-paid, well-trained, smart administrators to spend their days sifting through piles—piles—of HIB paperwork, splitting hairs about issues such as if poopyheads are a protected class of children whose rights are violated when other kids call them “poopyheads.” If the answer is “maybe,” then if Suzy called Jimmy a “poopyhead,” Jimmy and Suzy and Suzy’s parents and Jimmy’s parents could be summoned before the “court” of your school board to sort it all out. Note, that a hearing about this poopyheadedness must happen within a 10-day time frame, which may require special assemblies of the board of education and your administrators.

HIB is regulation run amok. Over-extended, draconian bullying rules create confusion and fear in schools. As a parent and school board member, I am struck by how successful already in-place anti-bullying campaigns have been. Kids I know say the word “bully” with total disdain, almost like “murderer.”

Schools are gatherings of large groups of human beings, a remarkably cussed species, so, yes, we will have bullies. How bad is the problem? A recent Pew study, “Teens, Kindness and Cruelty on Social Network Sites,” found 69% of teens said their peers are mostly nice to each other online, yet 88% have witnessed peer-to-peer meanness or cruelty and 15% have been the target themselves. However, 90% ignored this behavior, 80% defended a victim, and 79% told someone to stop it. The study reports an interesting mix of behaviors. On the one hand, kids are mean to each other — surprise! — and can now be mean using social media. However, without being pummeled by regulation, the vast majority of kids are willing to stand up for what’s right.

Children need to learn to deal with all kinds of problem behaviors. Now, when a kid is insulted, we mobilize an educational bureaucracy to his or rescue. I wonder if we are further short-circuiting children’s ability to deal with adversity.

And HIB laws, in an attempt to ferret out all incidences of one kind of bully, will no doubt embolden another kind, the parent bully. Parents will use HIB to get at others and to, well, bully their schools. You know these people. They’ve already been mucking up the process of running a school, haunting your district’s administrative offices and clogging up meetings with their grievances. The world has been out to get them, and now it’s out to get their children. They are quarrelsome, troublesome, overbearing people, and they will use the mania of HIB to bully school staff out of one of the most precious things they have (and that we all pay for): Their time.

I am not making light of childhood bullying. I wish I could have in some superhero way personally prevented every drastic bullying incident, but I don’t believe HIB regulations will successfully don the hero cape. HIB creates a labyrinthine set of ambiguous or poorly supported rules,  including the requirement that cash-strapped schools appoint an HIB administrator to sort through what will largely be nonsense. At a recent school board training I attended, the New Jersey School Board Association lawyers conducting the training said the state had set up a fund to help schools pay for the required HIB administrators, but no money was actually appropriated to that fund. Check out your school: I bet your HIB point-person is someone who already has five other job responsibilities. (By the way, schools are starting to fight back against HIB mandates on this fiscal point.)

As I close, I want to say how I am struck by the way legislative bodies seem hellbent on micromanaging schools and school personnel. I know public schools must be accountable: They are run with public money. But from astonishingly inflexible budget rules to No Child Left Behind to HIB laws, politicians have used threat and coercion to destroy opportunities for common sense-driven decision-making by school personnel. We hire people in schools to teach children. Let them do their jobs.

(I guess it’s just what people care about. While we’re nattering about HIB, some urban schools remain cauldrons of violence, as was well documented in The Philadelphia Inquirer’s recent “Assault on Learning” series. I guess it’s easier, and maybe more politically advantageous, to go after those “poopyhead” haters.)

Overregulation distracts schools from their core mission: Educating children. U.S. schools are certainly not the better for these layers of regulation. In fact, the way that legislators lean on schools makes me think of one thing: Bullying.

Novels about academia have never held a strong appeal for me; there seems very little at stake in the tweed-clad genre except for tenure, which doesn’t make for the most riveting reading. But in Alex Kudera’s debut satirical novel, Fight for Your Long Day, there is a lot more on the line for the protagonist, Cyrus Duffleman, than mere tenure: his very life, it seems, is doomed to extinction as the world around him erupts into a frenzy of violence.

Cyrus is a breed of university Everyman known as “the adjunct.” If you’ve ever stepped foot in an English 101 or an Introduction to History class, you have seen one: rumpled and coffee-stained, adjuncts are usually in a mid-career or mid-life slump, or in Cyrus’s case, a state of perpetual ennui. [Full disclosure: I am an adjunct, but I make an adequate attempt to wear clean, ironed shirts, and I take St. John’s Wort capsules to stave off any impending mid-life crises.]

Duffleman sees himself “as a foot soldier on the front lines of America’s knowledge-based economy.” And soldier he is, for on this Thursday, when he teaches not only four courses but works as a tutor and as a security guard to supplement his middling pay, he will come across numerous varieties of that higher education anomaly known as the “disturbed” student: one who has a psychic breakdown in Duffleman’s first class; another who sends him inappropriate — and near threatening — emails; yet another who leaps to his death from the roof of the dormitory. And in the midst of all this, a renegade armed with a bow and arrow is killing wildlife in Fairmount Park, an act of barbarism that has the media fear-mongers agitated.

What’s an underpaid adjunct without any medical benefits to do? If you’re Duffleman, a committed teacher — remember those? — you simply do your job. But that’s becoming increasingly impossible in this discordant world, as Duffleman must act both as psychiatric counselor and General Nanny to the uproarious, unfocused, aggressive and all-but tuition-exploited students enrolled in his lower shelf classes.

The educational institutions in Kudera’s novel are education factories, more concerned with dollars and high student enrollment than in providing quality and affordable education. The tenured class, those with the puny administrative power, comes across as revoltingly grotesque and yet ultimately, recognizable. Kudera’s jabs are shockingly effective:

“From the daily papers, he knows one professor murdered his wife and another was convicted of testing the date-rape drug on  a research assistant. A third came back from Southeast Asia with a laptop full of seven- to twelve-year-old smiles, torsos, and bare behinds, and a master of library science was caught in the hidden corridors of power with a male specimen aged eleven or fourteen. There were rumors scrawled on bathroom walls of ssecret Facebook agreements to exchange fellatio for A’s in freshman seminars.”

In one telling scene, when Duffleman, genuinely concerned for the student’s welfare, reports to his superiors about the student who melted down in his class, their only intentions are to make sure that neither professor nor student intends to sue the university. (Penn State, anyone?)

Meanwhile, as Duffleman plods through his day, the bow and arrow hunter has opted for a taste of human flesh; the United States Undersecretary of Homeland Security Defense is arrowed in the brain during a university speech at Liberty Tech, and the entire city of Philadelphia goes bonkers. Every Left Wing and Right Wing and Centrist nutbag erupts. Protests and counter-protests emerge; while the cops insist on palpating every sack and satchel within reach, as though this were another dress rehearsal for 9/11.

The closing scene involves Duffleman and the bow and arrow sniper.  Duffleman becomes achingly alive in this moment, a moment that may or may not be too late for him and us.

I struggle to find contemporary comparisons for Kudera’s satire. Palahniuk perhaps, but less salacious and juvenile; at times, David Lodge, but with much more meat. But the ultimate compliment I can give to this campus romp is that it bears no resemblance to any other novel that I can think of. Kudera, an English instructor, obviously knows his subject intimately. Fight for Your Long Day is hysterical and sobering, and Cyrus Duffleman one of the great anti-heroes in recent fiction.

They are enthusiastically for elimination, these chilly, sodden folk who gather at my doorstep. Eliminate debt, eliminate taxes, eliminate property, eliminate poverty, eliminate wealth and the wealthy too and once in a while, publicly eliminate on the sidewalk. Who claims they lack coherence? They Occupy Wall Street and Main Street, meaning they reside there; sleeping rough, eating roughage and are roughly handled, so they complain, by the authorities, the media, the neighbors, business, academe and above all by harsh and increasingly cold Reality. I depart from most of the critics of the Occupiers however. No, their problems are not strictly speaking in their heads. There is, actually, an underlying, unifying rationality among the commies, hippies, dippies and loons. Finally polling has investigated our modern Bonus Marchers and found a diagnosable malady; not just debt but student debt.

All debts are NOT created equal, not lately. There are headlines across the land that express shock and horror that total accumulated student debt has crested one trillions dollars, edging out credit cards. This is appalling, apparently, but for reasons opposite to those I would submit. For one thing, generally credit card debt is at a much higher rate than secured student debt, that is loans for which you and I are the co-signers, willingly or not. More than this though we must examine for what purposes the debt was allegedly encurred. Credit card debt is accumulated for any number of purchases; some small measure of which are business related or yes, even educational but for the most part your credit card bill itemizes your consumption. Food, clothing, whimsical things of dizzying variety best described as “entertainment” constitute the charges on your outstanding balance. Student debt however is not supposed to be any such thing. In America an education is considered to be and sold as an investment in future employment opportunities more remunerative than would otherwise be available. The best exemplar and worst offender is certainly the law school market. When the inevitable question is asked of the undergraduate pursuing his BS in Melanesian Pottery; just what are you going to do with that degree? a ready answer presents itself. I’m going to law school.

And who can argue? That industry is one of our top three: Doctor, lawyer, indian chief. And admissions are notoriously NOT based significantly on undergraduate credentials but mostly on standardized tests. It is a chance for the truancy artist who muscled through their degrees on raw test-taking ability to extend what has perhaps become an easy life style of posturing, drinking and fornicating in that order. Do not look to the financial aid office or admissions at an level to discourage this view. Quite the reverse. It should not be surprising that the education industry sees its wares as the cure to all ills. What is surprising and dismaying and, as we see now, utterly destructive is that a credulous public, led by its government and governing elites has agreed that “education” is a commodity, like platinum or pinto beans, to be measured by weight, distributed by fiat and financed by public debt.

It has long been the assumption that almost any debt incurred in the pursuit of almost any “education” is the most certain of investments. Like the mortgage industry, the student debt industry has therefore been targeted for extraction by Leviathan government. Sallie Mae is a newer addition to Your Federal Family and she accomplishes a similar task to Fannie Mae which is to expand the total market for debt by making it less risky and less expensive for the lenders who remain, at least nominally, private institutions. What has happened with these step-sisters is identical and identically predictable. As the housing construction and home-loan industries expanded wildly creating our famously popped “bubble” so to has the education industry. The costs of so-called education have exploded even more quickly than medical expenses. Has the quality also improved? The volume certainly has; more people pursue and receive degrees than ever before but in liberal arts undergrads, especially, it seems that if anything the quality is diminished. Here the Occupiers offer their examples which are astonishingly dreadful. Not only do they demonstrate themselves ignorant of the simplest basics of history, government, law, finance and grammar they offer not even the most modest proclivity to critical thinking, self-awareness or practicality. Even Marxism is ill served by these minions and although the groups are small, as far as media can reveal, they are pretty representative of their generation and demographics. No, they are far from 99% of the populace but in their inchoate rage, ignorant entitlement and self-serving myopia they are a plurality of graduates and near-grads.

In short, these twenty and thirty-somethings are children. This is an indictment and exoneration in one. In the recent past a boy became a man in fairly rapid order, either through back-breaking labor or the rigors of war. No one longs for these days to return but in their absence we rely on education to take up the slack. This, to put things mildly, has not happened. In part it is because the education establishment high and low is no longer concerned with such things as civics or long division giving way instead to fashionable concerns of historical revisionism and moddish aculturation that seeks to stamp out bullying or develop respect for two-mommy homes. Development of character is not so much left out of the equation as it is perverted to political ends. A willingness to recycle is taken as a moral imperative; one that is quite easy to fulfill. Self-reliance is suspect if not profane as it makes the tyke or teenager less tractable. It is the logic of Trophies for All! which attempts to free us from the cliche of discipline and accomplishment. The crush of conformity, supposedly the poison of yesterday’s suburbia, is enforced and reinforced to a degree veterans of that time and place can scarcely contemplate. Self-respect is eclipsed by self-esteem; two concepts that could hardly be more antagonistic.

Failing to mature the children remain children and it is no stretch or innovation to describe the Occupation as an elongated tantrum; unfocused, emotional and self-destructive but not baseless. If our young citizens grow to the age of majority without maturation whose fault is that really? Like all children, they only know what they are taught. And what have they been taught? In the field of education they have been taught that falling in line, paying your dues and your tuition will reward one with a degree which is, according to the Edu-mongers, a straight meal ticket. The subject of the degree is immaterial. The doctorate in Bongo Studies is as virtuous as the doctorate in Philosophy or Computer Engineering. Thankfully medical doctors are still held in reverence and their studies quite rigorous but how long before they also claim their percieved right to the same credentials as everyone else who shows up (and even many who do not)? And always the escalating costs are met with escalating debt. Don’t worry about that, you will be earning more than your uneducated peers. But that is now not true, apologies to Herman Cain. Yes there is less unemployment among the college educated than those not but it is still less than necessary to keep the conveyor belt moving. Bacchalaureates are backing up like cartons on a loading dock. The overage has spilled out onto our parks and commons where the students do, unsurprisingly, what they have been taught to do; posture in terms of great aggrievement and demand their due. The authorities have been telling them for decades; pursue your studies of whatever. Seek your star, you can be whatever you want to be, even if you don’t know what that is. If you find a passion for theatre or film or archaeology or ever more commonly, gender/race/poverty studies, there is a productive and rewarding place for you in our society. If you do not find it so, get your masters! The educrats care little and they may even believe their blandishments. Their business is in recruiting paying students… sometimes athletes. And if the odd aspirant can still not find their bliss, there is always education as a career; something the educrats encouraged up until lately. Now the professoriate suffers the same predicament as the bricklayer; too few places sought by too many applicants so those with current positions are not much interested in encouraging their competition.

The time was that a young man or woman could sell their labors speculatively, coming into an apprenticeship to learn skills valued in the workplace or just a good, long-term reference. Many, many the American ancestor was bonded, not for life like the slave, but bonded all the same; voluntarily (if we remove the discipline of necessity) for their passage across the sea with the expectation of a reward in marketability. Benjamin Franklin was a printer’s devil, later to become a devilish printer. The shadow of this model of profitably indentured servitude is much of the logical and cultural foundation for the education as investment model, but unlike the indentures of centuries past, our modern boys and girls, currently experimenting in climate science, are ejected from their pallets by the fire with a debt they have accumulated during their “labors”, not worked off. Further they find that self-righteous dudgeon about the Trail of Tears is no job skill, not even in an indian casino. In fact the only milieu they can reasonably see themselves plying their trade is within the government/academia/media/non-profit world which is well enough but these exist as adjuncts to the world of building and trading which is currently and perhaps permanently unwell. So with debts as absurd for the individual as our national debt is to the country, with little prospect to gain from their “investment” and with nearly no knowledge of the practical world our New Indentures are cast adrift, even bankruptcy is no avail, unlike your accumulated bar tabs on your VISA. What will they do? Whatever it is, much of it will be underground. The debts cannot be cancelled and cannot be outrun but they can be ignored if one can simply live off the grid like a wily raccoon. We have here a new class of the over-credentialed semi-homeless; bound to nothing but their debt which makes any legitimate employment nothing but an invitation to garnishment. Student debt defaults will skyrocket. The co-signers, mostly parents, will also default losing even their homes, meaning the final co-signer, YOU, will be on the hook for another trillion which we cannot pay. New student loans will scarcely exist which means enrollments will collapse and then even the highest-flying professor will be imperiled if not cashiered. “Education” will dissappear in favor of learning. There might even be some wisdom gained, you never know. The road will be difficult but it is already paved, marked and stretched out before the oddly freed but permanently excluded. Still, only they can determine the destination.

Plagiarizing was once clear-cut. Those intrepid college students who drove to a paper mill (which back in the day was a real warehouse full of papers) and bought someone else’s paper — they knew they were cheaters. If someone wrote a paper for you, you knew you were a lazy cheater. Xeroxing a big chunk of an encyclopedia and putting it word for word into your paper: Obviously, cheating!

But today we’re going through this massive, largely uncontrolled, cultural/social experiment, as a generation of children grow up with digital tools. These tools and the practices and behaviors that accompany them provide engines of astonishing human promise while enabling some bad behavior along the way.

One thing the digital enables is perfect reproduction. These digital natives have grown up with it. It’s in the nature of their virtual interactions. Represent yourself on your profile with this clipped image. Take that quote and put it on your status. Cut and paste. Copy. Children today have come of age with easy access to the Web and its words, images, videos, and ideas. Free information at a click, information that is easy to use and easy to copy — exactly.

Then they get to school, and someone says, “You better know how to cite your sources.” But they not only don’t know what to cite, but sometimes they don’t even know what cheating is. What if you use an online article and refer to it throughout your essay but forget to cite in one place that you used an idea from it? What if you can’t find the author of a Website? What if the info you found on one site is really from another? What can inform your ideas — and what’s forbidden? Students grow up with mixes and mash-ups; ownership boundaries are not always clear.

I remember taping songs from the radio when I was younger (believe it or not, I still have these tapes, grainy, imperfect songs with a DJ’s voice chipping in at the start and finish [yep, Pierre Robert was at WMMR back in the 80s]). Now, of course, you want a replica of a song, you can file share it, and you get the exact song. It’s perfect.

The college students I have worked with the past few years have a peculiar relationship with copying. I learned this in an interesting way, when several years ago I had the most passionate argument I’d ever had in a first-year writing class: It was not about abortion, gun control, prayer in schools, or the death penalty. It was about file sharing. I found them articulate but sometimes earnestly convoluted about the ethics of file sharing their beloved music. And so the RIAA has found in its ongoing battles with their generation. Many of them crafted their view so the sharing wasn’t really theft.

They seemed ethically bewildered in the face of the astonishing ease — and peer popularity — of this copying. This confusion of course would carry over to school. Teacher and scholar Annette Rosati, in a thoughtful article about plagiarism co-written with Danielle DeVoss, described how three of her students submitted papers downloaded from the Web as their own. When she announced in class that some had plagiarized and if the plagiarists didn’t come see her in her office, they would fail, the three word thieves were joined after class outside her office door by 11 others; the 11 innocents all asked a version of the same question, “It wasn’t me, was it?” They didn’t know if anything they had done in their papers was wrong too, including one person who wondered if Cliff’s Notes constituted cheating.

DeVoss and Rosati see intellectual property as a lens to help students think about the constraints of borrowing: What have they used, why, and how will that affect the person who created it? Similarly, writer and teacher Dave Saltman said educators need to teach “digital natives how to become good digital citizens”, at least partially by having dialogue about fair use, a sometimes elusive legal standard for copyright, especially in the digital age. (The RIAA I guess deals with so much of this that it has a Webpage called “For Students Doing Reports.”)

Kids start their technology habits early in school. When they make a PowerPoint in third grade, they may not even think about any of this when they clip that picture or that little block of text, when it’s so easy and anybody can search for the thing and find it.

What is the cost of students’ digital research habits? Even if they can’t articulate it this way, do they see their mash-ups, their patchwriting (a term I’m borrowing from Rebecca Moore Howard) not as cheating but as part of the world of knowledge they inhabit — after all, Google’s operation is basically as a gigantic copier of texts, pictures, and documents?

In my classes, informed by those like DeVoss and Rosati and Moore Howard, I encourage students to step back and look at the Web practically, but critically. What’s the purpose of a given document? Why are you writing it? How are you representing other people’s ideas? How would those people feel about that? What are the rules for citing in this case? (For instance, I’m violating all kinds of official rules in my casual linking here. It’s a blog. Is that okay?)

I’m not talking about free passes for cheating, because the outright digital cheating can be numbing. I have seen “cases” in which three or more college students all submitted the same paper. Teachers turned into detectives, tracing a file’s meta-data for last date saved or what computer a document was written on, while the students cooled their heels in separate offices, like interrogated crime suspects.

I don’t think we need much teaching to say you’re a cheater if you buy a paper or let someone else write it for you. It always has been. But there’s also an open digital space. Watching screenagers — whether my students or my own kids — meander through the Web sometimes makes me wonder what we can claim as authentically our own. Once, you could sit in class and write with keen insight about Hamlet’s indecision, and you would never know 120 other students had the same idea in other schools that term. That Web offers ways of reducing that redundancy of knowledge, maybe allowing us collectively to reach higher than we ever thought we could. But it also may show us how difficult it is to be original.