Against Cop Shit
jeffreymoro.com
jeffreymoro.com
- End scanning[1]. Scanning is the practice of forcing students to put their possessions through x-ray machines and walk their bodies through metal detectors. Like, airport security.
- Wrap your head around that for a sec. Everyday, you trek to school, and are immediately put in a hostile environment where you must prove your innocence to be _able_ to learn. Not to mention it's a flagrant violation of the 4th amendment (search/seizure). Oh, and this happens disproportionately to poor/minority students.
- End police in schools, period. In NYC, we have "school safety agents" which are a subset of the NYPD[2]. School Safety, if taken as its own police department, is greater than the size of police departments in Las Vegas, Phoenix, and other police departments with <5,000 officers.
- Furthermore, because you now have cop-lites in the building, you also have cops in the building...because, why not? Minor infractions like fighting, pot, or even "disrespecting teachers" no longer get a call home or a trip to the principal's office, but handed over to a cop.
- Boom, the student is now in the system. This is called the school to prison pipeline[3]. It's real, very real. The pathetic feedback loop of going to school to break out of poverty only to be streamlined to jail...
1. https://www.schools.nyc.gov/school-life/safe-schools/school-safety
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_Department_School_Safety_Division
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline
I suspect flaggers may not have actually read TFA. It was published in February, so it doesn't specifically refer to recent public demonstrations. It's pretty clear which side the author would take...
(I don't see how to try and "unflag" it, but I'm still not 100% of some of the moderation system here even after all this time.)
The flag system gives a small number of users the ability to kill articles entirely too fast.
My general experience is that people who get wrapped around the axle over a word also wouldn't have engaged with the topic if a different word were chosen.
I had no idea what the premise of the article would be without clicking on it. The article's thesis: "abolish cop shit in the classroom" would make a more accurate title (albeit still inflamatory to those sensitive to the language).
This seems insane to me - how could an educator think this is a good thing to do to a 7 year old? There is more risk of putting them off studying and academics for life than solving their maths problem. I think as a parent I would flat out refuse to let my child do that, and if the teacher had an issue they'd have to take it up with me.
Secondary schools, however, are prisons for our youth, so that their parents can go to work. Something like half of the people don't want to be there on any one day. So how are we supposed to keep children forcibly confined without cop shit? This is all well and good if education is the goal of school, but people who don't want to learn do a really good job of not learning. We confine them anyway. We pass laws requiring them to be there. We make our children get written permission from their wardens to go to the toilet, but at least they get an hour out in the yard^W quad, right?
I think that all of this institutional dehumanization is harmful, like the author does. But I think that unless you let people leave, particularly the disruptive students, you can't run a school this way.
Of course, if we don't dehumanize our kids in school, we run the risk that they won't work for dehumanizing employers in the future either. When you reach university, no one makes you beg to use the toilet, no one cares if you miss a class. You're in the elite now. But for the rest of the workforce, well, you had better have an good written excuse for being sick.
"Anything that presumes an adversarial relationship..." is an elegant description that might work for adult relationships, but it's harder to say what presumptions are baked into the structures you use with kids. My experience as the parent of two toddlers is that they are way happier with some forms of structure and discipline, including evaluations and positive and negative rewards. Humans actively seek that kind of "cop shit" out in their games and even personal relationships.
This essay seems to reject some pretty simple forms of structure and discipline (e.g. "badges"), which is a really presumptive thing to do. Try it at your school / on your kids and let us know how it goes. See how it interacts with kids having different needs, backgrounds and social environments. Not that there aren't many kinds of "cop shit" that is just as untested or which makes things worse, but assuming a (philosophically) simple solution is bogus.
If we actually want people to learn, plagiarism detection isn't the problem, it's the industrial factory approach in the first place. Get rid of that, and instructors can know and talk with their students well enough to tell what they actually know and understand instead of having to rely on artifacts that can be faked.
But we'd have to be spending more money in the first place, vs spending money on other things (like cops?!).
"Interpersonal skills are optional" is not a good side effect of our current educational system!
Effective writing is an important skill, so I don't think in-person conversations would replace papers, but from a conversation with a student who plagiarized their paper you could probably tell that they didn't really understand what they "wrote."
I think of it like stack overflow. If someone borrows ideas and code from there for a code review, I'm fine with that, as long as they understand how the system is doing. Being able to do research and find information is a useful skill! But only if it's applied correctly, with understanding. So I'm going to probe on that. And it might be blindingly obvious to me that they didn't understand what they were doing, or why the pasted code isn't appropriate. And I don't need a "stack overflow detector" to see that.
Adversarial teaching environments are a symptom, not the problem. And the fundamental issues don't have a clear solution, though it is clear that the situation is far from optimal.
a) Can't actually explain what they were writing about
b) Didn't learn how to correctly cite things, and/or don't understand what plagiarism is
Are plagarism detection tools perfect? Heck no. Lots of false positives, and of course they don't do anything for essay writing services (unless, of course, the service plagiarizes - which happens!).
Under the ToS of all plagiarism detection software (at least that I've looked at), the student's work is added to the corpus against which all texts are tested against. This is what you would _obviously_ do if you were building a plagiarism detection app, however that means a student is forced to submit work to a private company, which will then profit off of their work.
You might say what the value of a gen ed term paper is to a student, and I'll agree it's not much. But that's not the point. The student is forced to provide that to a third party by the school, which will then profit from it. This isn't a Facebook-like situation where you can just not make a Facebook account. I would guess in many schools, refusing to submit to plagiarism detection software would be taken as evidence of plagiarism.
This is probably a few years out of date, and I see that Turnitin recently shut off their 'upload your own work so you can see if it's plagiarized' product, but for a student to have an active defense against plagiarism _costs money_. Yes, if a student wanted to make sure their paper wasn't accidentally plagiarized (this is common, because their algorithms are shit), that will cost a few dollars. This is unacceptable.
And for anyone who says, 'just transfer sections to a prof that doesn't use the software', there are contracts with entire departments and schools, which then force professors to use the software. Yeah, you could transfer _schools_, but the point stands.
Plagiarism detection software -- which purports to support the intellectual property of the author -- does just the opposite.
Also, I should mention that if someone wanted to cheat, they wouldn't plagiarize; they would simply get someone to write a paper for them. This service is far, far more common that you would believe.
When I was in school students did plagiarize a lot. It went out of style as software was introduced. I distinctly remember the panic'ed buzz as students discovered the teacher (or professor) was using detection software. The services you're talking about are common precisely because of plagiarism detection software.
I'm not disagreeing with your points about morality of it though, just the efficacy.
I will say, though, that when you are in a meeting and claims are being made by the student and by the parents that the instructor is completely at fault, and you can produce a computer accounting showing that the student spent less than five minutes on this week's assignment, ... well there is definitely a sense of thinking that tracking isn't entirely downsides.
But even here, one wonders what results from diverging from the classical medieval trivium, which were grammar, logic and rhetoric. These were to form the foundational basis for the upper arts, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, and the seven liberal arts combined were to form the basis for studying philosophy and theology.
It would be one thing for me to anachronistically pine back to the medieval way of education, but I can't help but be curious about what we lost out on through our own factory optimized, parallel reconstruction of an education system. The system seems now to serve first as daycare and only very distantly second as means to teach foundational thinking skills.
As such, I can't help but consider an alternate universe where we actually built such an egalitarian education system that begins with grammar, logic and rhetoric, then arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, then philosophy and theology. My college experience involved very small class sizes taught in a discursive seminar style rather than the lecture style, and I really learned to think there. I can't help but wish that we had a system that had similar priorities. And I can't help but wonder if such a system would more deeply resolve issues that surface level fixes (such as plagiarism detection tech) only seem to distract from.
In reality, a conformance approach is a disservice to all. I am reminded of a story about the initial cockpit designs for military jet aircraft. Designers took a data approach. They measured 140 dimensions of 4000 pilots: height weight, arm span, leg length, ... And found the average for all. The end result was that no pilots fit in the cockpit, many so badly that the air force saw many unnecessary crashes.[0]
The human mind has far more variance than the physical body. Education by conformance is a fail out of the box.
[0]https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
Law and Order - Destroying our society every day.
Source: I went to a "bad" public school, take issue with abusive authority, and had a mix of bad-cop and supportive teachers. It's the supportive teachers who rolled their eyes and moved on from my antics, and rewarded efforts I put into the class (regardless if they were trollish misinterpretations of assignments -- the good ones celebrate the creativity but still give a fair grade) who actually flipped me from being a class clown. Now, I've got a PhD in math.
Take a hyperactive, disinterested, insubordinate student and you will find intelligence and creativity. You can steer that focus towards destruction by whacking them with sticks, or you can steer it towards productivity by wafting carrots. Cop shit doesn't help except when students are literally beating eachother and you need to pull them apart.
You try to move away from worksheets and attendance taking because it's a university, students oftentimes have family or work responsibilities, so you hand out problems and administer exams, and it completely backfires. Up to now, everything was rigidly structured, now it's missing, and the kids are floundering.
You read the instructor reviews, it's like the prisoners rating the prison guards. Apparently I'm not a good prison guard because I set problems instead of handing out worksheets. There are no easy solutions.
I think the way the one solves this with individuals is through behaviors akin to parenting and/or therapy. And in a team context, I do a lot with collaboration, feedback loops, retrospectives, and 1:1 discussions. But in a traditional classroom setting, I don't think those can be directly applied. A teacher just doesn't have time to give all their students that level of therapy, but the individual-evaluation model breaks most of the tools that make sense in a team context.
The only hope I see is a Montessori-like approach. Having seen kids go through that, they learn a level of collaboration and mutual aid that's missing in industrial-style education. With that kind of collaboration, I can see ways to apply the tricks we use with cross-functional software teams. Of course, Montessori students also learn goal-directed behaviors that suit unstructured environments, so maybe it's all of a piece.
I'm aware this is an older post, but how much discussion would this be getting if the title wasn't so provocative, or if it wasn't associated with current events?
In primary school I am 100% for focusing on learning, and limiting the bureaucracy around it to only that which furthers the goal of learning. Punishing tardiness or unexplained absences doesn't make much sense, but noticing it does, because improving attendance is a worthy goal in pursuit of learning.
When you get to secondary school it makes some sense to put a bit more emphasis on responsibility.
And in post-secondary school, you're a customer now, so I think the teacher should only really care about what you do insofar as it might impact the service being sold to other paying customers.
Education has a deep societal purpose, especially in democracies and advanced economies. Its consumers are generally immature, and are definitionally people who are ignorant about important things. Education must not be structured solely around whatever a 19-year-old happens to want.
Fair enough, if you have more effective methods of achieving these goals, then describe how they better meet the need and let us evaluate them on their merits and try them.
But let's not tear down what we don't understand
I'm not sure many of the rest of the list can be either, to be honest.
For example - citing inconclusive results from a plagiarism detection suite as a reason to have a meeting with a student or group, would induce large amounts of anxiety and stress is most people, even if the professors intention is that 90% of cases would be thrown out after the student/group testifies. It can lead to infighting in groups in particular, even when no cheating occurs. And the in person meeting is almost certainly rather stressful for most students.
And how many educational authorities are quick to jump to judgement and words like "just admit you did it, and we'll punish you less?" Presumption of guilt is the most reliable way to sow distrust and discord, and yet it is often done by lay people, whose negative actions are amplified by their positions of authority.
Underage students in particular should not be expected to react reasonably under such adversarial circumstances.
And even if the law and society expects it, I'd argue that most adults cannot handle novel adversarial circumstances well. Police interactions, and interactions with educational authorities over matters of discipline and cheating are most certainly novel, adversarial, and hugely stressful for most people, and it is done for remarkably little gain in terms of actually catching cheating, practically speaking.
To tie it off - I've been accused of cheating twice in my academic career.
Once when I was in 6th grade, when the assistant principle and a police officer pulled me into an isolated meeting and gaslighted me to confess to my guilt for 30 minutes. In the end, they "realized" they had pulled aside the wrong student. And then, that 2nd student they pulled aside had also turned out to have not been cheating. Such gross incompetence and psychological abuse should never be allowed to happen to children going through the most formative experiences in their life.
The 2nd time, my undergrad group was called to a meeting with one week's worth of notice, that our code had been flagged by plagiarism software, and that we would have to testify if we had cheated or not, or risk having a 0. My partner was a miserable wreck for that entire week. Turns out, when we got there, the code had just flagged some unimportant boiler plate code as having been copied from somewhere else. Not even the part of the code that actually solves for the problem, just the code that initialize variables and classes. The professor was apologetic, but that week of torment was for naught.
Both of these instances were in well regarded, well funded public schools, in the heart of the California Bay Area. I imagine it would be even worse in less well off areas, and geographies where education is not taken seriously.
The article is most certainly referring to instances of it being sloppily and maliciously used in ways to intimidate students, even if plagiarism detection tech can be used in a responsible manner. If the technology requires rigorous ethical training and screening to be used by authorities properly, which is often not provided to any reasonable degree, then it should not be used at all. I would rather every cheater be let go, than have 10 innocent kids be tormented and punished for a wrong they never committed.