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Howdy DSISD: Disguising the Ways They Kill Us: Big Data, Behaviorism, and Mindset Marketing

Howdy DSISD,

With DSISD collecting SEL data, some counter narrativeā€¦

The irony of turning schools into therapeutic institutions when they generate so much stress and anxiety seems lost on policy-makers who express concern about children's mental health

Source: ClassDojo app takes mindfulness to scale in public education | code acts in education

Behaviorism is primitive moral development. Behaviorism commodifies people. Silicon Valley and the autism industry are prime examples. My company said no to Silicon Valley because of its ethical rot. Now, that rot is entering public education via ed-tech. Instead of welcoming it in, align with the humane tech and tech ethics folks who are pushing back against behaviorism and its commodification script.

Like a great many autistic people, I do not support autism organizations that promote ABA or PBIS. Organizations that promote them are not allies. Orgs that promote behaviorism don't have autistic people in charge. Schools that promote it harm autistic and disabled people.

PBS and Class Dojo in schools are warning signs to us. We really don't like behaviorism. Really, really, really don't like it. I want yā€™all to appreciate how ethically yuck and fundamentally misguided it is to so many of us. It's a crude tool. R. still talks about the public, color-coded behaviorism during his time at DSISD. Doing that to kids is wrong, especially autistic kids. Public color coding was a constant source of stress and shame. Shame is not a weapon. Behaviorism too often forgets that.

Behaviorism and mindset marketing disguise the ways they kill us. Fix injustice, not kids. "It essentially boils down to whether one chooses to do damage to the system or to the student."

"We favor product over process which begets one bad policy after another." "Learning should be by design, not product."

Iā€™ve written a lot about behaviorism and mindsets from my neurodiversity, disability, equity literacy, humane tech, and tech ethics perspectives. Here are some private links to recent writing Iā€™ve shared in emails and chats with some of yā€™all. These are rough draft, personal, and vulnerable.

My main public narrative pushing back against what DSISD and other schools are buying into is ā€œMindset Marketing, Behaviorism, and Deficit Ideologyā€. Chase that with this public writing:

DSISD buys into pseudoscience and bad psychiatry best consigned to dark and sad history. What I see coming from DSISD strikes me as ignorant of autistic and disabled community and history. It strikes me as ignorant of the humane tech discussion going on in my industry. DSISD needs some disability studies and tech ethicists.

Heed Alfie Kohn. Heed Audrey Watters. Heed Bruce Levine and so many others. Neurodiversity, disability, and humane tech communities co-sign their narratives.

We have the opportunity to build something timeless. We have the opportunity to build equity literate contemporary progressive education. Instead, we are investing in primitive moral development, commodification, data collection, and gaslighting at scale.

Itā€™s not about behavior. Until we leave that framing, we will continue bikeshedding deficit ideology and wasting the future.

Plenty of policies and programs limit our ability to do right by children. But perhaps the most restrictive virtual straitjacket that educators face is behaviorism - a psychological theory that would have us focus exclusively on what can be seen and measured, that ignores or dismisses inner experience and reduces wholes to parts. It also suggests that everything people do can be explained as a quest for reinforcement - and, by implication, that we can control others by rewarding them selectively.

Allow me, then, to propose this rule of thumb: The value of any book, article, or presentation intended for teachers (or parents) is inversely related to the number of times the word "behavior" appears in it. The more our attention is fixed on the surface, the more we slight students' underlying motives, values, and needs.

It's been decades since academic psychology took seriously the orthodox behaviorism of John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, which by now has shrunk to a cult-like clan of "behavior analysts." But, alas, its reductionist influence lives on - in classroom (and schoolwide) management programs like PBIS and Class Dojo, in scripted curricula and the reduction of children's learning to "data," in grades and rubrics, in "competency"- and "proficiency"-based approaches to instruction, in standardized assessments, in reading incentives and merit pay for teachers.

Itā€™s time we outgrew this limited and limiting psychological theory. That means attending less to studentsā€™ behaviors and more to the students themselves.

Source: It's Not About Behavior - Alfie Kohn

We cannot replace agency with response to stimuli.

Source: MMCP: Critical Digital Pedagogy; or, the Magic of Gears | Hybrid Pedagogy

I am watching the US education system not very subtly invite punishment back into the mainstream classroom. This appears to be driven by the field of Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA).

Source: Defining Reinforcement and Punishment for Educators - Why Haven't They Done That Yet?



last updated december 2018