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As a pre-school child, I had some issues with fine motor coordination. I couldn’t cut or color in the lines. In the pre-kindergarten testing my performance on these tasks was troubling enough there was talk that maybe I should wait a year before starting school.
And then my mother pulled out a book and asked if it mattered that I could read.
Couldn’t color, but I could read. Being raised in an bookstore my mom had started when I was a year old probably had something to do with it. My fine motor coordination issues continue to this day. My handwriting is a fright. Don’t ask me to craft.
Today’s “college and career ready” Kindergarten would probably have suited me well, but back in the 70’s it was coloring and drawing a decent chunk of the time. My Thanksgiving turkey hand tracing craft project resulted in a creature born and raised in a post-Chernobyl radioactive hellscape.
We also had a gold star board marking achievements. I only remember two of the items, zipping your own coat and tying your own shoes. I remember those because I was the last kid in class to get those stars. I remember crying over my shoelaces, trying to practice at home.
It’s possible I was an oversensitive kid, and it’s likely my memory has distorted and elevated reality. At the time, I might not have outwardly displayed much stress.[1] But that’s part of the point. These are the dominant memories of my Kindergarten year. Above all, I remember the ways I was defective, even as I was reading while my peers were still learning the alphabet.
I don’t know if I would’ve survived life in a Hero K12 school. Hero K12 is “behavior management software” used in schools that count over 2.8 million students with what at this point must be over half a billion “behavior scans.” https://herok12.com
The Hero K12 introductory video is, as was remarked to me on Twitter, like something out of a “corporate dystopia,” every interaction is tracked and quantified into a system of demerits and rewards. Being on time and doing extra credit allows you to cut to the front of the lunch line. Tardiness means you wait with the rest of the rabble can’t attend the pep rally.[2]
Notice the entire lack of human discretion within the system. We do not know (or care) why Jill arrives late, if her mother’s car broke down (again) or if perhaps there is a younger sibling needing escorting to school. What matters is not the individual, but the lateness itself, apparently a threat to the orderly, well-functioning school.
One of my current book projects concerns the ways we teach writing, and as I prepared the proposal it became clear to me in order to understand the dynamics of the college writing classroom I needed to learn much more about what students had experienced in their prior schooling.
My concerns about my students are not about their skills or writing knowledge so much as their attitudes and orientations towards the act. They tend to arrive laden with rules and schematics to be applied to all “academic” writing tasks. Curiosity and the ability to make informed choices inside the rhetorical situation were considerably lacking, to the point where students appeared to have little actual experience with these concepts.
Previously, I’ve placed much of the blame on systems of schooling that require teachers and classes to focus on standardized assessments requiring rubric and rule-based strategies for “success.” I believe we now primarily train students to pass writing assessments, which is not the same thing as teaching them to write. Some of my personal frustrations over what my students could or could not do, do or do not know, has been eased with a better understanding of the ways they’ve been (un)prepared for their first-year writing course.
So much energy has gone into making students “college and career ready,” as measured by these lousy assessments, they’re not particularly ready for college. But knowing this, I can work with it, and around it, and through it, and I believe my students and I have had some success on this front.
The damage of what is increasingly become routine surveillance and behavioral tracking is going to be much tougher to undo, however. I don’t believe it is coincidental each successive freshman class reports higher incidences of depression and anxiety when every aspect of their behavior and academic performance is being tracked and quantified.
When students come into a first-year writing class and are encouraged to explore the boundaries of an idea, they are doing so having come from a school culture that explicitly punishes deviance from approved administrative control. This is antithetical to the kinds of atmospheres of freedom and open inquiry rooted in intrinsic motivation that underpin effective learning.
These are not fringe companies
As compiled by Audrey Watters at Hack Education, we see that Hero K12 is one of the leading ed tech investment recipients so far this year ($150 million).
Class Dojo, a somewhat cuddlier, less obviously authoritarian version of Hero K12 is nonetheless nearly identical in its intentions to track every moment of student behavior and performance. It claims to have a presence in 90% of K12 schools.
Hero 12K is actually a rebranding of PlascoTrac, which is in turn a product from Plasco ID, “The Global Leader in ID Solutions.” If you’re having a hard time seeing the education DNA in the company, it’s because it doesn’t exist. Plasco ID provides security passes and systems, not education-related resources.
PlascoTrac even has an Urban Dictionary entry dating to 2010 including this 2nd definition:
2. The ridiculous machines that rent-a-cops and administrators carry and scan your ID with/print you a pass with when you are in the hallways at a bad time.
Used in a sentence:
I can't believe that rent-a-cop whipped out the PlascoTrac on me! I was just getting a book from my locker during lunch.
Imagine an existence where your worst moments of shame are not only your memories, but are now data that could follow you for the rest of your life. Never mind that, how about just a moment-to-moment school experience when any answer you give is going to be enshrined in your data profile. How could we expect anything other than depression and anxiety as a result?
Personally, I would’ve crumbled under such a system, and I was one of the so-called “good” kids, worried about doing the right thing and not wanting to get into trouble.
When schools are adopting technology that looks more suited to prisons, we must’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere.
[1] My mom reports I didn’t appear to have “much interest” in learning to tie my shoes, but rather than being an indicator I didn’t care, I think hindsight suggests I was simply afraid of a task I knew would be hard for me to learn. What looked like lack of caring was more like a fear-based aversion. I see this in many writing students. What looks like lassitude is actually an expression of feeling overwhelmed and under-resourced, a recipe for failure.
[2] Though, I’m having a hard time envisioning a pep rally at this hypothetical school. Maybe they induce school spirit by awarding extra bonus points for extra loud cheering, each student fitted with a decibel meter.
