Thomas Swaroop, Child Advocacy Director for South Asia, shares about the inspiration he received from a young girl who has an opportunity to shine for Jesus.
My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates
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Last Friday, ONE members from the Twin Cities gathered at the University of Minnesota for a special conference on Literacy and Education in a 21st century Africa.
The event was hosted by a local organization called Books for Africa, the world’s largest shipper of donated books to the African continent. In the past 11 years they [...]
Last week I spoke to 4-year-old Ercilia in the village of Muzingane Bairro 3. As she played with her friend Carlos on the swings at their preschool, Ercilia told me how much she loves her new playground. She smiled and laughed as Carlos pushed her high up into the air on the swing.
Nothing [...]
Tonight PBS’s “Wide Angle” series will begin airing part 3 of the program Time for School. A 12-year documentary project on global education, Time for School has been following a group of students in Afghanistan, Benin, Brazil, India, Japan, Kenya and Romania since they first entered in 2002.
According to PBS,
These children’s stories put a [...]
EdSec Arne Duncan this week came out fighting for mayoral control of large urban school districts, and against local school boards. I’m interested to hear your views on this, pro and con. Me? I see it as opening the door to more school closures without input from – and often against the will of – local school communities; more charters; more non-unionized teachers; and less democratic input into urban education. Maybe some of you can enlighten me about the advantages of mayoral control.
The AP article cited above sketches out opposing viewpoints like so:
Against mayoral control:
National School Boards Association official Michael Resnick said local school boards are the backbone of community representation in schools.
”Education is too important to fall onto the already lengthy list of functions that mayors are managing,” Resnick said.
(And this NYC Public School Parents blog post suggests mayoral control in NYC is far from popular.)
For it:
Mayoral control is worth considering in about 400 of the biggest school districts, said Kenneth Wong, a Brown University professor who studies the issue. Those districts enroll about a third of the nation’s 50 million school children.
”I think the time has come; there has been enough research suggesting it is a promising strategy,” Wong said.
”The way I look at it is, we are talking about real accountability,” Wong said. ”A lot of urban school systems are playing this game of blaming one another — the superintendent blames the school board; the school board blames the union.
”With the mayor in charge, there ultimately is one single official held accountable every four years, whether they’re doing a good job or not,” Wong said.
Your take?
I love hearing what great adults say was the formative literature of their youth. Nobel Prize-winning economist and NYTimes columnist Paul Krugman tells his story in a great profile article on Newsweek:
Born of poor Russian-immigrant stock, raised in a small suburban house on middle-class Long Island, Krugman, 56, has never pretended to be in the cool crowd. Taunted in school as a nerd, he came home one day with a bloody nose—but told his parents to stay out of it, he would take care of himself. “He was so shy as a child that I’m shocked at the way he turned out,” says his mother, Anita. Krugman says he found himself in the science fiction of Isaac Asimov, especially the “Foundation” series—”It was nerds saving civilization, quants who had a theory of society, people writing equations on a blackboard, saying, ‘See, unless you follow this formula, the empire will fail and be followed by a thousand years of barbarism’.”
His Yale was “not George Bush’s Yale,” he says—no boola-boola, no frats or secret societies, rather “drinking coffee in the Economics Department lounge.” Social science, he says, offered the promise of what he dreamed of in science fiction—”the beauty of pushing a button to solve problems. Sometimes there really are simple solutions: you really can have a grand idea.”
I admire Krugman’s style on the bobblehead Sunday morning talk shows, the way he pwns sniffly George Will’s whacked analyses so effortlessly, and holds Obama’s and Geithner’s feet to the fire as well. I admire him more now, knowing that he was nerdy, shy, and bullied as a kid.
And what does this say about our insistence on teaching the canonized classics in our English classes? Did they work for you? What did you read voluntarily as a teen? Reading Krugman’s account made me remember my strange love affair with a weird fantasy series called The Chronicles of Gor. They weren’t classics, but they kept me reading for 27 volumes. That’s a hell of a booster for any kid’s vocabulary, I have no doubt.
Call me crazy, but at 16, love him though I do now, I just wasn’t into Billy Shakespeare.
Praise the Lord and pass the aspirin: the Texas creationism wars are over.
I’m as weary as the next person of the Creationists on the Texas State Board of Education trying to elevate pseudo-science in textbooks across America. So I’m glad to report that the standards battle is over – at least until the textbook adoption process begins in 2011. Steven Schafersman, president of Texas Citizens for Science, live-blogged the three-days public hearings and final vote on the standards (Day One here, Day Two here, Day Three here), and gave this summary when it ended:
What is the bottom line? Did we win or lose? Neither. We got rid of the worst language, but a great deal of qualifying language remains. I am not going to claim either victory or defeat. I realize that Casey Luskin of Discovery Institute will declare complete, unqualified victory, but it is not that for them. Neither is it for us. The standards adopted were generally good, but there are several that are flawed, fortunately most in minor ways that textbook authors and publishers can deal with. I think we can work around the few flawed standards. But the point is that there shouldn’t be ANY flawed standards. The science standards as submitted by the science writing teams were excellent and flaw-free. All the flaws were added by politically unscrupulous SBOE members with an extreme right-wing religious agenda to support Creationism.
This will become apparent in 2011 when the Biology textbooks come up for adoption. Rule 3A and several other poor amendments in Biology–all the contribution of SBOE members who know nothing about science but a lot about pseudoscience–will be used to attack Biology textbooks. Cynthia Dunbar said so: “All we need is Rule 3A as now written and we have everything we want” (I am paraphrasing, but she said this in so many words). Gentle Readers, this is not the way to develop educational policy in one of the most wealthy and powerful state in the most wealthy and powerful country in the world in the 21st century. The process you just experienced, by reading my live blog columns, was deplorable and should be deeply embarrassing to every Texas citizen.
The policy (science standards) that resulted are not the best they could be. They are acceptable but could have been pseudoscience- and Creationism influence-free. However, I can also say the standards could be much worse. The votes were so close, and several members switched their votes back and forth several times, sometimes voting with the antiscience radical right wing members and sometimes with the pro-science members, that anything could have happened. I suppose I should be grateful the results are not worse. (full post)
(Salon.com is more dour here.)
I listened to the live-stream audio of the hearings for a good few hours myself, and agree that they were an embarrassment. Beyond the evolution-creationism debates, there were equally eye-popping ed-board jeremiads against teachers for using the word – *gasp* – capitalism in the social studies standards, instead of the right-wing politically correct free enterprise, as if “capitalism” is a dirty word in their book. (These folks probably banned “French fries” in favor of “freedom fries” in their health and nutrition standards after Bush invaded Iraq in ‘03.)
Bad curriculum and teacher-bashing redux:
And it all comes back to the point made repeatedly over the last weeks and months on this space: the open season on teachers and their unions as the Big Problem in education leaves so many bigger and more destructive prey out of the ed-scapegoat-hunters’ sights. Our boards of education don’t deserve the sheltered immunity they enjoy. The good Texans’ creationism and “free enterprise” agendas are the proof in the pudding.
I’m a sucker for a good analogy, and teacher Mark Ahlness finds a gem at the end of this well-argued post:
This incredible article in Education Week reports on a study – and leads with this – that teachers are the reason new technologies are not being used in our schools:
Teachers, for the most part, are not taking advantage of the tools that middle and high school students have widely adopted for home and school purposes,….
Wrong. We teachers are, by and large, not allowed to use new technologies in our classrooms. Good grief, people, look at school district policies. They are set by administrators and school board members, not by teachers.
Guess what, they’re not set by teacher unions, either.
So I say back off, and get to work fixing what’s wrong. Do not start by trying to fire teachers. We are not the problem. That’s like trying to pin the world financial crisis on bank tellers.
Image by Cayusa
We’ve spent a good deal of time on this space debating whether teacher unions create problems by “protecting bad teachers” from dismissal (see “Do Teacher Unions Deserve the Bashing?“). That discussion was often more full of opinions that data justifying them. This post may remedy that, if the data below the videos is accurate.
On his HBO talk show “Real Time,” Bill Maher asserts in no uncertain terms that this teacher unions do deserve bashing in the following two clips from his HBO talk show “Real Time.” He calls the unions “corrupt,” attacks the tenure system, and accuses unions of shuffling “bad teachers” from school to school like the Catholic Church’s shuffles child molesting priests from parish to parish. Pretty hard-hitting stuff – and the audience heartily applauds each attack. Even UPenn professor Michael Eric Dyson, after arguing that Obama and ed reformers should acknowledge socio-economic factors in their plans, says he’s “with” Maher on the “corrupt” teacher unions. (The other guest, by the way, is NYPost conservative columnist Andrew Breitbart.)
Watch it below, then see excerpts from David Macaray’s response on Counterpunch. The stats Macaray marshals in defense of unions are compelling, on the surface. Anybody want to take them on? (Start at 9 minutes on Clip One, then see the rest of the discussion in the first three minutes on Clip 2):
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David Macaray offers a statistics-filled response to Maher in “The Myth of the ‘Powerful Teachers’ Union’” on Counterpunch (h/t to Norm Coleman):
On Friday, March 13, comedian and uber-liberal Bill Maher joined the attack on his HBO show. In one of his signature tirades, Maher, a California resident, railed against the “powerful” California teachers’ union, accusing it of contributing to the crisis in public education by not allowing the school district to remove incompetent teachers.
Maher came armed with statistics.
{snip}
Maher made a huge deal of the fact that, because of the union’s protective shield, less than 1% of California’s tenured/post-probationary teachers get fired. Although this ratio clearly outraged him (he appeared visibly upset by it), had he taken five minutes to research the subject, he’d have realized that this figure represents the national average—with or without unions.
In Georgia, where 92.5% of the teachers are non-union, only 0.5% of tenured/post-probationary teachers get fired. In South Carolina, where 100% of the teachers are non-union, it’s 0.32%. And in North Carolina, where 97.7% are non-union, a miniscule .03% of tenured/post-probationary teachers get fired—the exact same percentage as California.
An even more startling comparison: In California, with its “powerful” teachers’ union, school administrators fire, on average, 6.91% of its probationary teachers. In non-union North Carolina, that figure is only 1.38%. California is actually tougher on prospective candidates.
So, despite Maher’s display of civic pride and self-righteous indignation (“We need to bust this union,” he declared), he was utterly mistaken. The statistics not only don’t support his argument, they contradict it. (much fuller article here)
Any changed minds out there?
Below are Obama’s remarks on charter schools during his Online Town Hall last week. I’m in a rush, but have added some of my own reactions to his comments. Consider them conversation-starters. How do you read the tea-leaves in his statement? Obama:
The definition of charter schools is pretty straightforward. And that is that in most states you now have a mechanism where you set up a public school — so this is not private schools, these are public schools receiving public dollars — but they have a charter that allows them to experiment and try new things. And typically, they’re partnering up with some sort of non-for-profit institution.
So, in Chicago, you’ve got charter schools that are affiliated with a museum, or they’re affiliated with an arts program, and they may have a particular focus. It may be a science charter school, or it may be a language academy. They are still going to have to meet all the various requirements of a state-mandated curriculum; they’re still subject to the same rules and regulations and accountability. But they’ve got some flexibility in terms of how they design it. Oftentimes they are getting parents to participate in new ways in the school. So they become laboratories of new and creative learning.
Now, there are some charter schools that are doing a great job, and you are seeing huge increases in student performance. And by the way — one last point I want to make about these charters — they’re non-selective, so it’s not a situation where they’re just cherry-picking the kids who are already getting the highest grades; they’ve got to admit anybody. And typically there are long waiting lines, so they use some sort of lottery to admit them.
Me: But they don’t have to keep anybody. They can expel students who don’t excel or cause problems. And they can also say “no” when their enrollment caps are met. Public schools can’t. Traditional public schools also have far more special needs and non-native English language learners than charters. And public schools also can’t set parental involvement conditions. And public schools don’t get the supplemental funds from the billionaires, so they spend less per student than charters.
Given all of that, still, if we’re going to say charters should still be supported in order to serve as those “laboratories,” the missing link in all of this talk centers on this question: “What’s the mechanism that will allow for that ‘duplication of success’ in traditional public schools?” And how will traditional public schools ever have the opportunity to duplicate charter successes when traditional public schools, as Obama acknowledges, are given neither the “flexibility” nor the extra funding enjoyed by charter schools? One dangerous answer to this is: Traditional public schools will have that “flexibility” when they are able to break union-negotiated teacher protections – to be union-free – and when they submit to the meddling of Gates, Broad, and the other billionaires at the Business Roundtable when they dangle their strings-attached money. What percentage could be shaved from, say, the military budget, to provide the funding from tax revenues equal to that of the edupreneurs?
Some of them are doing great work, huge progress and great innovation; and there’s some charters that haven’t worked out so well. And just like bad — or regular schools, they need to be shut down if they’re not doing a good job. But what charters do is they give an opportunity for experimentation and then duplication of success. And we want to encourage that. So that’s the definition of charters.
Me: As for that, I’ll quote member/guest-blogger Jennifer Parker’s comment on an earlier post:
Chartered schools were conceived for flexibity and innovation, but there is no one charter law written for this reason. Charter school law consists of a body of individual state laws, with much variance.
I’ll speak for myself when I say that every school needs to be flexible and innovative. It’s damaging to create two systems: the chartered schools that can be “innovative” and the others that are restricted by bureaucratice constraints. I mean, if the charter concept is so great, why don’t we just get rid of the restrictions for all public schools?
And either way, right now, both are judged on standardized test scores, so how innovative can we really get?
Your take?
[Note: The blog ate my homework. An hour's work this morning, up in digital smoke. Enjoy the cross-post from April 2008. It actually expands on the "Good Teaching with Bad Curriculum? Part 2 post from earlier this week. - Clay]
I went into a restaurant downtown – you couldn’t do that back then, because things weren’t integrated yet – and I sat down with my [Olympic] gold medal around my neck, and the waitress came up, and I said, ‘Yes, I’d like, uh, a cup of coffee, and a hot dog.’ And she said, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t serve negroes here.’ And I got so angry, I said, ‘And I don’t eat them, either. Now bring me a hot dog!’ — Muhammad Ali, 1971 TV interview (YouTube embedded below)
You never could have made me believe years ago, when I got out of high school with a D- average – and they gave me the minus because I won the Olympics, 1960, I graduated in 1960 and I won the Olympics in 1960 – . . . . and if you would have told me that I would be offered a professorship to teach philosophy and poetry at Oxford, and speak at Harvard, I never would have believed it. — Muhammad Ali, Harvard graduation speech 1975 (YouTube here)
In 1964, [Muhammad] Ali failed the U.S. Armed Forces qualifying test because his writing and spelling skills were sub par. — Wikipedia
It’s been a sleep-in Saturday after a long week. I woke up and took a rare cruise through YouTube. It started with laughs with Ali G, and ended with inspiration from Muhammad Ali.
This post is for any student who, like Ali in the epigraph above, has a low GPA (and thus a low self-image), but a brilliant mind. It’s also for teachers of those students who wish they could do their part to make that GPA more accurately reflect that student’s abilities.
Listen, in this YouTube interview from 1971, to this “sub-par” English student’s brilliance with language*, and laugh at the limitations of assessing writing and spelling to measure verbal intelligence:
And teachers – English teachers, especially, but any teacher using writing to assess understanding and merit in your classrooms – ask yourself, in this age of user-created video and audio, if it makes any sense to keep giving the Muhammed Ali’s of our classrooms a D- because they can’t write well, when they can speak well enough to be honored, like Ali was, at Harvard and Oxford. The English teacher in me is uncomfortable with this question, but the history teacher in me thinks it’s justified: Writing is no longer supreme since the Digital Revolution. It’s now on equal footing with Speaking and Graphic Communication. Isn’t it?
If yes, then why, in most classrooms I’ve seen (and taught), is writing still weighted as around 75% of the final grade in the Language Arts classroom? And how can so many teachers who themselves are capable thinkers and creators, but horrible writers, justify this sort of assessment policy in their own practice?
Ali’s language could “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” and with it this man “shook the world” – but neither his high school nor the Army could reflect this in their assessments. Instead, they labeled him “below average” and “sub par.” He didn’t do standardized tests well.
It’s been more than 50 years since Ali left high school. Can we leave that assessment philosophy now? (I hear the answers already: “Not until the SAT allows oral instead of written essays.” Just kill me.)
I met Ali in 1982 or so in a West Hollywood restaurant on Sunset Boulevard*, serving him as his white-boy waiter. I was about 20. I told him my name was Clay, and that when I was in first grade in the ’60s and he was still known as Cassius Clay, people called me “Cassius.”
When he heard that, this gentle giant smiled, put up his lethal dukes, dodged and weaved for a split second while he said,
“Oh. So you a fighter.”
Then he offered a handshake that swallowed my hand whole.
I was an English major in college then, but I didn’t take mental marks off of Ali’s performance for omitting the “are,” didn’t say, “You mean, ‘You are a fighter.’” And this wasn’t just because he could have lifted me over his head and snapped me in two. It was because his language, bad grammar and all, was far more electrifying than many a grammatically perfect professor I had at the time.
I was unschooled in Ali’s history at that time. All I knew was that he was a heavyweight world champion of my childhood, and now had some sort of neural disorder (he often fell asleep at his table, and his wife would wake him up). I wish I’d known then what I know now – that he was one of the great men of the 20th century – so that I could have told him that. Instead, I just laughed with the stupid giddiness people often have in the face of celebrities, and served him his pasta.
Only years later, after watching Leon Gast’s riveting documentary, When We were Kings, did I realize just how great Ali was – not only as a boxer, but also as a citizen and man of conscience for a nation adrift. Punished with the loss of his boxing license at the prime of his career for his political dissent and his refusal to fight in Vietnam, he became an American pariah.
Fifteen years after meeting him, I had another Ali moment. Having lost all desire to become an academic, but not having lost the lifetime of college debt I’d accumulated in that (for me) fool’s quest, I was in a personnel processing center at Fort Leonard Wood, Arkansas, with a freshly shaved head and a duffel bag, ready to start Basic Training. There was a wall-mounted TV in the corner of the room, with live coverage of some important-looking outdoor ceremony. I was out of all media loops that summer, and didn’t even know the Olympics were going on. It was the Torch-lighting ceremony on that TV that I was watching – and it was history. Ali lit that torch in his final, moral comeback. The audience and media adulation was for once justified. It brought tears to my eyes and gave me faith in America.
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*The critical thinking about race in religion and in US history are not too shabby either. And yes, while Ali shows a lack of critical thinking in his wholesale swallowing of everything Elijah Muhammad preached to him, we shouldn’t be too hard on him. That’s pretty common when people discuss their own religion.
The War on Greed, starring Larry the Loophole
If you’re a fossil roughly my age, you should remember the classic Schoolhouse Rock cartoons (fill in the blank: “Conjunction junction, what’s _______ __________?”). Those songs taught me grammar on Saturday morning in front of TV far more effectively than anything in school.
From Crooks and Liars, some share-worthy links of Schoolhouse Rock video cartoons to teach finance-related things:
In the ’90s, the Schoolhouse Rock makers realized they had neglected an important part of American life and made videos covering borrowing money, budgeting, paying taxes, the stock market and even the national debt. Personally, I think they need to update it again and cover the loophole that allows corporate execs to pocket seven figure bonuses while bilking the average Joe out of what little life savings he is able to put away. Luckily, Brave New Films thought so too, and created “Larry the Loophole”. Doesn’t have the musical hooks of Schoolhouse Rock, but what it lacks in snappy music, it gains in honesty.
A new and troubling development in the science wars
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the National Science Teachers Association in New Orleans last week that President Obama “will not allow scientific research to be held hostage to a political agenda…. Whether it’s global warming, evolution or stem cell research, science will be honored. It will be respected and supported by this administration.” Their commitment to science education may soon face a serious test, with serious consequences for secondary schools across America. If they fail that test, it will be a victory for the scientific worldview of Sarah Palin – and a victory that controls science education for the next ten years.
I’ve written about this repeatedly, but there’s a new and very troubling development afoot. In a stunningly anti-democratic back-door move, Texas State Rep. Wayne Christian has introduced a bill that would impose creationism-friendly, anti-scientific language in the state’s science standards, no matter what standards the State Board of Education (SBOE) votes on this week. Christian’s House Bill 4224 would re-instate the “strengths and weaknesses” clause that the SBOE voted to eliminate last month. Worse still, it ups the ante by inserting provisions that in essence give students the right not only to their own opinion about science, but also to their own “scientific” facts:
(c) Students may be evaluated based upon their understanding of course materials, but no student in any public school or institution shall be penalized in any way because he or she subscribes to a particular position on scientific theories or hypotheses;
This sounds innocent enough, on the face of it – until you read the next section, which protects teachers who teach creationism (and following Steven Novella, I “use the term ‘creationist’ to refer to anyone denying evolution to a significant degree, from young-earth creationists to intelligent design proponents who accept common descent”):
(d) No governmental entity shall prohibit any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students to understand, analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information.
Protected by this clause, a creationist could simply label creationism a “hypothesis” or “explanation,” and trot out arguments for its “strengths” long since refuted or rejected by the international scientific community.
On Novella’s post, Steven Schafersman, president of Texas Citizens for Science, explains the consequences of these two clauses, taken together, for the classroom:
Students could claim they believe anything they wanted in anything in science and if that’s what they say, the teacher would be forced to give that student an A. That’s how bad[ly] this bill is written.
Why this matters nationwide
The Texas textbook market, along with California, is the biggest in the nation. All major textbook publishers will tailor their science textbooks to please Texas, and all other states will have to choose from those textbooks. Worse still, the new Texas standards being voted on this week – and overturned by Christian’s bill, if it passes – will stay in effect for the next decade. That means all schools nationwide will have inferior science textbooks beyond Obama’s second term, if he has one.
The Texas SBOE vote this week will be close. Even if the scientific community prevails in that vote, it could be defeated by Christian’s bill. And if that happens, we can only hope Pres. Obama and Duncan find a way to save evolution from being “held hostage to a political agenda.”
Otherwise, educationally, we may as have Sarah Palin in the White House after all.
A question: What’s the best action to initiate to oppose this?
[Update: The above-mentioned Steven Schafersman, president of Texas Citizens for Science, is live-blogging the SBOE sessions at the Houston Chronicle (h/t to Paul and PZ):
I will be live blogging the Texas State Board of Education meeting of 2009 March 25-27 in this column. This includes the hearing devoted to public testimony beginning at 12:00 noon on Wednesday, March 25. I will stay through the final vote on Friday, March 27.
You can listen to a live audio-stream of the SBOE public testimony too. I’m listening right now, and it’s fascinating. A woman is protesting some history/social studies standards revisions for basically not being right-wing enough. Good luck to any national standards hopefuls out there….
Image by Colin Purrington
Last week I posted a list of read-worthy blogs on tech-focused 21st century learning blogs. I left out Bill Farren’s Education for Well-Being, which goes beyond technology to larger issues of education for sustainable living, well-being, and much, much more, and for which I duly kick myself for not including in the original post. Bill’s one of the most original and important voices out there, in my book. I hope you’ll check him out.
I thought I’d follow up with a list of blogs more focused on policy and current education news that I subscribe to in my RSS reader. Add your suggestions in comments.
Policy and Current Education Events:
Bridging Differences: Hands down, my favorite daily read: “Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch have found themselves at odds on policy over the years, but they share a passion for improving schools. Bridging Differences will offer their insights on what matters most in education.”
Dana Goldstein at The American Prospect’s TAPPED blog (her personal blog here).
New York blogs: the first-rate Gotham Schools, Edwize, NYC Educator, and NYC Public School Parents.
Voices of Resistance to the Billionaires’ Club and NCLB Testocrats: Susan O’Hanion (email subscription only), Gerald Bracey on Huffington Post, Education Policy Blog, Jim Horn’s Schools Matter, and the fun satire of Billionaires for Education Reform.
Education Week, including all of its topical blogs: Politics K-12, Teacher Beat, NCLB Act II, Curriculum Matters, On Special Education, and more.
Chicago blogs: Michael Klonsky’s Small Talk, Fred Klonsky’s Blog (a recent quotable from Fred, on Arlen Specter’s re-election hopes: “He’s so done you don’t need a fork.”), Catalyst-Chicago (a great resource for the scoop, not the hype, on Arne Duncan’s performance as “CEO” of Chicago Public Schools) Alexander Russo’s This Week in Education (recent Russo quotable, on questions for grammatically-challenged Arne Duncan: “Is there anything that we can do to incent you to tell us who your Deputy Secretary is going to be?”) – and I really enjoy Russo’s teacher guest-blogger John Thompson’s regular posts.
California blogs: The Perimeter Primate (Sharon Higgins is a regular guest-blogger here, and her in-depth coverage of the charter take-over of Oakland Public Schools is citizen journalism at its best), Caroline Grannan’s SF Education Examiner articles (ditto Caroline for SF, who also guest-blogs here).
ASCD Smart Brief: a good daily round-up of news, often with free access to for-pay content on Education Week.
Mainstream Media: NPR’s Education feed, the Washington Post’s education articles (also see WaPo education writer Jay Matthews’ Class Struggles blog, in which readers get to push back on his pro-KIPP charter reporting), the New York Times’ education articles.
Wonk-world: Richard Kahlenberg at The Century Foundation, Eduwonk.
Google Blogsearch RSS Feeds: Linda Darling-Hammond, Arne Duncan.
New to RSS feed-readers? A quick tutorial to set you up with your own customized newspaper:
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Image by Kyle Wegner
Parents for Public Schools works to bring parents into an advocacy position concerning their children’s education. Nationwide research such as the Henderson/Mapp report supports what we have known for many years: that children and schools improve when parents are more involved at all levels. Parents for Public Schools has launched a statewide program in Mississippi called Schoolhouse to Statehouse. We are building a powerful parent organization that engages participants and partners with other local, regional, and statewide organizations around systemic educational issues that impact student performance. Several parent coordinators work around the state, often with very vulnerable Mississippi families and schools. Local, grassroots advocacy is done by PPS, and statewide Legislative advocacy is done by The Parents Campaign.
One of our coordinators, Victoria Peters, tells her story here. This is not a story about teachers who don’t want to teach kids. My experience with teachers is that the great majority of them enter teaching precisely because they do want to teach kids, each and every one. But her story illustrates the need to train parents to have a voice in their children’s education. Many parents have never had anyone explain how schools work and what their rights are in their children’s schools.
There are many other “Victorias” out there, and we hope that our work lifts them up, allows them find their voice, and helps to provide better educational opportunities for their children and for all children.
Here’s what Victoria has to say:
When my son was in first or second grade we were experiencing long hours of homework and review. My husband and I thought that he had a learning disability because he didn’t seem to be getting it all. He had great reading and comprehension skills for his grade level, but we couldn’t figure out what was going on. So, we kept trying to fix it by working with him each night. The last thing that I wanted to do was to accuse the teacher of anything.
I worked in a neighboring school district; I had witnessed so many parents who would literally curse out the teachers, yell at them, etc. Usually, they never considered that the problem could have been their child. Having this experience, I never really considered that it was a teacher issue.
Finally, I contacted the teacher, and she said that my son was very quiet, and recommended that he be tested for a learning disability. I told her very calmly that I knew that he didn’t have a learning disability. To prove it, we had him tested. He did not have a learning disability. The meeting did not yield the kind of results that truly addressed our situation. This particular evening, my husband and I sat our son down to ask again…what is the problem? He then told us that he didn’t want to ask questions because white people were smarter than black people. We asked him where he got that. He said from the other children in his class. We coached him to understand that being smart had nothing to do with the color of his skin.
Then, I scheduled a second meeting. This time the teacher’s response was that she just couldn’t teach black kids. I was shocked because I couldn’t believe what she had just said. I left the meeting and went directly to the principal. I can remember that the principal truly listened. I do not remember what was communicated to the teacher by the principal. The principal knew where I worked at the time, and apologized to me that this was not a reflection of the district.
I felt very powerless as a parent at that time. I didn’t know what my rights were. Here are some questions I struggled with:
- Should I contact the NAACP? I didn’t know what to do, but something more needed to be done.
- There would be more African-American students who would come through this lady’s class. Would they be discriminated against because of the color of their skin? I didn’t know my rights. I didn’t know other parents who may have experienced this same thing.
As a result of feeling powerless, we eventually took our son out of the public schools, and we home-schooled him for two years. Eventually, we put him back in to try it again.Today, I know more than I ever have as it relates to public education. Now, I know that I am an owner in public schools. Through Parents for Public Schools, I have developed leadership skills and knowledge of how public schools work; how to partner with my local school district and effectively be engaged to impact student achievement and improve public education. For every parent who feels powerless, my mission is to give you the tools and resources to effectively partner with your school district. Don’t quit. You have a voice; your voice can be facilitated in a way that improves your school district and all the students who attend.
In my last post, “Good Teaching with Bad Curriculum?,” I promised to share “a powerful example of a teacher who used a combination of grade-resistance, project-based learning, and digital communication to give his students an experience they wouldn’t forget.” Short and sweet, it’s this:
An AP Literature teacher in Pomona, California, was teaching The Great Gatsby to his seniors. Many of you might be familiar with the result of that unit from the widespread media coverage it got, but just in case: The teacher found a “relevance hook” for this classic meditation on economic class in America by having his students first write personal reflections about how the current economic meltdown is affecting their families and their futures. When he read those reflections, he invited his students to make a short film on the same subject. He got it into the hands of the Obama administration, and it led to Obama directly addressing the students in a speech, and later visiting the school during his trip to L.A. last week.
For me, the teaching behind the film is as interesting as the film. But here’s the film, first:
The benefits of anonymity in classroom writing
What intrigued me about this is something not mentioned in the film – I had to learn this part by watching the two video downloads from media coverage on Crooks and Liars – and it’s this: the initial student writings that made the teacher find his teachable moment, and decide there was a film project in their stories, were anonymous.
So what? So this: That anonymity is one “unschooly” element, I suspect, that worked the magic allowing these students to really write. Why “unschooly”? (Click “Read more” below for the rest…)
Because, unless I’m missing something, that writing assignment was not for a grade. (How can you enter grades in a gradebook on anonymous papers?) How does writing change for a student when it’s not for a grade? For one thing, it removes the pressures to take the safe path of writing what you think teacher wants to read, and instead opens the door to honesty. It also might shut the door to the soul-numbingly mechanical “five-paragraph essay,” and invite the organic approach to writing followed by most of us in the real world. Above all, “no grade” distances the assignment from school itself, and instead signals, “We’re being real here.”
If you buy this, then you buy into the paradox that schools, by tying writing to grades, encourage bad writing. That’s a timely idea for this age of measuring everything by grades. (And the reality of grading does not preclude the occasional anonymous, or ungraded, piece.)
The real world as audience, YouTube as medium
I shared in my bullying memoir something I have in common with these students: The collapse of the real estate market during the Carter administration took its toll on my family – my father sold real estate – and that took its toll on my studies. What the Pomona teacher had that was unavailable to my high school teachers in the ’70s was, obviously, the ability to create films easily, and publish them to a real-world audience on YouTube (the edtech world calls it “digital storytelling,” and Wes Fryer and David Jakes are good edubloggers to look into if you want to learn more).
This is old news to the 21st century education/”learning 2.0″ crowd, but bears pointing out here: the web revolutionizes the concepts of “language arts” and “audience” for schoolwork. Before Web 2.0, the communicative medium for student work was primarily the printed word, and the audience was primarily one person: the teacher. (Okay, there was the literary journal or the hallway bulletin board display for the radicals on the cutting edge.) In less than five short years, Web 2.0 has exploded that reality – even in mainstream journalism, as is obvious with a quick glance at all the multimedia on the online versions of the NYTimes or Washington Post. Suddenly film, photography, spoken word podcast interviews, and slideshows are viable alternatives to text, and arguably more compelling to audiences than text-only modes. Ask yourself if a transcript of the film above would have received as much attention, or had a similar impact. Next, ask yourself if the students would have been as engaged in their work if they thought the film was, old-school-wise, for the audience of one – the teacher – instead of the presidential candidates.
Next, consider the implications of the new modes on student achievement – as measured by grades. I presume the film was used for a grade, and if that’s the case, then it gave students in this “language arts” class who may have been middling-to-bad writers, but capable speakers, the opportunity to excel.
Rescuing curriculum from irrelevance
Finally, there’s the question of curriculum. One of my best years teaching history was one of the worst years for the world: the school year 2004-2005. Why? Because the American occupation of Iraq was starting to unravel, and civil war was looming on the horizon. Like the AP teacher seeing a “relevance hook” between the “American Dream” in Gatsby and that of his students today, and seizing on it, I seized on the situation in Iraq by re-working my syllabus for Asian history, which ended with the Middle East eight months later, by inserting a two-week study of the Iraq situation at the beginning of the year. The concepts wrapped into that situation – imperialism, resistance and guerilla warfare, sectarianism and civil war, power vacuums, puppet governments, geo-politics and diplomacy, on and on – were ones that would crop up repeatedly in every country study we did throughout the year. We were able to use Iraq as our touchstone for those concepts practically every week for nine months. And as an added bonus, the students would learn about that rarely-studied thing called “current events” and graduate into the world knowing something about their own age, and not just those in the distant past (another travesty of schooliness).
The AP teacher was apparently able to do the same thing for Gatsby. One take-away from this, to me, is that it’s essential that teachers be able to change the curriculum based on current events. If Gatsby was not on the syllabus for that year, did the teacher have the freedom to see the teachable moment, make the change, and put it there? If not, why not?
And what about math and science?
We’ve looked at relevance hooks for history and English, but what about math and science? How can they be taught in a way that’s relevant to students? When I interviewed the two Intel Science Talent Search student finalists a few weeks ago, they made abundantly clear that independent applied research projects, mentored by real-world scientists in their communities, did the trick for them. As for math, I just read about a class combining geometry and construction projects in Kentucky that sounds like an excellent way to make geometry a relevant subject. (And math teachers out there should check out math teacher Dan Meyer’s blog, by the way.)
I’d love to hear stories along these lines from any of you out there, in any discipline.
