Justice Needs A Platform
Here’s another nifty way to make your blog alive; link to your own posts. It’s so easy in the WordPress editor when selecting text to hyperlink.
Source: Blog Posts As Old Concrete Slabs or Alive in the Cracks In Between? – CogDogBlog
A living organism is an agent of bounded rationality that doesn’t pursue a single goal, but instead follows rules of thumb for what to pursue and avoid. Our human minds perceive these evolved rules of thumb as feelings, which usually (and often without us being aware of it) guide our decision making toward the ultimate goal of replication. Feelings of hunger and thirst protect us from starvation and dehydration, feelings of pain protect us from damaging our bodies, feelings of lust make us procreate, feelings of love and compassion make us help other carriers of our genes and those who help them and so on.
what makes disruption so devastating is the fact that, absent a crisis, it is almost impossible to avoid. Managers are paid to leverage their advantages, not destroy them; to increase margins, not obliterate them. Culture more broadly is an organization’s greatest asset right up until it becomes a curse.
Source: Intel and the Danger of Integration – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
That eagerness to coddle capital has always been part of our culture. Maybe it could be justified in a society hemmed in by commodity money and weak financial markets, where there might be some limitations to the amount of capital available for investment. But there is far more capital looking for profits today than there are plausible investments. We’ve just run a huge real-life experiment. The Republican tax bill gave corporations billions of dollars in tax breaks for money stashed “offshore” to avoid taxes. The brilliant CEOS had no profitable use for it and gave it to their shareholders.
Source: Democracy Against Capitalism: Capital In A Fiat Money World – emptywheel
PBIS also ignores human nature by demanding everyone maintain a positive mood and hide any frustration with a student’s naughty behavior.
My more in-depth interpretation is a reiteration of my earlier post on PBIS as well as my posts on classroom management. The PBIS method is far too easy to get wrong. It is far too easy to use consequences or the threat of consequences to motivate behavior (e.g., threatening a kid that they will not get a reward unless they comply). For individuals with ID, reinforcement has to be 100% correlated with good behavior and if there is punishment it has to be 100% correlated with the inappropriate behavior. No deviation and no gap between behavior and consequence. Otherwise, the system falls apart.
Importantly, if a system is based on using external rewards/stimuli to motivate behavior, falling apart takes the form of behavioral outbursts and frustration from the student or client.
Unfortunately, this type of asymmetrical reward is a feature, not a bug, of PBIS. PBIS uses asymmetrical reward as a motivational tool, to the detriment of the students that struggle with their comportment. And, take my word on this, no one can identify and rebel against an unfair system as efficiently as a kid or adult with ID, except perhaps an autistic person. They know the system is unfair!
PBIS is Coercion
This is an argument usually used for Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA), but it applies to PBIS as well. Because PBIS emphasizes the use of tangible rewards and teacher praise to motivate “appropriate” behavior, it often escapes this description.
The overall focus of PBIS is obedience or compliance with rules leading to a reward. The flip side of that coin is there is a lack of rewards or outright punishment administered for noncompliance. The pressure of complying with this system turns kids into ticking time bombs. Having to focus on compliance with school-wide and classroom rules stresses kids out and causes them to enter a state of anxiety when they come to school. In fact, I have seen this escalate to the point the school building itself was a trigger for panic attacks.
Source: PBIS is Broken: How Do We Fix It? – Why Haven’t They Done That Yet?
When we dangle rewards in kids faces, we encourage them to ask, “What do they want me to do, and what do I _get _for doing it?” And when we threaten them with punishments or consequences, we encourage them to ask, “What do they want me to do, and what happens to me if I don’t do it?” Neither question encourages kids to contemplate life in a way we would like to promote, and neither question has anything to do with creating a collaborative community built on caring.
Nolan’s inability to think about others, combined with his obvious self-interest certainly exemplify a primitive level of moral development… but, if the adults in his life subscribe to an equally primitive kind of character development, how can we come to expect anything more? How can we expect kids like Nolan to progress to a higher level of ethical behavior when our dependence on rewards and punishment is precisely what condemns kids to such primitive self-interest.
Source: for the love of learning: Primitive Moral Development: PBIS
Using praise as a reward contingency serves to teach students either that you do not like them (if you do not praise them), and that motivation is extrinsic and has to be earned through compliance.
White supremacy and ableism are tight. They share the politics of resentment. The Onion highlights that by invoking the language of ableism and accommodation in this piece.
https://local.theonion.com/picky-refugee-just-expects-to-be-reunited-with-exact-sa-1827449946
I updated “Classroom UX: Audit Your Context with the Social Model” with a selection from “PBIS is Broken: How Do We Fix It? – Why Haven’t They Done That Yet?”.
And, take my word on this, no one can identify and rebel against an unfair system as efficiently as a kid or adult with ID, except perhaps an autistic person. They know the system is unfair!
Source: PBIS is Broken: How Do We Fix It? – Why Haven’t They Done That Yet?
rnbn 