Earlier today, I wrote a sincere apology to John Arnold for having overstated the amount of money he was paid when he left Enron (before its collapse). He left with $4 million, then created a hedge fund and accumulated a fortune in excess of $3 billion. As EduShyster pointed out, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation has supported charter schools, Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst, and Teach for America.
A reader on the blog has some different ideas for the Arnold Foundation:
Mr. Arnold, how about using your wealth to endow a struggling school with a state of the art library and technology resource center, a parenting center, a health and social services clinic, a day care center, science labs, a theater, music facility and art gallery? Provide funds for class trips! Create a community garden at the school and give classes on healthy nutrition and eating habits! Reinvest in industrial arts and vocational training! Then sit back and watch these kids thrive. Twelve years of corporate education reform have failed. Put your money to better use.
Teachers: You know your students. What would you advise the Arnold Foundation to support that would improve student success in school and in life? Share your good ideas based on your experience.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
omg….field trips…some of these kids will never get to an art gallery or a museum because the schools can’t afford to take them anymore. I think that is incredibly sad.
Support a food pantry in an impoverished neighborhood.
No! Support a living wage instead.
Mr. Arnold,
Endow a brand new school of education that espouses E.D. Hirsch’s ideas. Our ed schools are currently plagued by intellectual conformity. We need intellectual diversity. Hirsch’s ideas for fixing education are the most cogent, yet they are blackballed by insecure, narrow-minded faculty in the education schools. The result has been that 99% of American teachers believe the same faulty conventional “wisdom”; e.g. that reading comprehension ability can be gained by reading a lot of young adult fiction and learning a suite of metacognitive strategies. (In fact, reading comprehension ability can only be attained through robust world knowledge, i.e. the knowledge imparted by a content-rich curriculum.) This falsehood, granted prestige by flagship institutions like Teachers College, needs to be forcefully contradicted. False doctrines inhabiting the heads of American teachers are seriously impairing our schools’ effectiveness.
Don’t listen to this nonsense, Mr. Arnold. Many teachers have used approaches that are very different from Core Knowledge (CK) and their students found success. There is no magic bullet, there is not one right way, that works for every child. Core Knowledge is just another list and it is no better than the Common Core list.
Teachers need autonomy to determine what list is developmentally appropriate and works best for their children. My primary aged students could not relate to the study of ancient civilizations, understand time or timelines or read maps, so I stopped implementing CK and encouraged them to pursue investigations in what they were interested in learning about, which was THEIR world, about which they knew very little, such as reading, reconstructing and using floor plans of the classroom and school on treasure hunts, learning their addresses and sending home mail, using a map of their neighborhood on walks and a map of the city on field trips, etc. (My list was long.)
And, actually, it’s VOCABULARY development that is so critical to reading comprehension. That can be best learned informally, through daily adult modeling of rich language, with the use of comprehension asides, such as synonyms, brief definitions and non-verbal communications, to help students understand new, sophisticated words. It should be done during routines, in regular interactions, during read alouds and while students are engaged in investigations in the content areas.
Mr. Arnold: If you really want to help the 90% of America’s children who attend neighborhood public schools, not just the select few who attend charters, then please start an Adopt a Neighborhood Public School Program.
Hirsch’s ideas may not be a panacea, but they’re the among the most cogent out there and it’s scandalous that many –perhaps most –ed schools hide this knowledge from their students.
Little kids can become interested in ancient China and Renaissance art if they’re presented well and appropriately.
Nouns are names of things. The only way to teach nouns is to teach things; i.e. the world. If all you teach is what kids are already familiar with, you’re not expanding their vocabulary much. World knowledge is word knowledge. This is something Lucy Calkins and her acolytes fail to acknowledge. They make it seem as if teaching metacognitive strategies and drab “academic vocabulary” is the royal road to vocab growth. Hirsch argues that the best way to accelerate vocab growth is to immerse kids in thematic units (e.g. on the human body or the Mayas –not “my neighborhood”) so as to set up a clear context for the words they’ll be hearing. That context will facilitate comprehension of the words heard and seen during that unit. I agree with him: this is the best approach.
Wait, Cosmic Tinkerer. Endowing a private college with funds to actually realize any positive vision would be a big step forward for predatory philanthropy.
It could offer scholarships to induce real people to come forward and willingly try out the vision in the real world, instead of lobbying and advocating to impose an avalanche of profiteering schemes on public schools.
We need intellectual diversity. AND
There is no magic bullet, no one right way, that works for every child.
yes, yes, yes
And it is certainly the case that little kids can become fascinated by ancient China or Renaissance art. What they cannot become fascinated by is an endless diet of skills training. If you want kids to read, they have to have something fascinating to read about. Endless rounds of exercises on finding the main idea and identifying instances of cause and effect in leveled “selections” isn’t going to cut it. That’s a sure way to turn kids off. Kids have GREAT crap detectors. I was talking, yesterday, to an elementary school teacher who was telling me about how she was doing some blithering CCSS-based skills lesson forced on her by her district when the subject of buzzards came up. The kids suddenly perked up and couldn’t stop asking questions. They were YEARNING to learn ABOUT something as opposed to the endless reading skills practice.
A lot of edupundits need to remember the WHY of reading, not just their notions about the HOW.
This is too easy. Implement chapters 21-30 of the best seller Reign of Error.
Great answer!
Well I hate to make a tall order, but it sure would be nice to get out from under RttT. Or maybe just $1,000 for band instruments.
Our school needs music and wrap-around services.
All of that and an afterschool program where kids actually play, not do more test prep.
A nurse, librarian, and counselor in every school.
I like the blogger’s idea
I meant the “reader of the blog”‘s idea
While a correction was in order, there was absolutely no need to apologize to this man.
Agreed. We truly live in an upside down world. A member of a national crime syndicate uses his henchman lawyer to threaten Diane for making a math error. Arnold only stole millions of dollars, not billions of dollars from his employees pensions and the citizens of California. Sure, he took the money from Enron legally but his cronies wrote the laws making such theft legal.
What a novel idea, put money into existing public education that has been successfully educating children for hundreds of years.
they could support a strong progressive income tax and real campaign finance reform so clean city governments and their public ed institutions have the resources needed for all of the amazing programming we want to do.
Simply encourage and invest in viable (and, therefore, profitable) inner city businesses that provide jobs that build portable skills.
Air conditioning.
Assistants or aides in every primary classroom. A nurse,social worker/counselor, librarian in every building. Air conditioning. Tissues, pencils. dry/erase markers or whatever helps make a classroom function. Judy clocks, fraction puzzles and any other tool that helps teachers teach. Books and more books. And most important, respect for teachers.
What’s a “Judy clock”?
Duane, a Judy clock is an elementary/special education teacher’s secret weapon for teaching kids how to tell time. I’m retired now, but they were always on my favorite list of tools needed for teaching time. Those big yellow clocks probably date me, but they always got the job done. I just googled them, and they still are being sold.
Thanks!
I’m with Miron Boland — implement chapters 21-30 of Reign of Error.
Here’s a suggestion: Buy every teacher in the United States copies of The Death and Life of the Great American School System and Reign of Error! Essential reading for educators.
Mr. Arnold,
Take your billions and invest in more classrooms and more teachers across this great land, then allow them to have the autonomy that they need to teach in their classrooms. If each teacher in this great land could teach with a classroom size of approximately 13 to 18 students, depending on grade level, every student in this great country would become successful in EVERY way! Success would come to each student regardless of race, income level, geographic location, etc., because, FINALLY, teachers could really focus on students as individuals and meet any and ALL of their needs, with a marked decrease in disciplinary issues in the classroom.
Phyllis:
In hour long classes the time per student varies minimally in absolute time with class size:
13 is 4′ 40″
15 is 4′
18 is 3′ 20″
20 is 3′
24 is 2′ 30″
How does 2 minutes per hour make a difference?
How does class size actually impact teacher effectiveness or student learning?