
Against Cop Shit - smacktoward
https://jeffreymoro.com/blog/2020-02-13-against-cop-shit/
======
syndacks
Hey 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
    

[edit: formatting]

~~~
bonchicbongenre
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

------
jessaustin
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...

~~~
syndacks
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?

~~~
wpietri
"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.

~~~
hatboat
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).

~~~
wpietri
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.

------
bb123
> 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.

------
labster
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.

------
evrydayhustling
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.

~~~
jessaustin
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.

------
ses1984
I'm not sure I'm against plagiarism detection tech.

~~~
majormajor
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?!).

~~~
austenallred
I don't agree with this at all. Assessment is completely necessary to
understand where a student is at, and plagiarism renders assessment
ineffective.

~~~
majormajor
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.

~~~
ses1984
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...

------
jimhefferon
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.

------
yowlingcat
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.

------
Minor49er
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.

~~~
HarryHirsch
What? The author says he's a graduate student (consequently very likely a TA)
with a 7-year old daughter.

~~~
jml7c5
The daughter is his stylist's, not his.

------
11thEarlOfMar
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-...](https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-
discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html)

------
HarryHirsch
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.

~~~
wpietri
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.

------
jml7c5
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?

------
jdm2212
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.

~~~
klyrs
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.

~~~
jdm2212
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.

~~~
klyrs
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.

------
rootusrootus
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.

~~~
wpietri
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.

~~~
jessaustin
"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.

------
el_don_almighty
"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

~~~
mjw1007
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.

------
Hnrobert42
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.

------
Joking_Phantom
"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.

