We Are Building A Religion…

December 17, 2014July 31, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

We are building a religion; we are building it bigger
We are widening the corridors and adding more lanes
We are building a religion – a limited edition
We are now accepting callers for these pendant key chains
To resist it is useless – it is useless to resist it…
You can meet at his location, but you’d better come with cash

I don’t spend much time defrocking the Edu-Reform Industry. Too many others are covering that issue far better than I am likely to manage. But the Spirits of Shuffle Play keep bringing around this song*, and I can’t help but see a correlation.

You could interpret it a variety of ways, but I hear a critique of the music industry in the guise of a commentary on televangelism. I can’t shake the image of Gene Scott back in the day, cigar in hand, wearing his weird hat of the night, scolding the audience for wasting his time and not giving enough. But it’s not the music industry I think about every time it plays. It’s the other guys – the ones “saving” education…

The parallels between a well-packaged religion and an effectively marketed edu-reform movement are rather fascinating, I think.

(Now don’t get all defensive and think I’m attacking faith in general. I’m talking about the #edreform equivalent – the fake stuff with the gilded flakes. “Some of my best friends are evangelicals,” etc., so just stay with me a moment…)

1. Both offer easy answers to complex questions. The impact of a Hinn or Hagee lies partly in their utter rejection of inconsistency or uncertainty. The Great Mystery of faith is transformed into stubborn conviction regarding every interpretation, implication, or sensation.

No Jim or Tammy Faye, no Koresh or Moon, would be worth their salt if they let a little reality slow them down. Faith is the substance of things not seen, sure – but it takes a special twist to proceed from that into complete and utter denial of reality. It goes beyond a willingness to accept what you cannot prove and gives you a noble – nay, holy – foundation for ignoring even what you can.

Behold the wisdom of Pearson and its ilk. They’re not out to win an argument – they’re offering to scratch an itch, to meet an apparent need. They have easy answers – textbooks which work in any state that’s not Texas, assessments which, because they’re online, somehow guarantee students have entered modernity, and suites of ancillaries, strategies, terminologies, and priorities.

It saves so much time compared to wading through specific student abilities or needs, and if you order today they’ll throw in a new sense of progressive identity and an assortment of Twitter-ready platitudes.

We are building a religion; we are making a brand
We’re the only ones to turn to when your castles turn to sand
Take a bite of this apple, Mr. Corporate Events
Take a walk through the jungle of cardboard shanties and tents

2. Both institutionalize things traditionally built on relationships. A good mega-church or movement has mastered its marketing, its placement, its packaging and branding, so that content itself is almost secondary – like the perfume in the bottle. Members are guided in what to profess more than what to believe, and as with any corporately controlled environment, dissent is discouraged despite token mechanisms in place to accommodate “suggestions” or complaints.

A faith founded on walking around talking to people, helping them out, even staying in their homes as you invest in their souls, is neatly packaged and shrink-wrapped into broadcasts, books, CDs, and playbooks for those who wish to move up the pyramid – Amway for the soul. It speaks of relationships but it markets systems.

It’s efficient. Cost effective. Economies of scale.

Edu-Reform talks incessantly of individualizing learning and teachers being the most important factor in the classroom, but allows for no such nonsense in practice. Every “solution” or “tool” requires a purchase order and a follow-up email suggesting scaffolds and assessments, available today at an introductory rate.

Any teaching method not consuming product is belittled and dismissed until those still practicing such things do so in shadows and shame. Classroom priorities not easily assessed are elevated in lip service while discarded in fact – at least if you want to survive evals. The Curmudgucation sticker on your keyboard or the Jose Vinson book on your shelf become clues to your heresy – an Ichthus fish for edu-bloggers.

He says, “Now do you believe in the one big song?”
He’s now accepting callers who would like to sing along
There’s no need to ask directions if you ever lose your mind
We’re behind you, we’re behind you – and let us please remind you
We can send a car to find you if you ever lose your way…

3. Both choose language which obfuscates rather than enlightens. The statement that kids aren’t all the same is difficult to refute, so they don’t. Instead, all children are capable. All kids can learn. All students should be equally prepared to function in an increasingly global economy and culture.

All of these are true in and of themselves, but are used to collectively imply that all teachers and all students should be on the same page of the same guidebook on the same day, regardless of background, ability, or interests – that is, if you believe that children are the future, and teach them well by feeding them the way…

One man’s “oversimplified” is another’s “firm convictions.” And on a similar note…

4. Both bring the feels. “Higher standards” is the new “Holy Holy Holy,” the edu-quivalent of “Our Test is an Awesome Test, it’s scored with Rub-uh-rics! It’s yours, when you join PARCC – Our Test is an Awesome Test…”

The power of manipulative rhetoric is in how it sounds and makes you feel rather than what it means – if it means anything. “Highly qualified” instructors “adding value”, focusing on “skills” and “inquiry” and “student-driven {insert anything here}” – are your ideals tingling?

I can feel nobler by taking a clearly marked path? The Grand Inquisitor would be proud.

Feelings are stronger than thoughts, and neither Pearson nor politicians worry about the latter when the former will do. Elected leaders or successful entrepreneurs are granted all the feels they can feel and all the rhetoric they can rhetor by simply joining the right conglomerate, writing the right check, and attaching the proper strings. It’s how we run wars, how we build cities, and how most policy is written. It doesn’t sound insane to them the way it does outside the Bicameral Halls of Cynicism and Delusion.

5. Both target effectively. Religious charlatans aren’t overly concerned with co-opting the truly devout – that’s not their demographic. They gently but firmly excommunicate them, either openly condemning or crocodile mourning their refusal to see ‘the light.’

Ed-Reformers aren’t overly concerned with winning over real teachers. They don’t need to. Most couldn’t if they cared to try. Instead, excommunication comes via the narrative of “failed teachers” protected by “entrenched unions.” Teachers resistant to bad ideas are “afraid of change” and hostile towards a little “accountability.”

(No wonder they won’t wear the t-shirts we passed out at the conference.)

6. Both come with pretty high stakes based on questionable standards. Need I elaborate?

7. Both are most successful when least successful.

You can build bigger churches and sell more books, but you can’t upscale a faith based on intimate relationship with the Almighty. It is by its very nature personalized and individual.

You can mass produce books, and tests, and videos, and propaganda. You can mass distribute media materials and multiply social media mouthpieces. You can create the illusion you are improving public education through the sheer scale of standardizing and branding it all.

But you can’t mass produce teaching. You can’t scale up the essential relationships, perceptions, guesses and decisions that go into any successful classroom. You can’t make kids or their teachers standard-enough to generalize about them or how they should be interacting. It just doesn’t work.

You can maintain the facade, but the substance is lost. And what shall it profit a reformer to gain the whole edu-world…?

We are building a religion; we are building it bigger
We are building a religion – a limited edition
We are now accepting callers for these beautiful pendant key chains…

* “Comfort Eagle” from the album Comfort Eagle by Cake

Related Post: Condemnation Bias

Related Post: Hole in the Wall Education

Related Post: If I Were A Conspiracy Guy

Related Post: No Profit Left Behind (from Politico.com)

Tragedy of the Commons

November 26, 2014June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

The Tragedy of the Commons is a situation in which reasonable people, acting in their own best interest, use or otherwise exploit resources shared by the whole – leading to negative results for everyone, including themselves. The term was first coined in 1968 by ecologist Garrett Hardin, but the idea can be documented much earlier – all the way back to the Greeks, I’m told, if one looks hard enough.

The classic example involves overgrazing a plot of common land. Each individual benefits substantially and personally from adding cows or sheep or whatever, although in the long-term they suffer when the land is no longer useful due to overgrazing. The bad stuff is shared in common, however, while the benefits are individualized.

Also in play is the awareness that an individual who decides NOT to take advantage – who limits the number of animals they graze, in this case – will (a) not actually solve the problem, since others will still do it, and (b) will suffer as a result of their community-mindedness, since they’ll have fewer cows.

The motivation for NOT being part of the problem is, therefore, nada.

Libertarians cite this as a fundamental case for land ownership and private property protection – one of the few ideals laid out in both the Declaration of Independence AND the Constitution (which don’t generally agree about much else). If each villager owned a small plot of land, to continue this particular example, they’d take better care of it long-term – or so the theory goes.

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It is not far removed from the so-called ‘Unscrupulous Diner Dilemma’, in which a group of hungry cohorts agree ahead of time to split the cost of their collective meal. For each individual diner, the cost of ordering a more expensive meal and maybe an appetizer or two is thus greatly reduced. Although everyone will pay more as a result, the negative consequence of the choice is not proportional to the benefit.

The obvious solution is for everyone to pay for their own meal. Problem solved. Unless it’s not. Sometimes we want the benefits of collective resources.

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In both cases, something intended as a collective good has negative results based on people being people. No one involved has to be particularly evil – they simply behave as people do rather than as idealized versions of what we wish people would do. In both cases, the solution seems so simple – to each his own. Everyone gets their own plot; everyone buys their own dinner.

But that’s where the proverbial devil enters into the details.

Someone will fail to take care of their land. Or it will turn out to not be very good land, compared to the next field over. Or one landowner will sell his plot to another to pay off debts, or because they wish to move, etc. Or the river will flood on some people’s plots but not others. Or ninjas. Or this, or that, or something else.

Inequality creeps in.

Even if the imbalance begins with human failure, the consequences are handed down to the eldest sons (keep in mind we’re working with the cow grazing example here – the ‘eldest sons’ part may vary in specifics). One way or the other, it doesn’t take many generations before some people have more land than others, or better land than others, and we’re faced with a disparity completely untethered to the individual choices of the landowners in question.

In the more confined example of the Table for Twelve who’ve decided to each pay their own way, inevitably someone will lack sufficient cash to buy their entrée. They may have enough for an appetizer, but as they return to work slightly less-nourished than their peers, they will produce less – and the next visit to the restaurant may find them ordering a glass of water, no lemon, and swiping a few breadsticks from their cohorts.

Maybe some of the others will feel compelled to buy dinner for this poor chap! No one should starve when we have food – so they’ll share, or someone will step up and buy, no big deal. Or perhaps some of those contributing begin to resent the freeloader, or a sense of expectation gradually develops on the part of the recipient of these kindnesses until he no longer even realizes that he could ever be expected to pay his own way.

The point is that there are problems with communal ownership. There are pretty substantial problems with private ownership. The third option – government ownership – is rife with difficulty as well. Like all things smacking of socialism (which I use not as a loaded term but as an effort to approximate government-directed ‘sharing’), what works in theory and what people do in practice rarely cooperate.

If all men were angels…

If there’s no coordination from above, people don’t cooperate on a large scale – at least not in ways large enough to consistently impact the system. If there is coordination, that means rules, and laws – things that inevitably benefit some players more than others. Rules which are by their nature coercive, and often corrupt.

Add a more explicit financial element, and the impetus for avarice and corruption is almost irresistible. Laws can attempt to herd in certain behaviors, but can never eliminate them – and can certainly never do so equitably or effectively. Prohibition is only the most glaring example of men working the system for personal gain and the unintended consequences of government ‘help’. Think tax code, or health care, or military bases, or college scholarships.

Or think public education.

Like access to that theoretical bit of grazing land, education has become a basic human right. An enormous pool of resources is dedicated to the task, but despite its size, there are always more cows than grass. How do we distribute these quinzillions most effectively? Or should it be most fairly? Most efficiently?

Public School Cows will always need more – none have too much, and many have nowhere near enough. The field is also open to the Sheep of Charter Schools, the Taipar of Virtual, This Reform Bison, That Reform Gopher, the Reform-to-end-all-Reforms Zebra, and the Reform-to-end-all-Reforms New & Improved Zebra w/ Technicolor Stripes. The Textbook and Testing Goats eat way more than their share, as do various Grasshoppers trying to control everything from what kids eat for lunch to how much physical activity they get between classes.

Actually, maybe those should be Locusts.

There’s no motivation to take less, you see – the system is in fact weighted to encourage each and every player to get all they can as quickly as they can, or another player will. There’s no such thing as ‘results’ in the Tragedy of the Commons, but if there were, we’d find that what claims to be a measuring sticks turn out to be more like a lawn mower.

None of our solutions are appealing. People in large numbers simply don’t play nice with any consistency. Governments are horrible at husbandry. Private ownership is, in this case, loathsomely immoral. Normally this is where I’d unveil the solution – witty, a bit sardonic, but suddenly so very obvious. Normally, this is where we bring this baby home.

Moo.

Condemnation Bias

November 24, 2014June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

You may be familiar with the website “Spurious Correlations”:

You knew cheese was bad for you, but maybe not exactly why…

Bring on Toddlers & Tiaras – it could save lives.

Accio Spinning Blades!

It’s a humorous site which makes a serious and rather important point:

We all know this. Most of us can identify it academically, in abstract situations. In ‘real life’, however, it all too often combines with another fascinating bit of human fallibility: ‘confirmation bias’.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to screen out or forget facts or situations which don’t support our existing beliefs, while remembering with emphasis those which do. The thing where it seems to rain every time you wash your car (or do a ceremonial dance)? Celebrities dying in threes? The way people from certain racial groups or religious faiths seem to always X, Y, or Z? Yeah, that’s largely confirmation bias.

It’s normal. It’s human. But we could be a little more self-aware while doing it.

I had a principal several years back who simply could not get enough motivational folderol. The posters, the sayings, the guest speakers who turn a splattered canvas into a rainbow sunrise of starfish dream destiny – the building was inundated in hopeful banality.

Every year came the ‘ring assembly’. National company, glossy brochures, and a thousand students held captive to their insistence that EVERYONE regardless of background, want, or financial circumstances, could and should go deeply into debt for the unequalled splendor of class ringdom.

I’d assumed the school received some sort of kickback for the opportunity to apply this fiscal peer-pressure on powerless minors en masse, but I was mistaken. Why, then, did we devote half of a school day – an otherwise potentially instructional school day – to arm-twisting on behalf of some corporation?

This principal explained with energy and enthusiasm that students who purchased a class ring were 68% more likely to graduate. He believed in his spirited core that the connection to school and the commitment to the date engraved on the side were driving students to succeed – to stay in school, working towards graduation, bursting with personal and school pride.

And maybe there’s something to that element.

But far more glaring is the reality he missed – that students who can afford a very optional expense like a class ring are far more likely to graduate than students who can’t. There’s definite correlation, but not because one causes the other.

He wasn’t alone. This was the same year the district wanted to remove 2 of the 4 microwaves from the upstairs lounge in the name of ‘conservation’. There were 12 of us using those microwaves each day, apparently running up quite the utility bill. If we were to take turns with half the microwaves, well – the savings!

You see the problem. There may have been reduced total usage, but only because on any given day half of us wouldn’t have time to eat before our lunch period was over.

It wasn’t malicious, and it wasn’t particularly stupid – mostly. The powers-that-be went in with preset expectations and assumptions. The solution only made sense because they’d already decided on their preferred course of action.

Confirmation bias can be particularly ugly when a relationship has soured and emotions are high. Positives are viewed with skepticism or noticed not at all, while every slip, tone, or shortcoming “just goes to prove” some unpleasantry or another. Causes are not merely speculated upon – they are ASSIGNED to unfortunate correlations. For those on the periphery, the fallacies may be less emotionally loaded but are no less ubiquitous.

Spurious correlations and confirmation bias create quite the salmagundi of doom when it comes to education ‘reform’. Most of us enter those discussions already pretty sure where we’re going to end up. We may even sigh with resignation. Obviously we’re far more experienced and insightful than the other buffoons and schemers in the mix. And – whether we admit it to ourselves or not – most of us have several sacred presets hidden in the back of our motivation which we do NOT want threatened by trivialities like facts, reasoning, or experiences.

Once we despise a major player – Gates, Rhee, Duncan, etc. – no statement they utter or action they take can be anything less than nefarious. Wendy Kopp (TFA) could lead a team into a blazing inferno at the orphanage, perish saving youth from the flames, and the major blogs the next day would lead with skepticism regarding how many of them were going to become CAREER firefighters.

Mostly, though, we’re on the receiving end (of, er… spurious correlations and confirmation bias.) We expect it from students – they have their own reasons for seeing and hearing what they wish and discarding the rest. We get it from parents who need to maintain their own narratives regarding their flawless angel-babies. The local media choose their angles based on what’s currently trending, what makes the best story, or perhaps simply how charming the superintendent was last time they were interviewed. In each case, they utilize facts that fit their paradigm.

There’s no need to lie – there are enough versions of the truth to go around.

Administrators are under a variety of pressures over test scores, discipline, attendance, and a dozen other things – some semi-rational, many nowhere near. Given how little they can directly control, their cause-effect narratives can be… well, just about anything that gives them a button to push or a factor to influence.

As to the major “reformers” – in business, in politics, writing books, or leading charters – it’s true there are those willing to consciously fabricate or manipulate to promote their agendas. Some may even be very bad people.

But I think it’s worth considering that they, too, may have their own narratives into which all subsequent input adapts itself. We all know how easily people form “camps” – sometimes over race or religion, sometimes over oblong pigskins. Once formed, party association radically shapes, well… everything.

It’s a basic human tendency. There’s no fundamental shame. A certain amount of assuming and generalizing may even be efficient, or evolutionarily useful.

But we can fight it. We can try to be a LITTLE more aware of our own foibles, and assumptions.

The lack of such introspection is largely why I think so many educators feel rather hostile towards the presumptive “reform” movements in play. That’s why it’s sometimes difficult to “be reasonable,” or acknowledge when those seeking to make changes make a good point or two, or to keep our own emotions in check.

Because it doesn’t always seem like those driving the so-called “reforms” are actually TRYING to see the complex realities of the fields they seek to overhaul. They too often appear to have their minds made up before they even began looking at me, my kids, my job, or my world.

My kids. My job. My world. It’s hard not to take some things personally.

We must call out spurious causation and confirmation bias when we do catch a glimpse – in our opponents, our allies, or ourselves. In the meantime, perhaps a tiny bit of cautionary humility wouldn’t do our classrooms, our reform-based tweets, or our relationships much harm.

Roster Villification

November 19, 2014June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

Note: After losing most of this blog and website just before Halloween of this year, I’ve been rebuilding it from salvaged text cut’n’paste into long documents with some pretty strange formatting. Since I’m having to redo any posts I wish to retain anyway, most are getting fresh edits – or at least being shortened a bit. Many are simply not being reposted.
This was going to be one of those.
But this week two First Grade teachers in Tulsa, Oklahoma, took a principled stand against subjecting their students to any more abuse in the name of standardized testing. Their story and the letter they sent home to parents made waves, and they are likely to be fired for doing what’s best for their students.
I couldn’t help but remember a few months ago when I did the opposite, and caved in the face of almost no pressure. I’m reposting this as a confession in contrast to their courage and their conviction. My other rebuilt posts retain their original posting dates for logistical reasons; this one will not. It was originally posted April 16th, 2014.

Roster Vilification

Right now I hate my job.

I like my co-workers, my administrators – even the nice lady from the ESC who had to talk us through Roster Verification this morning. I may hate myself a little, now that I think of it.

I don’t even teach a tested subject this year. State law as it stands this week (it’s been rather flaky lately, so who knows what 30 days from now might bring?) says I can pretty much make up my own standards for VAM in my department, while my friends down in the Math & Science halls are tied to tests already taken and cut scores which are determined by random rolls of leftover D&D dice sometime in July.

What do I care, seriously? What difference does it make what bureaucracy I agree to, just to move things along? Why am I blogging this only so I don’t write my 2-week letter – THIS time of year of all times?

I just looked through a list of 168 students and confirmed with God as my witness that I am 100% responsible for everything they’ve ever done or will do, good or bad. Kids I haven’t seen in months. Kids who’ve been through weird circumstances, or who haven’t but have just shut down anyway. I’m also taken credit for kids I don’t think I’ve really taught much to – they’re just ‘those kids’ who show up and do most of what I ask.

They may have 102% in my class, but I don’t think they’re leaving with a love of learning so much as reinforced cynicism about just playing along with the system.

Which is what I just did.

This is wrong – this electronic tying of each teacher to each kid based solely on who’s on your grade book at a given point. It doesn’t matter that I have upper middle class white Methodists from two-parent families who only miss school for golf or family vacations to Europe, while the guy next to me has kids suspended so often he has more class admit forms than completed assignments.

There’s nothing in the measurement to indicate where a given kid might be mentally, or emotionally, or how often I’ve even had them physically in front of me. I don’t even recognize some of the names I just said were mine.

But I agreed to it all.

I agreed to it all because refusal doesn’t make things difficult for the State – it makes things difficult for my building principal, who I love and respect. It makes things particularly difficult for the nice lady from the ESC who started off so determined not to take my comments personally, but who hasn’t dealt with me often enough to know how unrealistic that was. (She actually did very well until my first effort to submit everything locked up the network – probably at the State’s end – and we had to reboot and start over.)

I agreed they’d been with me in such and such class all year, even though first semester was an entirely different course with a different name and number. I agreed although 140+ kids from various teachers including myself were pulled out of our sections in November and given to the new guy – but I couldn’t remember which ones and didn’t want to try to dig through old records to fix it. I agreed even though it was wrong – wrong mathematically, morally, pedagogically, and emotionally.

I agreed because refusing to cooperate wouldn’t change anything, and would be a huge pain in the ass for people who aren’t actually the ones causing the problem. I agreed because realistically this won’t even affect me that much – I teach Social Studies. No one cares what we do most of the time. We don’t get much support or respect compared to other cores, but we also don’t get called to the same meetings or face the same stress. I’m 47 and tenured, and could probably make the same money doing workshops and PD full time. I agreed because this isn’t really my problem.

Which is the opposite of what I teach my kids all year. It’s the antithesis of that stuff that helps maintain the thin illusion that anything we’re doing here matters, or has value, or could change anything. “Don’t rock the boat – it won’t help!” That should replace the other posters in my classroom for the last two weeks. Just sit in the back of the damn bus. Just finish the wire transfer from the hidden account. Just ignore the policies that maintain poverty for political gain, or segregation for social stability. Just walk past the problem.

You don’t even have to pull the trigger – just don’t step in front of the gun. You’re not that important – you can’t change something this big with some small, symbolic gesture that’s going to do nothing except make everyone around you have to work harder because you’re an ass. Pick your battles, dude – just click the ‘Submit’ button. This is Oklahoma – what are the chances that whatever policy is going to save us all this week will even be around in a year?

So I went along with it. I did what the instructions said, cynically, but in order to move along – much like my most successful students, now that I think about it. They do it because we tell them to, and that’s how you get an ‘A’. I fight it all year, wrestling for their academic souls, and just gave mine away for a bowl of convenience stew.

None of my kids will know, or care. My co-workers get it, but figure – correctly, no doubt – that I’m overreacting. My bosses might even agree, but can’t come out and say so.

But none of that really matters, because right now I hate my job. I hate my state. I hate the naiveté that’s kept me doing this for so long as I move past my otherwise employable years. I hate the other professions I turned down because I thought I was that f***ing important – a difference maker – a world shaker. I hate how when that little moment of decision came, I did the easy thing because I didn’t think the big thing was even a possibility. I just fed the machine, and it let me go back to class.

I have students coming in 15 minutes, and we should be discussing what we’ve read so far in The Grapes of Wrath. I’d meant to talk about “Joe Davis’s boy,” who drives the tractor that’s tearing up their land and down their homes, and I’ll ask them whether he’s part of the problem or not.

They’ll say he is, most of them. And they’re right.

We’ll talk about the ‘monster’ that’s bigger than the people who work for it and in it, and – being young – they’ll take a more defiant stance than the characters in the book are able to at this stage in the story. A better stand than I did today. Eventually, maybe, they’ll learn to just… go along. I can hardly steer them otherwise.

I hate myself today. And I’m sorry.

Chipotle Mexican Grill & Charter School

November 11, 2014June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

We still hear from time to time that public schools could learn a few things from successful private businesses. If so, why not Chipotle Mexican Grill?

Chipotle is a rather brilliant concept. The food is fairly high-quality, and I’ve been 27th in line and still eating within ten minutes. The menu is somewhat limited, but with five or six choices at each of the four steps shaping your dining experience, it at least feels like great variety is in play.

The staff undergoes substantial training before they’re allowed to actually make or serve food. The ingredients are organically grown and the meat naturally raised. (I’m not entirely sure what this means, but I believe it involves little chicken playgrounds and fun cow activities for the young.)

There are higher quality restaurants with greater variety, of course. Usually these are local treasures, often unique and almost never part of the major chains. There are cheaper and faster places to eat, also – but they’re not usually as good.

But what Steve Ells did is pretty amazing. He started small, tried different formats, swapped out a few ingredients, then reproduced the most successful combination on a large scale. All the benefits of sit-down dining and the economies of scale normally found in eating establishments represented by cartoon characters or creepy plastic-headed men. It’s a charter school movement dream come true!

For the analogy to work, of course, we’d need to make a few minor adjustments. First and foremost, diners heretofore will be required to eat at Chipotle almost exclusively. A special few may be allowed to go to Abuelo’s or Chuy’s, but there aren’t enough of those to go around – so maybe some sort of lottery would have to be involved.

Everyone else MUST eat there, and every day – whether they want to or not. The staff will have to deal with these unwilling customers and be fully accountable for their dining happiness and success. There are vegetables in those pans for a reason, young lady!

Also, Chipotle will need to make some modifications for customers who may need gluten-free choices, or who can’t carry their own trays, or who eat more at breakfast than lunch, or who don’t like Mexican food. Some will want extra chips or different beans, some all rice all the time. Several need their food pre-chewed – all without changing the price, speed, or quality of service. You can’t reasonably expect everyone to eat the same way, can you? You can only expect them to all eat at the same place under the same format served by the same staff with the same resources.

Duh.

Employees at Chipotle will be held to higher standards than currently the norm. Customers will undergo regular physicals, including checks of their weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, stamina, heart-rate, and anything else we can think of – including whatever might be trending that year. Locations unable to demonstrate consistent weight-loss and fitness-gain will face staff reductions and reduced ingredients until they improve.

Individual workers whose customers fail to grow taller, stronger, and healthier (whether eating during their shifts or not) will be publicly exposed and placed on plans of improvement. All servers are expected to bus tables, sweep floors, study cookbooks, and otherwise contribute during their off hours. They’ll be paid slightly below minimum wage and regularly berated by Gordon Ramsay look-alikes, most of whom have been speaking at restaurant conferences and writing cookbooks far longer than they spent asking whether customers preferred black beans or guacamole.

A percentage of resources currently poured into running the various Chipotle Mexican Grills around the country will be redirected to a bureaucracy responsible for overseeing these things. These sundry minions’ expertise will be based largely on them having eaten at a Chipotle at some point, or if not, having eaten somewhere else at some point in their lives.

Other than those minor tweaks, I see absolutely no reason the model can’t be replicated and mandated in every neighborhood of every state across this grand land, regardless of the wants, needs, or dietary requirements of this or that little region. All people, regardless of background, need picante. Period.

I’ve run this by a few people, and they refuse to share my dream. They argue I’ll ruin the restaurant altogether, or that my suggestions are completely unrealistic and can’t possibly be serious. To be honest, I’m shocked at the reaction. The manager at my local Chipotle heard only a fraction of it before laughing and walking off.

Clearly he’s terrified of a little accountability. Typical.