Ed Johnson lives in Atlanta and fights daily against the malignant competition and punishment inflicted on the children of Atlanta by the school board and superintendent. He shares the philosophy of W. Edwards Deming, who taught the importance of collaboration and teamwork.
He wrote this post and sent it to the school board:
Cyberattacks and competition
I have been under cyberattack for nearly a year, now.
First, it was attempted blackmail to “expose” me by making public an old username and password I used once to visit an “unsavory” website some 25 years ago. I hear this blackmail tactic is quite common, and successful.
Well, blackmail didn’t work on me, so then came invading my computer and encrypting all personal files and holding the encrypted files hostage pending my paying the one bitcoin (~680 USD) ransom demand before I would be given the decryption key.
Well, holding my personal files hostage for ransom didn’t work on me, so then on 18 Dec 2018, there suddenly came a great flood of email notifications from subscription and online services all over the globe thanking me for having signed up. Fraudulent signups continue to occur at the rate of around six or so per day. The aim of the bountiful fraudulent signups seems to be the gamble that, in the fog of hurriedly unsubscribing the many services, one is bound to click on a Trojan Horse disguised as an “Unsubscribe” link.
Well, fraudulent subscriptions haven’t worked on me, so two days ago, this happened: My receiving notifications of Diane Ravitch blog posts had been blocked at wordpress.com, for crying out loud!
For the first time, I felt panicky. No Diane Ravitch blog posts?!! No, that can’t be!
But in the end that didn’t work on me, either. Not for long, anyway.
So I remain a happy camper.
Even so, I guess we will always have some folk who have been taught and deeply conditioned to compete “by any means necessary” to win at the expense of others.
Atlanta Public Schools Leadership (APSL; school board and superintendent) are pretty good at teaching and conditioning people, even young children, to win at the expense of others, when winning and losing is not at all necessary, as with their Race2Read competition, for example.
Just think, the many children innocently and trustingly pour themselves into reading, wanting to do their best, to be helpful, to contribute, only to have the APSL adults turn on them and declare ten reading winner kids (“Top Student Readers”) and to tell the thousands of other children they are the reading loser kids, even if that is not the reality, at all. Because they show they utterly fail to understand variation, the APSL adults create reading winners and reading losers out of the children, arbitrarily and capriciously, and ignorantly.
The currently serving APSL have always shown that everybody cooperating to achieve a common goal is an extremely foreign concept to them. As their Race2Read competition exemplifies, the APSL would rather have children, students, schools, parents and community members, and even school bus drivers, competing than cooperating and collaborating.
How unfortunate, here in the twenty-first century, some among the APSL keep practicing the regressive belief that competition motivates people and boosts morale and improves quality, as does, for example, school board member Cynthia Briscoe Brown opining in a school board meeting here (at 1:22:30 thru 1:24:56) that the new “Elite Bus Driver” program is a way of “boosting morale” among school bus drivers.
Now, tell me, what parents would want an inferior, second-rate school bus driver at the wheel of the school bus transporting their children? Or an inferior, second-rate mechanic having worked on the school bus? What might parents think or do if they knew the majority of both school bus drivers and school bus mechanics have been told, and have come to believe, they are the inferior, second-rate ones?
Intentions hold no water, here. Again, we are in the twenty-first century and the APSL should be progressing into it, not regressing back out of it, by way of behaviorism and Taylorism.
One dimension along which the APSL should have already progressed further into this century is that of recognizing the unethical and immoral nature of arbitrary and capricious competition—such as the Race2Read competition and the Elite Bus Driver program—and simply not do it.
So, how many children made Race2Read competition losers will grow up to transfer, unconsciously, their learned reading loser position in life into a selfish coding and hacking practice of “winning” by cyberattacking others?
What? Did someone just say such a matter can’t be measured so therefore can’t happen?
Really?
Ed Johnson
Advocate for Quality in Public Education
Atlanta GA | (404) 505-8176 | edwjohnson@aol.com
Not a teacher I know who uses tech has a clue about the swiss cheese privacy policies of their software or how that may changed with mobile apps. Now comes along this
Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side
My elderly mother was recently the victim of a Ransomware attack. Her computer had to be wiped and rebuilt from scratch.
I recently received a text that read, “Your subscription in the amount of $_____ will renew in 10 days. If you do not wish for this amount to be charged to your account, please notify us immediately at ________.” There was no identifying information except the contact. I assume that this was a scam.
Another common one, these days, is for hackers to get access to someone’s Facebook account and send an attachment, via the built-in Messenger app.
And then there are the fake calls and emails pretending to be the IRS or Medicare. I don’t know much about these. All I can say is, be very, very careful.
I never open attachments without first verifying with the person who sent it that he or she did in fact send it. It’s easy for scammers to get access to people’s email or messaging accounts and to send these fake messages. Verify first.
This post reminded me of the summer reading competitions sponsored by our library & trumpeted by the school to parents in the closing days of the school year– back when my kids were in elemsch in the competitive ‘90’s. I always felt queasy just at the idea of them, & steered clear. So I perused the libe website to see if that still happens. What a nice change! Nothing like that at all. They have storytimes for little ones, and “Reading Clubs” for young readers of various ages/ interests: sign-up day complete with inflated bouncy castle in the library yard. Plus dance, music, et al activities, all incl in membership. Guess Atlanta’s still living in the competitive ‘90’s.
We have Battle of the Books. It started out as a fun event to get kids to read. The next thing you know, it turned into a competition. The wealthy, crazy competitive parents decided to add in costumes and scenery and then they decided to start drilling the kids on the subject matter of the book and to make the children do “close reading” sessions after the kids had already read the book….. so that they could win. Disgusting! It’s no longer fun for ALL the kids to read, anymore and there is no incentive for most of the kids to join this madness.
Oh my gosh that’s sad and disgusting, Lisa. I’d like to think that pubsch & libe staff here are so perspicacious they led the community to a better place. But more likely they’re just responding to public demand. These whims seem to come & go in waves. Our community here, since my kids finished K12, has been gradually ultra-gentrifying w/ new houses going for 1-2million, so I’m going to guess we have no more stay-at-home or PT-worker competitive mama bears. Maybe their offspring are being taken to libe functions by relaxed neñeras & abuelitas who know better what’s good for kids.. Or maybe the working moms are tuned in enough to understand that the high-pressure over-scheduling of yesteryear is no better for their kids than it is for them… We are lucky to live in a neighborhood where you can just walk/ stroller your kid to the town library, so maybe that ease rubs off & encourages low-vibe kid-friendly activities. (For now, until the next wave.)
There is only one person I compete against, and that person is me. I do not compete with anyone else. I’m an indie published author and I do not compete against J.K. Rowling or Stephen King, et al. In fact, I do not compete against any published author, indie or traditional.
And I measure my success when competing against myself by completing my written goals.
For me, that means: “When I complete 95-percent or more of my weekly written goals ….”, I am a winner. Always a winner. I actually have that written at the top of my list of short and long term goals.
To make sure I don’t cheat on those goals, I write them down on a whiteboard in my home office and I monitor them all the time, every day. The great thing is that I haven’t missed a goal for years, but I also make sure not to set impossible daily goals for me to complete.
We are all individuals and we are not racehorses that compete against each other to win a horse race.
We are all individuals and most of us are not Olympic athletes who compete against other Olympic athletes.
Even when I was a public school classroom teacher for thirty years (1975-2005), I never competed with other teachers to out teach them. Instead, as a professional teacher, I put in many hours improving my education as a teacher and improving how I taught but not in competition with other teachers but often collaborating with other teachers in teams to work together to help each other improve our teaching methods.
Will someone PLEASE remove Bill Gates and his anal obsession with the rank-and-punish competition out of our children’s lives and out of our public school teachers classrooms.
In fact, how about a national restraining order from the US Supreme Court to keep Bill Gates completely out of and away from our public education system.
I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself. –Mikhail Baryshnikov
I refuse to compete. Competition does NOT bring out the best in people.
So true. Competition often brings out the worst in some people. The urge to win turns many into liars and cheaters. Trump is the perfect example of how corrupt one is willing to go to win, win, win while everyone else loses.
One two examples or I might be adding to this list for hours and even days:
One: To win new women, Trump cheats on his wives and even his mistresses.
Two: To always look like a winner with gold plated toilet seats, Trump cheats his partners and contractors out of what he agreed to pay them.
Lloyd,
👍 So TRUE.
Thanks, Lloyd. 🦋
It’s a very tough lesson for some to learn, Lloyd—the “personal best” thing. Some seem wired to compete from the time they were born, & others were shaped to it by a lack of unconditional parental love. The crux comes when one must decide to do the best one can w/n the limits of one’s own resources, & define goals for oneself w/o comparison to cohort. That’s maturity. Some never reach it.
Within the context of how society/ govtl system shapes these things for youth, I find capitalism, if unrigged, provides healthy competitive stimulus, and pure socialism stymies it—similar to the way in which overly-enabling parenting can engender stasis and even depression/ inactivity in offspring. Some middle ground, which seems to have been attained in Nordic social democracies, provides unlimited opportunity obtainable w/effort, w/safety-net fallback—very similar to how good parents encourage toddlers to venture out, but are there to retreat to when necessary.
You identify the fundamental cultural conflict: sink or swim vs. water wings for everyone.