This comment just arrived. Read it and weep for two lost lives. Think of the children whose social and emotional needs are ignored in pursuit of test scores
“Dear Diane,
“I do not know if you will get this or not; however, I am so grateful to receive this particular communication. You have done an excellent job of explaining the purpose of charter schools.
“I am writing from Spark, NV, where the school shooting took place yesterday. All 3 of my kids attended this middle school. I am a former elementary, middle and high school principal in (Washoe County) NV and I am in awe of what is taking place in education.
“As for a young student coming onto a campus with a gun, I feel that he must have been bullied and set-out for revenge. Additionally, I feel that given the relentless, inflexible and unyielding focus on “test-taking” and school rankings and scores, etc., could have possibly contributed to this horrible school shooting.
“When teachers and counselors are spending an inordinate amount of time preparing, worrying and focused on test results, their time to connect with students is limited and scarce. (By the way, I hired this teacher who was killed and I guess I am upset and needed to vent). If one teacher, counselor or administrator had had a few extra minutes to look into this student’s eyes and possibly connected with him in a meaningful way, maybe this catastrophe could have been averted.
“I just want to express my deep appreciation for your daily communications about what is going on in education. I am a huge fan of yours. Keep up the great work and the communication.
All the best,
Dr. Debra A. Feemster
Tue, 22 Oct 2013 16:00:33 +0000 To: dsmithfeemster@hotmail.com”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well said. Beyond sad! In so many ways now teachers time is taken up with trying to fulfill all the ridiculous impediments to educating, educating in its best sense, because that time previously available for fulfilling children’s many needs is unavailable.
At one time a very close friend, teacher, gave up because she could not take the stories which children came to tell her of what had happened at home. She left teaching. [She was a superb teacher.]
People who really care about children find it difficult, in this case impossible, to face the realities of the home life which are constantly brought to their attention.
All kinds of problems of which the politicians do not, or choose not to understand.
Yet again, teachers should be free to work with children’s needs, not politicians and corporate needs.
When the current flock of reformist “leaders” intimidate, threaten and bully, and their behavior is praised and lauded by the press as “fearless and tough” there is a trickle down effect that results in a toxic school culture.
The reform movement is all about fear and intimidation. They have used bullying to denigrate the teaching profession.
I’m sure many will disagree with me, but I find this post as objectionable as one from either the pro- or anti- gun lobbies that always pop-up immediately following a shooting tragedy. There is absolutely no reason to believe that standardized testing was at all involved in this child’s decision to take a gun to school and it seems, to me, very wrong to seek to put an agenda to it.
I send my condolences to Dr. Feemster on the loss of her colleague.
I think you have no right to make any judgment about someone who is grieving the loss of a colleague. She said, quite simply, that someone should have taken the time to look into the eyes of this lost child and perhaps the tragedy would have been averted. That is her view and I respect it. She is there, we are not.
The letter does not just say that someone should have “time to look into the eyes of this lost child” but also speculates that “given the relentless, inflexible and unyielding focus on “test-taking” and school rankings and scores, etc., could have possibly contributed to this horrible school shooting.”
I don’t think poster carrollvalueseducationblog was judging the author of the letter, but saying that speculating about what might be a contributing cause is a bit premature.
I wasn’t making judgements about Dr. Feemster for writing it. I was making judgements about this blog for posting it.
By laying fault on lack of time to connect, she is basically saying that someone at the school could have prevented this tragedy. That may or may not be true; we can never know.
So Dr. Feemster can write it, but you have a problem with anyone posting it on a blog?
Why? Because it speculates about social circumstances that might contribute to violence?
Standardized testing mania is a the root of the problem because the teachers don’t have time to really know the children, to get into their heads and to help them grow into functional human beings. They may as well be taught by computers. A real teacher comes to love her children even though she might not like some of them, and middle school kids need the most love because they are the most mixed up and difficult to teach. A real teacher will put her life down for her kids. But testing limits her ability to be a professional and stifles her heart. We are not teachers because we just want kids to learn academics. We are teachers because we are teachers and we love children. It’s not a open head, pour in knowledge thing. It’s a relationship. School deformation, Teach for America and standardized and high stakes testing have stolen the essence of what it means to be a teacher.
You sound like the detective on CSI saying, “I’m sorry for your loss” .
I’m not familiar with the character, so I assume there’s a tone implied. But “I’m sorry for your loss” is a cliche because sometimes there’s really nothing else to say.
A few words of caution here: we don’t know why this student did what he did. It’s irresponsible in the extreme to jump to conclusions, or to insinuate that the climate at the middle school was such that it tolerated bullying and did nothing to stop it. Perhaps that is the case, but if the school did have a strong program, we’ve done the teachers, staff and students a huge disservice at that school–adding insult to injury in this case.
The factors involved are likely complex and varied. Please, please, please keep this in mind rather than immediately making this a political issue of one vein or another. Are the issues involved likely to be political ones (like the fact that yet another semi-automatic weapon was involved in yet another school shooting and yet a large portion of the country pretends this is no big deal?)? Of course. Unfortunately, jumping to simplistic conclusions and then promoting simplistic solutions won’t prevent these senseless school, movie theater, mall and grocery store parking lot shootings.
These very serious issues deserve attention and we owe it to our precious children and those who put themselves in front of the bullets to save them to approach these issues with sensitivity and without assuming we “know” what this was or wasn’t about.
Having worked at that school a few years ago, I KNOW that it wasn’t the fault of the school this happened.
The fact of the matter is the responsibility falls upon the parents for making that gun accessible to a disturbed student.
Many kids are bullied, and the huge majority of them don’t resort to murder.
School is so much more than test scores. It is learning to live. But the deformers have not caught that. There have been many suicides and now this. There is no time to look after the needs of the students, to give them the love and attention that they need and to watch out to make sure they don’t have a gun or a knife.
I think about the exceptionally small first grader who brought a knife to school stuck down in his pants. One of our paraprofessionals saw it and got it from him. When asked why he brought the knife, he said he was going to stab “Peaches”. Peaches was a third grader from a dysfunctional family who had been bullying him because he looked 4.. I had known her since she was two. She would have taken the knife from the tiny child and stabbed him.
I also remember at a high school a few years later when a visually impaired student brought an unloaded gun to school. He was being bullied because he had to hold his work about an inch from his face to read it. Another student, a girl, saw the gun and went to the Vision Resource teacher who disarmed the legally blind crack baby. He had to turn him in, but he helped the parents bond him out of jail and then went to court with the boy and got him probation.
Would this have happened today? I wonder if anyone would have taken the time to save these two children, both in inner city schools in Atlanta Georgia. Or would they just have expelled them and said, “good riddance” and went on with their test training. After all in Pointe Coupee Parish Louisiana they did not even notice that a high school girl was missing. Her mother had recently died from cancer and she was being bullied ostensibly because she didn’t speak southern English, but she was always sent back to class with no assistance. No one noticed until she didn’t make it home and was found hanging from the bleachers.
Where is the time to stop or prevent bullying when every minute is spent on test training instead? Where is the time to say, “It will get better” and give a child some attention. This is wrong, yall.
Well said. it is a very sad time for schools. I agree with the Doctor.. We need to spend more time helping our students and focusing on “true’ school success, keeping our Counselors and Librarians, safe schools, creative arts for students,
Keep talking Diane… We really need you.. Thanks …
Reblogged this on maureenkeeneyblog.
I read an article in Mother Jones about 10 years ago that indicated that the school shooting up to that point were all by students who had been on behavior or emotion meds. They had nothing in common socioeconomically, demographically, academically, or even in terms of diagnosis, but all had been on mind-altering meds.
I know that this notion could start a whole debate, but having spent seven years married to a toxicologist and working in his lab at times, I would say that the developing brain is something to be handled with care and that perhaps in this era of standardization, we are too quick to put our children on meds so that they can fit into it—forcing square pegs through round holes, too hastily (like so many things in education “reform” right now).
I don’t know if this situation applies to the shooting at hand. But to me these shootings are reasons to keep studying the adverse effects of medicating children, and to slow down our hastiness to make them all the same.
A terrible tragedy, but I like other commenters worry about politicizing it. I don’t think Dr. Feemster’s letter was overly political but some of the commentary on it has been. I understand that one can make a prima facie plausible story about how the “reform movement” is to blame, but I’m not sure what purpose that serves.
The anti-“reform movement” movement risks turning itself into a charicature if it blames literally anything bad that happens at any school anywhere in America on the “reform movement”.
Perhaps the point is, since NCLB and RTTT mandates the focus of education has shifted from child centered to test centered. We have seen this all across the board. Art, library, music and PE have been scaled back or eliminated. Interesting how there is money for standardized test but not for the arts. Recess is nonexistent or has been drastically cut in elementary schools in favor of test prep and remediation. On the playground children learn conflict resolution and problem solving skills under the guidance of a caring adult. Middle school students have very little down time as study halls have been eliminated and lunch is reduced to 30 minutes. We see middle school students arriving with diminished problem solving skills and critical thinking skills across all disciplines. And yes, we believe there is a direct correlation to the 10 years of standardized test taking and test prep that students have been subjected to. The demanding schedules across the board are a cause for concern. Educators would like to return to the days when education was child centered. Parents please help us and let your voices we heard far and wide.
Love your post!
So the math teacher served (survived) two tours in Afghanistan, comes back and teaches Middle School and is shot by one of them. Don’t look for blame, I just remember the last lines spoken by the Doctor in “The Bridge on the River Kwai”:
“MADNESS, MADNESS, MADNESS
Any attempt to explain the inexplicable eventually results in incoherence.
Dr. Ravitch,
By opening this blog post with, in part, this — “Think of the children whose social and emotional needs are ignored in pursuit of test scores” — you are at least implying that “the pursuit of test scores” is a factor in this homicide/suicide. What evidence is there of that? Can you cite an article where investigators have already found such evidence by talking to the shooter’s family and friends? Any other evidence aside from Dr. Feemster’s (well-meaning but equally evidence-free) speculation?
Perhaps we should all wait for the investigation to conclude before we speculate.
I was responding to Dr. Feemster’s comments. On this blog, we all have the right to have our own views. You do. So do I. So does Dr. Feemster.
But, as SC Math Teacher notes, your response to Dr. Feemster’s comments seem to imply that you have some sympathy with the view that this tragedy was caused by the pursuit of test scores. You don’t explicitly state “I think this event was caused by pursuit of test scores”, but your response to Dr. Feemster’s comments is highly suggestive.
The reason why I think this matters is that if it turns out that the anti-“reform movement” movement thinks that literally anything bad that happens in any school anywhere is the result of the “reform movement”, then the anti-“reform movement” movement loses some intellectual credibility in my opinion.
Is it important to ask the question, ” Did school climates become less child centered with the introduction of high-stakes testing and high-stakes testing tied to schools, teachers and administrator evaluations?” Have we eliminated or scaled back on curriculum and natural activities that help children relieve stress e.g. recess, art, PE, library, music in favor or test prep? We owe it to the children to have an honest discussion concerning how high-stakes testing have or have not impacted school climates throughout our public schools.
AlwaysLearning:
I agree completely with what you’ve said, and I strongly believe that high-stakes testing and crude teacher evaluation methods has had a disastrous effect on the climate of many schools in the country.
However, there is a big difference between an honest examination of that important question and immediately implying that high stakes testing had something to do with this tragedy.
I understand that tragedies often serve as reminders that we need to have those sorts of conversations (like when a mass shooting sparks renewed discussion on gun control, or when an oil spill sparks discussion on environmental legislation) but there is a big and important difference between “We don’t know what caused this particular tragedy yet, but it got me thinking about what impact high stakes testing is having on the emotional climate of schools, and what impact that climate might have on destructive student behavior up to and including these sorts of senseless acts of violence” and what Prof. Ravitch and other commentors have said, with their implication/suggestion that high stakes testing had something to do with this particular event.
That is an intellectually empty response. Of course everyone has a right to their own views. I can spout off about anything I want, as can you. But you (not so) deftly avoid the issue: You are clearly implying, without a shred of evidence, that the testing environment was a contributing factor here. How about you wait and see what the investigation turns up?
Since Sandy Hook (and even before–there were school shootings involving high school and college students prior to that, of course), much talk has also been made about the need for MORE mental health services, especially due to escalating pressures on children (and adults)–rising poverty as a result of unemployment: homelessness, dysfunctional families, divorce/separation, hunger and other pain that children and families endure these days. In numerous cities and states, mental health clinics have been closed. Social workers and school guidance counselors (along with school nurses, and we just witnessed the tragic results of that) have been in the front lines of laid off school personnel. I just met a school social worker who once was responsible for one school having 450 students (which is a bad enough ratio, especially with a middle school population), and is now, due to budget cuts, responsible for fifteen hundred students and traveling to three different schools.
Would a student like the one in Sparks be able to see the S.W. with ANY consistency or on a one-to-one basis?
In making another point, here, when the school superintendents, boards, cities and states are crying poor, they are spending millions of dollars on testing, dollars that could otherwise go to retaining–and, perhaps–hiring even more social workers, guidance counselors, psychologists and nurses. Having these people on board could have meant a different outcome for schools like Sparks. Unfortunately, if we don’t return to the amount of such services (and now, even more) we’ve had in the past,
recent history is doomed to repeat itself.
There MUST be these highly trained people to “look into this student’s eyes.”
And heart. And mind.