Against Cop Shit
jeffreymoro.comHey so this is awesome, and I'd like to add a few points. (I used to teach HS Math in NYC Public Schools).
- 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
This, sadly, conforms very well with my experience of lower-income/higher-minority schools. I was a volunteer teacher (for a program teaching young ones to code with Scratch, once weekly) at a number of West Philly grade 1-12 schools for a few years, and the environment in those schools was obviously to the detriment of the students. Wonderful kids, but it's no wonder that so many won't make it to a better life when they're taught nothing of value, but are taught that they're to be feared, derided, and not cared for from a young age. I kid you not, the average SAT math score from one school I taught at was in the 300s (and of course, less than 10% of those graduating took the SAT/ACT) — you can score a 300 on the SAT math without answering a single question correctly. The students were taught nothing at all. There was constant cacophony of teachers yelling all the time, I saw multiple police in the halls every day, had to be scanned myself going in. The whole thing was ridiculous, and it's only clear purpose was to imprison those wonderful children in the poverty and destitution they were born into
Haha I just vouched it back from the grave... [EDIT:]... and now it's [flagged] again.
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 think HN could really benefit from some adjustment of the flagging/killing process. An article like this is going to attract lots of knee-jerk flaggers based on the title alone, but the guidelines state, "...please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." Perhaps in this case the title could have been changed under the "linkbait" criterion. It's just annoying to see things flagged within minutes of submission when clearly no one has had time to read it.
A 100% agree that adjustment is needed. I don't even like TLA (end plagiarism detection? Really?), but I think the discussion around it is valuable.
The flag system gives a small number of users the ability to kill articles entirely too fast.
Yeah, I don't think it should be flagged. It's a provocative title, but it's very much an argument about pedagogy and technology in education. It should be in HN's wheelhouse.
(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 more upvotes it gets, I think reversed flags.
the fact that this gets flagged tells me people didn't even read the article and just got offended by the title.
It could be useful to have "February 2020" in the title.
I can't seem to vouch it, so I guess it's dead now. I think there's some rule that after getting resurrected and re-flagged, something is dead? I looked at this and figured it might be someone yelling for more "disband the police" or whatever, and the title is pretty inflammatory, but I clicked and agreed with the article. I suppose HN could replace every link with a tracking link to force people to click before flagging/voting/commenting, though that runs into concerns with data collection...
Just want to add a voice that this should not be flagged.
This is an extremely important topic. OP I think you are sort of shooting yourself (and the topic) in the foot with the use of "shit" -- can you not use a more descriptive word please?
"Cop shit" is excellent idiomatic English for conveying what they mean. The title is clear, accurate, and attention-getting.
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.
The title is far from "clear" or "accurate". Attention-getting for sure.
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).
Titles aren't always supposed to be perfect summaries. Nobody reasonable complains that "The Sun Also Rises" is not in fact a book about daybreak. But if you're concerned about people's "sensitivity", then presumably putting "cop shit" in the title is even more important, so that those delicate flowers know not to click.
I used the title the author of the article gave it. I generally try to do that when submitting, unless there is a very very good reason not to -- e.g. it's something completely incomprehensible to someone who isn't a regular reader of that specific site.
> While I was getting my hair cut yesterday, my stylist told me about her daughter’s math teacher, who is currently punishing her daughter for falling behind on work due to a broken arm by assigning her upwards of fifteen pages of homework a night. The child is seven
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.
I was a graduate student teacher too. The biggest difference to me about teaching in university is that everyone in the classroom wants to be there — or at least cares enough about their parents to fake it. How could they not? It costs thousands.
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.
I'm all for limiting data collection from kids, and for making our schools less like jails. But I don't think the author does a good enough job defining "cop shit" for discussion.
"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.
Yes it's true that badges appeal to children. I remember they appealed to me when I was a child. I'm wiser now, and I realize they were never beneficial to me or to the other children who got fewer gold stars. Adults owe it to children, not to exploit their weaknesses in ways that are not beneficial.
I'm not sure I'm against plagiarism detection tech.
Plagiarism detection tech seems like a solving-the-wrong-problem attempt to address a symptom of how we're trying to mass-produce education to save money.
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?!).
I don't agree with this at all. Assessment is completely necessary to understand where a student is at, and plagiarism renders assessment ineffective.
I think the point of the person you're replying to is that there are other methods of assessment which would render plagiarism ineffective - such as in-person presentations and conversations. But, teachers don't have the time and resources to do that with all of their students.
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."
Industrial mass-produced "assessment" is only necessary in a mostly-anonymous, un-personal system. If you have time to actually talk to a student, you can figure out pretty quickly how well they understand something.
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.
Yes, if we had unlimited resources and could give each student an individualized exam, oral and written under supervision, then plagiarism detection of tech wouldn't be necessary, but if you're trying to stretch a budget...
In the past we solved that by the instructor discussing the material with the students; it would quickly become apparent who knew something and who didn't. Unfortunately classes have become too big for that.
That injects a ton of bias into your marking though. Under that method, shy students and students with poor verbal skills (for example, ESL) don't stand a chance. I have seen excellent work come out of students that you could barely talk about the material, but could produce excellent assignments (this is in a domain where plagiarism would be very easy to detect, so I'm very confident it's actually their work).
It's better for shy students or students with poor verbal skills to work on that in an academic environment than to be dropped into a work environment where those things are just as important without their education ever bothering to help them with it.
"Interpersonal skills are optional" is not a good side effect of our current educational system!
I was gonna say. The author never elaborates on it, but this is a profoundly silly take. Plagiarism is not just unethical, it also is (in my experience) a pretty good indicator the student didn't learn the subject matter. If you know what you're talking about, it's relatively easy to put it into your own words. Students that I've caught plagiarizing either:
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!).
While plagiarism is unethical, nearly all means to combat it (detection software, esp. Turnitin) is also unethical; two wrongs don't make a right.
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.
> 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.
Plagiarism detection is only needed because we are using completion/grading of work to determine whether students graduate, GPAs etc. The article is arguing that we shouldn't be so dependent on the "grade of homework" metric at all, so plagiarism should be less impactful and less incentivized.
I have seen students plagiarize co-op work term reports, which at the institution that I marked at are binary pass/fail with a near 100% pass rate (barring plagiarism). The assignment isn't long, is on a subject the students already know, and you can hand in some pretty terribly written garbage and still pass. But students still try to plagiarize on it - there's a subset of the population that wants the degree, but can't/won't put in the time to do the actual work.
Requiring a plagiarism detection feature is a symptom of a shitty instructor, syllabus, and/or academic institution.
How does a good instructor, syllabus, and/or academic institution not need this? I went to an Ivy League school with hopefully above average teachers and saw a lot of plagiarism.
The problems are societal in nature. I don't beleive either the parent commentor or original author fully appreciate this.
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.
In principle, you remove the incentive for plagiarism by making the students' reward for their work be what they learn as a result, rather than some kind of certificate.
Oh cool, so we just need to fix a massive social problem that's generated by long-running structural trends within our society and economy. Then we can stop using plagiarism detection software.
... So we shouldn't try to fix the problem?
Of course we should, but we shouldn't be naive about the challenge doing so represents.
They could have set work that is difficult to lift word for word, or examine in any number of ways that do not allow googling
In one class, in order to submit an assignment, we had to accept an agreement that gave the plagiarism detection company the copyright to the essays we had written. I’m sure there is an okay way to do plagiarism detection but I think many companies do it in ways that don’t respect the rights of students.
Bad teachers may punish students for false positives. It's a tool, not a blackbox of academic integrity.
I saw multiple instances of my classmates plagiarizing. It's very rampant in colleges. Removing that tech would be a mistake in my opinion.
I'm a working teacher (college) and so is my wife (high school). I agree that adversarial is, the great majority of the time, counter productive. Working with students is way better than working against them. Besides, you have to look at yourself in the mirror and think, "Am I really that person?"
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.
It's always interesting to note the whiggish, egalitarian overtones of the origins of the American public education system, as argued by one of its founding proponents, Horace Mann. The system was designed to teach children from all backgrounds the three Rs: reading, 'riting (sic), 'rithmetic (sic).
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.
This author categorizes plagiarism detection and rigorous learning experiences along with "any interface with actual cops". This is under the blanket presumption that all of these things "[presume] an adversarial relationship between students and teachers", which is fundamentally wrong. He is, by his own admission in the post, an inexperienced teacher. He also does not appear to be a parent. I think he should get a lot more experience and think about his position before writing a post like this again because he is advocating for a less-educated classroom.
What? The author says he's a graduate student (consequently very likely a TA) with a 7-year old daughter.
The daughter is his stylist's, not his.
Education by conformance is the only solution that has held up for mass-produced education around the world. In any conformance environment, you'll find actors who are more and other who are less strict. The behavior cited is an outcry against absurdly strict and asymmetric methods for driving conformity.
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-...
This is the kind of stuff you can believe in if you haven't been a student at a bad public school. There are students who for the sake of their classmates (to say nothing of the teachers' sanity) absolutely have to be handled with "cop shit" because they won't respond to anything else and will disrupt not only their own class, but every nearby class too.
That's exactly the kind of bullshit that Law and Order people sell every day while they poison our society with violence, force, and mistrust. This is the kind of bullshit that got us the TSA (never forget!) and real censorship (think of the children!).
Law and Order - Destroying our society every day.
Those kids need better outlets, and more support; cop shit turns it into a power struggle that entrenches their adversarial mindset.
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.
The disruptive students I'm thinking of were basically juvenile delinquents, not future math PhDs who trolled on homework sometimes. The girl who dropped acid in economics class, the girl who peed on the floor in math class, the guy who beat the shit out of another guy in the cafeteria, the two girls who were literally ripping each other's hair out in the hallway until my history teacher pulled them off of each other. There weren't that many of them, but in a class of 30 students a single one of them (just 3%) can guarantee no one learns anything.
Don't take this hindsight for granted. Nobody would have said I was a future math PhD, and several of my teachers were quite convinced that I'd never amount to shit. I was a bad student, and got in trouble for all sorts of shit. Numerous teachers gave up on me very early in my education: my third grade teacher moved my desk to face the corner as a "permanent" punishment because I was disruptive. It was a collaborative effort between my parents and a few good teachers to even get me through high school, and I had no interest in higher education. It was only after a few years bored as fuck in web development that I started to wonder if I could make something more of myself, that I went back to school.
What do you do with people who cannot operate in an unstructured environment because their schooling has been completely authoritarian? It's a tough problem.
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 wish I had a good answer for you!
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.
This is unreasonably inflammatory (both the language, and the way it's being associated with current anger at policing) for what is an interesting but not cutthroat topic. Swearing a lot is attention-grabbing (see the success of "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck", and the pile of "Blank Blank Swe*r Blank" titles that followed), but it's the essayist's equivalent of clickbait.
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?
I think it's important to draw some distinction between primary, secondary, and post-secondary education.
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.
Nah. The customer model is frequently corrosive to mission-driven organizations. Imagine it in medicine, for example. If I asked my doctor to prescribe me morphine because I'm the customer and I want it, they'd refuse. They should.
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.
"What the [parents] want" may not be the best model for education, but it's certainly not the worst in regular use. Actually, that's true in medicine as well.
"Don't move the ancient barriers" is an old proverb that cautions us towards careful consideration before we thoughtless tear down the walls around us before considering their core purpose. What has changed in the heart of humans that no longer necessitates these controls? Why do we discourage cheating? Why do attempt violence prevention within our schools? Why do we train personal responsibility as a guiding force of character?
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 pretty sure that neither "ed-tech that tracks our students’ every move" nor "plagiarism detection software" can be described as an ancient barrier.
I'm not sure many of the rest of the list can be either, to be honest.
I found the excessive use of the term “cop shit” distracting. I am not a prude. It’s not the profanity. Just use a pronoun every once in awhile godamnit.
"Plagiarism detection software" can most certainly be misused and abused - it's quite a slippery slope, difficult to administer fairly, and likely to create unwarranted chilling effects. The author was almost certainly referring to its ease and accessibility for misuse by educational authorities.
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.