Why don't we get real reform in schools?

 I was astounded a few days ago to learn that Promise Neighborhoods is not revealing the results of the $60 million grant it made to the Castle Park neighborhood in Chula Vista two years ago.  I attended Castle Park Elementary as a student and worked there as a teacher, so I'm quite familiar with the culture of the school.  I had a feeling that the Promise grant wasn't going to help much because the people in charge were basically the same people who had driven Castle Park Elementary into the ground ten years ago.

Here's my recent post on the problem.

Below is an article with some thoughts about why we have inadequate leaders most of the time in most areas of endeavor.

The problem?  Hypocognition.  We just don't know enough, and we don't know what we're missing.  It's the "unknown unknowns" that Donald Rumsfeld talked about.



Why are these clowns winning?  Neuroscience explains incompetence of all sides 
Paul Rosenberg
Salon
Nov 29, 2014

...[W]hen a very smart idea or very smart person comes along, the organizations are not necessarily very skilled at recognizing that person’s genius,” Dunning said.  “We have lots of data showing that very top performers, their top performances are very much missed. The genius of their ideas are just missed by the group.”

...University of California, Berkeley, cognitive linguist George Lakoff, whose work illuminating the cognitive and communicative differences between liberals and conservatives—”Moral Politics,” “Don’t Think of An Elephant,” “Whose Freedom,” etc.—has found a wide audience centered in the progressive activist base, but has yet to seriously impact the political professionals whose collective failure I alluded to in this story’s first paragraph.

When I interviewed him recently for Salon, Lakoff even highlighted the concept of hypocognition—that “we don’t have all the ideas we need.” One example he cited was the concept of reflexivity, “the fact that thought is part of the world. That when you’re thinking, it’s not separate from reality, it’s part of reality. And if your understanding of the world is reflected in what you do, then that thought comes into the world through your actions,” which helps to explain, in part, the power of conservative mythos, even when it’s mistaken as a matter of fact, a matter of logos.
Lakoff also pointed out that “Hypocognition itself is an idea that we need.” There are things going on in our social and political world that we don’t have names for—and because we don’t have names for them, we can’t think and talk about them coherently.  So, we have conservatives on the one hand acting on their mythos, mistakenly believing it’s true as a matter of logos—which is one kind of incompetence—and yet, nonetheless reshaping reality through the power of reflexivity. (Think of how invading Iraq in response to 9/11 helped bring ISIS into existence, for example.) On the other hand, we have liberals seeing things only in terms of logos, who can’t understand how wildly mistaken conservatives can nonetheless reshape the world to reflect their paranoid fantasies, because they’re missing the crucial concept of reflexivity (and even the very concept of missing concepts, the concept of hypocognition)—which is another, very different, but very real form of incompetence.
So, when Dunning told me, “The genius of their ideas are just missed by the group,” Lakoff’s discussion of hypocognition naturally came to mind.  What could be a worse idea to miss than the very idea of missing ideas?  If you don’t think they’re out there, you’ll never go looking for them—never believe anyone who claims to have found one of them, either.

Little boy draws a soldier, ninja and Star Wars character, each holding a knife or gun; Arizona school freaks out

Obviously, this school, like so many other schools, is run by geniuses.

Arizona Student's Halloween Costume Drawings Cause Firestorm At School
The Huffington Post
By Rebecca Klein
11/04/2013

Where one pair of parents saw innocent drawings of ninjas and soldiers, school administrators reportedly saw disturbing and threatening images.

Last week, the parents pulled their sons out of Scottsdale Country Day School in Arizona after the school’s headmaster reportedly threatened to expel their 8-year-old over a set of drawings. According to the child’s father, the drawings of a soldier, ninja and Star Wars character were meant to depict Halloween costumes. However, school administrators were upset that the drawings showed each character holding either a knife or a gun, according to CBS local affiliate KPHO-TV.

The school’s headmaster was also reportedly upset about what he saw as violent passages from the child’s journal, including ones about scenarios with killer zombies. The child’s father, Jeff, whose last name was omitted from the report, told KPHO that the journal contained other passages about saving the world and that his son has no history of violence.

Kathy Prahcharov, the school’s director of operations, told The Huffington Post that reports of the incident have been inaccurate. While she could not elaborate on what happened for confidentiality reasons, she said the student “was not threatened or expelled from the school.”

[Maura Larkins comment: Obviously the school made a stink about the pictures, or we wouldn't be hearing about it on national news. I think we're looking at some pathologically paranoid individuals who can't get a grip on the real world. How can we expect people with this mentality to recognize real problems?]

The charter school’s handbook states that “[a]ny behavior that is deemed threatening such as violent behavior, drawings depicting weapons, blood, or aggression” can be grounds for expulsion.

A number of schools across the country appear to have cracked down on students who use drawings, food or toys to depict guns and violence. In recent months, students have been suspended for actions such as chewing pastries into the shapes of guns or having gun key chains.