You may recall a few weeks ago a post about a teacher who was falsely accused of putting a state math question on Twitter. His principal suspended him. Eventually he was cleared of wrongdoing but there was a cloud over his head and a bitter taste in his mouth about the episode.
Then the parents in his school did something wonderful. Please read about it here.
Not only is it heartwarming but it reminds you that all the badmouthing of teachers is orchestrated by pundits and people with an agenda. The public, especially parents, know how hard teachers work, and they love their children’s teachers.
As Rlratto says, parents will save us from the mess we are in:
“Parents are organizing to opt their children out of high stakes testing. Parents are challenging the motive and research behind the Common Core Curriculum. Parents are challenging those who want to create a data base of their children’s information. Parent’s all across the nation are saying stop scapegoating our teachers, stop closing our schools, stop destroying our nations most important asset. Parents will be setting this all straight.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I have heard about parents in NC who are nervous about more testing being unveiled getting together to speak out against it and opt their children out. Since teachers cannot organize in NC, it will be up to parents. It will be inspiring to them to hear stories like this one. Parents and those who graduated from public schools and see no problem with the education they had as a whole are the silent majority who will save public schools, I think. I hope.
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Rally in Albany…teachers, students and parents…I believe:
http://www.wivb.com/dpp/news/local/teachers-rally-against-tests-in-albany
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Joanna
NC now has an excellent blog.
Go here
http://stopcommoncorenc.org/2013/06/04/lt-governor-dan-forrest-my-concerns-with-common-core-video/
McCrory and Lt Governor has spoken publicly about the Sloppy implementation of the commn core.
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The family is the strongest political unit and must be undermined. This is behind the push to divide them by creating smaller schools out of larger ones. The power to label school as “failing” also helps to remove the influence of parents.
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I have read these stories twice now and will come back to read them when I need a boost.
Great Stories from great educators!!
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Thank you Diane. Parents are setting the record straight all across the nation. I saw many at yesterday’s rally in Albany.
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Congrats on being honored by the people whose lives you’ve touched. 🙂
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Sometimes parents do know what’s best, what’s right. But I’ve found in my 20+ years of teaching that the extent to which the parents’ voices are put to good use is directly related to the nature of the community. In my experience, better-off communities with more educated parents, more stable homes, tend to be more in touch with and involved in (as well as invested in, philosophically and otherwise) the education process itself and what’s “really” going on than communities with very high dysfunction, illiteracy, poverty, crime, etc… (I’ve seen entire extended families show up to school unexpectedly mass-berate a guidance counselor or administrator over something that anyone with the slightest inkling of how schools really function would have taken in stride.) Also, parents from particularly strong partisan or religious backgrounds tend to focus their grassroots energy on areas that are not pedagogy-centered, but that support their personal sociological or religious agendas (religious displays in schools, banning GSA club activity, etc…) I think overall there is a benefit to restoring more control to local (district, site) levels. I think the Conservatives who call for total parental control are taking it one step too far, in part for this reason.
That said, this story is remarkable, and an excellent example of the power of the voice of the grassroots collective. In this case, the voice of the masses was used to a good end. But it is not always so.
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blame conservatives, blame parents. ah yes the ” voice” of the ” grassroots” “collective”.
these low income and poverty stricken areas have been the guinea pigs of leftist curriculum for decades precisely because of their low parental participation. It is much easier to manipulate children while their parents are not watching. Your inference about knowing ” how schools really function”, is indicative of the secret society that keeps parents out of their children’s education and if anything common core has been a real eye opener for so many who had no idea that curriculum was not only being written by radical leftists but is being used as a weapon against society in general. so please deeply engage in this text and keep it between the four corners, no context allowed.
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Radical leftists? Any sources where you got that information?
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try a google search, then mine the end notes and bibliographies or links for original documents they are all there
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Bev — I’m no progressive (seriously, read my blog – TRUST me, I’m no progressive). But it’s foolish to assume automatically that the parents with the loudest voices want and know what’s best for thousands of students in their districts.
I agree that there is a hyper-liberal pendulum swing in process in schools, and I think it is turning back, finally. my fear is that it goes TOO FAR in the opposite direction.
I’m not sure what you mean about “the secret society that keeps parents out of their children’s education” because in my two decades in public ed, my biggest source of sadness was parental unwillingness to engage, or, in many cases, the utter impossibility of even reaching them, getting them to come in to for a meeting, a Parent Night, a board meeting, a conference, anything. Maybe it’s just the urban populations I worked with, but if there was a mystical force keeping parents away, it didn’t emanate form the schools. Can you clarify?
With regard to “curriculum was not only being written by radical leftists but is being used as a weapon against society in general,” i don’t know why you had to ruin a perfectly good statement with “by radical leftists,” but I think otherwise you are correct. I think curriculum is the latest hammer of the gods — and it’s not just liberals. Look at the OFFICIAL position of the Texas State GOP platform (http://www.texasgop.org/about-the-party) which states, –and I’m not even kidding about this — the following:
“We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”
How do you create a, what was the word you used, “weapon?” Answers: You strip away individual thought and breed absolute surrender to authority. You remove the instinct to question and instill the instinct to obey. You make a human as automatically responsive as any other weapon in your hand would be. Teaching students to question, inquire, investigate, doubt and critically think is not liberal hogwash.
So both parties are equally guilty. QED. No back our regularly scheduled program. A synopsis. Teacher was wrongly accused. teacher was punished, publicly admonished. Teacher was innocent. District/site administration refused to man up and admit error, apologize, show respect. Community stepped up and showed appreciation by proxy. Teacher feels redeemed.
It’s not a partisan thing to recognize how f***ing awesome that is.
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thanks Andrew,
I will check out your blog.
it is awesome the public outcry in support of this teacher, agreed.
I happen to disagree with you regarding HOTS etc, as hogwash. show me your proof that it is not hogwash.
children should not be obsessed with questioning everything, especially when they are given nothing. I agree that OBE just keeps being renamed. if you read all of the descriptions and copious documents about them, UbD, etc you see that they are stirring the same pot of oatmeal and it is old, crusty, tired, bland and has no nutrients at all and is covered with mold. in fact it makes you sick. this is my opinion. so who is the authority on HOTS? Bloom? Resnick? where is the empirical evidence? why do you believe it?
as far as the secret society I referred to, you may not see it as you are in it. and you believe in things like HOTS. ask some parents.
they have no clue as to how it all works and will be the first to admit they blindly follow. parents are condescended to by admin using pedagogical wordplay and school board meetings regard parents as a nuisance as you illustrate.
the weapon is teaching no content and implanting radicalism into even math, under the guise of social justice. why does my third graders vocab include ” stout hearted”? I cannot even use that in a sentence, and it is 2 words. confusing for 8 year olds. why does his vocab list in sequence, dangerous vacation terrible accident? every list includes violent, radical, dangerous,poverty… issue words. many. majority.
you have seen the math problems too. try looking up social justice math gatekeepers.
you are welcome to disagree but I see it in my children’s schools, and in their friends, and in their textbooks. I am not following a dogmatic crowd for the sake of following I am reacting to what I am experiencing, experiential learning, not transcendental constructivist creating my own reality but real life in front of me, and research through documents that back it up. i and many others don’t like it.
we voice our opinions online as our schools will not hear us.
so how does deep engagement with narrow text, no context allowed,and guided reading not “strip away individual thought”?
( pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!)
for example the test question illustrated by an 8th grade boy via valerie strauss in the wapo about a busboy cleaning up MUG TM root beer spilled on the floor? not worth the paper its written on and a lame excuse for product placement from pearson. how can a parent trust any of it? this appears as malpractice.
next the fact that Bill Gates has bankrolled the circumference of common core and its affiliates, and is partnered with everybody involved in this. a deep engagement with text about him reveals proof of what I am saying. he is considered a leftist atheist globalist billionaire educrat, is he not? if he is paying for it why wouldn’t it be in his likeness?
you are indeed right about both the left and the right being responsible for much of this. Bush and NCLB are the platform for
Obama and Common Core. Both egregious.
but how many admin teachers and parents do their homework beyond pedagogy and education propaganda?
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@economist: Tru dat!
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Also, Bev, I wasn´t blaming “Conservatives,” as you say. I distinctly said “the Conservatives who call for total parental control.”
The relative clause “who call for total parental control” is restrictive, and therefore modifies by specifying which Conservatives I’m talking about. Compare that to the same passage with commas:
“the Conservatives, who call for total parental control, …”
This version, with the relative clause in apposition, is a non-restrictive use of the same clause. In other words, a sentence that began this way would be discussing Conservatives in general, as the appositive may be freely removed without affecting the sentence’s meaning.
In the former, however, I was speaking only of “the Conservatives who call for total parental control,” i.e. a proper subset of Conservatives.
The problem with overemotionalizing an argument is that it tends to lead one to see only what one wants to see.
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Yes, I learned that from reading YOUR posts yesterday.
Did you follow up on any of the documents, links, books provided to you by many of the eudcators/readers?
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@Linda: Not sure to what you are referring.
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Ah, I see a lot of stuff has been added since last I looked. Ok, fine, I’m not afraid to read challenging viewpoints (without lashing out). It’ll take some time.
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Andrew this is precisely what keeps parents out of the secret society.
confusing me with grammar and punctuation analysis. Is this what they mean by “meaning making”?
who are “the conservatives that call for total parental control”?
also who if not parents,care as much for their children? We are seeing in real time evidence that they are being used as guinea pigs for common core, so why would parents not want to have control over what their children are learning? Common Core has been crucified by many admired credentialed and respected scholarly experts. If they detest it why shouldn’t we want to have a major say in its removal and henceforth what is taught to our children?
So we are not allowed into the secret society?
I am an overemotional woman. is this a war on women then Andrew?
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@Linda: Just read all the short links, and skimmed the multi-page tomes (the pdf, not the books). I don’t see your point, sorry. I have no idea why you feel compelled to lump me in with the privatization movement types. You seem to gravitate towards extremes, however, which is you and I part ways philosophically.
Neo-cons and Objectivists accuse me of being not conservative enough. Progressives and liberals say I’m not far left enough. Fact is, both of those types of comments are illustrative of exactly the problem. People seem to want to assume that if a person doesn’t subscribe to all of the tenets of a particular ideological agenda that that person has no principles. I am far left on some things, far right on others, and all kids of shades in between on the rest. Attempts to categorize (me or anyone else) ultimately say more about the categorizer than the categorizee.
With regard to Freidman, all of his foundational claims ring true. I just disagree with his solutions. With regard to school closure, OF COURSE schools need to be closed from time to time. With regard to the Powell memo, most of his observations are correct – there is a powerful wave of leftist revisionism ongoing over the last 30 years, which isn’t to say that there haven’t been equally powerful waves of conservative revisionism.
I didn’t read anything alarming, or anything that I didn’t already know. I didn’t see anything that would justify the way that you and others utterly reject what I have said. Maybe you could explain it without reposting others’ links to do the explaining for you — you know, explain it organically.
I still stand by my assertion that ultimately, sites and individual teachers and administrators have the final say about what does and does not go down in their schools and classrooms. They can either fight it or not fight it. (Yes, it is an oversimplification, I will acknowledge that.) So much evil happens for no other reason than we allow it to.
I suspect that if we were to talk, we would see that we agree more than you think we do. Read more of my blog, and tell me if you really think I’m as evil as you seem to think.
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Ummm, Andrew…pot calling kettle…your quote: ” You seem to gravitate towards extremes”….please point out indications that you were portrayed as evil? A bit dramatic and EXTREME, no?
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Yes, you are right. Further evidence of how pervasive a problem it is. But at least on my blog, I advertise myself as being “a bit cranky.” Caveat lector.
I love public education — I see it as necessary and vital (unlike many hardcore neocons, libertarians and Objectivists, who would just as soon see PE eliminated altogether) … and badly BADLY blighted. There’s enough blame to go around, to be sure, but I believe – and perhaps I’m just an idealist at heart – that there’s more power in a few conscientious objectors’ big mouths than in a dozen billionaires’ checkbooks. That’s why in my blogs I so often sing the praises of the Gerald Contis and Ellie Rubensteins of the world… I don’t automatically agree with every detail of their complaints, but I agree with their course of action. The same is true with many of you-all… I do not subscribe politically to what I perceive to be a very progressive set of core beliefs, but I do support many of the overall goals, and there’s more likeness than not in our overall concept of the direction we need to go.
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AK,
There is no lonelier place than middle ground, especially on Internet forums.
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@economist: Tru dat!
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Paranoid much?
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We are all in this together. Labeling things like radical, left, right,
etc. shuts down thinking. We need to be concise in what we are saying (and thinking). We are conditioned to think this way.
To break the conditioning of compulsory education, we need to break our own conditioning of us against them. Decisions about education are not arbitrary and capricious by those who control it and create the conditioning that is fed to us. We need to be concise and use examples with respect. Anger is also a product of that conditioning.
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Agreed. Well said.
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why shouldn’t test questions, all of them be available to parents? cheating is really quite irrelevant as many questions are about feeling and are personal. so the trust factor has flown out of the classroom window as observed by many articles on this site. teachers are trying to protect their students from what they see as disturbing and parents in the know are shouting to the rooftops. so if not trying to hide something, why shouldn’t all materials be available for parental perusal? the persecution of teachers by administration is another red flag. this man has integrity and they want to crush him.
http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/139006
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Bev, I actually don’t disagree with your broader point. But I think giving out the tests in advance is kind of silly, and “cheating is irrelevant” is not a terribly sensible comment on its face for many clear reasons.
HOWEVER… your larger point(s), your premises behind those statements, are worth talking about. To that end, I am of the opinion that you would enjoy the essay “Modern Education Kills,”by Edwin Locke, which I link on my blog here (I also think you would like this post): http://askingquestionsblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html
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I am glad you agree with my larger points, I do not think I said give them out ahead of time, but make them available for parental perusal before they are shipped out. let parents see what is being asked of their children. then we can stop being
“paranoid, much” . this is like chess, I like it. I will check out your blog later and follow up here, i have to go tend the brood. thanks for the spar.
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One of my facebook friends posted this letter, he is not the author, but I thought it was worth reading and I wasn’t sure how to email it to Dr. Ravitch directly.
by Bo Wright
I freely admit it. I’ve taken teachers for granted. Sure, as a kid, you wanted the ones that weren’t too hard on you when you screwed up, or maybe
the ones who never noticed when you did.
As a parent, you merely hope they will turn your children into the smartest kids in town. We look at state rankings of schools and hope ours is smarter than that dumb school down the street. Because, by God, my kid needs to have a good job someday so I’m not supporting them till they’re 35.
I’ll admit it. When I get my kid’s report cards, or test scores, or whatever, I congratulate my kids for the good grades, and question the teachers about the bad ones.
Then, it hit me.
When your 4 year old, who’s never been more than 8 feet away from you is dropped off at school for the first time, and you’re at work all day stressing about it, the teacher is the one with him, making sure he’s ok.
When your house is just so loud from your 2 or 3 kids being cooped up all summer, and you can’t wait for the house to be quiet again, the teacher is the one who happily receives them.
When a kid is having problems at home, the teacher is the one that comforts them and gives them a sense of normalcy.
When you get a call that the school is on lockdown, because of whatever craziness is going on in the world at that time, the teacher is the one who is there to comfort them.
When an EF-5 tornado is zeroed in on your kid’s school, and you are 10 miles away, helpless and hopeless to reach them in time, the teacher is the one who makes sure they are in a safe place.
When that same tornado, or even a crazy person with a gun, enters the school, and attempts to take the life of your child, and you wish you were there to jump in the way, the teacher is the one who does.
This is for all the teachers who I ever had, and every teacher my kids ever had, or will ever have. You may have never had to take a bullet for me, or protect my child from a falling wall, but it wasn’t until now that I realized, you totally would have.
I apologize for never treating you with the proper respect. The same respect we give our fireman and our policeman, should have been given to you.
Thank you for everything you ever did, and everything you were in position to do, but never had to.
Good job, teach.
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The teacher who was falsely accused, Mr. Ratto, has to now take his experience to the next level. He should come to a school board meeting, briefly tell his story and demand an apology from the superintendent not only for himself, but for his students, their parents and the entire school district for a knee jerk reaction that can only have a negative effect on the school community. He should have this portion of the meeting video taped which he is allowed to do under the First Amendment ( as long as the video taping is not interrupting the meeting).Parents should also speak out The camera should also focus on the body language and facial reactions of the school board, but especially the supt. Then the video should be posted on the social media circuit such as U-Tube and sent to Alphabet City- CBS, NBC, ABC. Finally, It would be very appropriate if Mr. Ratto wore a shirt showing a snake with the words, “Don’t Tread On Me!”
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