Dr. Yohuru Williams teaches history at Fairfield University in Connecticut.
In this post, he condenses the lessons of the best-seller All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, reducing sixteen lessons to only six. They are on point and hilarious.
These are six rules to live by and to learn by. School would be a far better place for learning if everyone took Dr. Williams’ good advice.
Here are two of his rules:
- Play fair. (Of course, this is impossible when the ultimate measure of a student’s success is reduced to how well they perform on standardized tests). Recent cheating scandals, involving some of the luminaries of Corporate Education Reform, illustrate the danger of a hyper-competitive model of education that substitutes standardization for innovation instead of more organic and battle-tested measures of student achievement.
· Don’t hit people. Or yell at people (Chris Christie), or make up facts (Stefan Pryor), or denigrate parents (Arne Duncan), or brag about taping the mouths of children shut (Michelle Rhee), or lie about test scores. Take your pick. But seriously, the crass manner in which the apostles of corporate education reform have “engaged” parents and teachers from Connecticut to California demonstrates how little respect they have for the communities or “children” whom they claim to value. See also: Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
You must have missed the most recent memo. “Play fair” and “don’t hit” are not common core standards. Since these items do not appear on any standardized test, they will be eliminated as kindergarten goals.
Good piece on how charter schools in one area in Florida are skimming the wealthier kids and even with that, even with the public schools being deliberately undermined and tasked with educating a much less economically diverse group of kids, they’re still doing a really good job:
“Ladanowski said, “Initially, people may look at Coral Springs or Flanagan High School and be disappointed, but when they start understanding the link between socioeconomics and a child’s performance, they would then congratulate these two schools.
Here, they have two to four times as many kids who live in poverty than the nearby charter schools, and yet have pretty close reading scores to their more affluent charter school neighbors.”
I’m curious if anyone on ed reform anticipated this, that parents of better-off kids would pull their kids out of public schools and cluster in certain charter schools, leaving the public schools to serve a poorer population and essentially creating a wealthy “zip code”?
Doesn’t this go against the whole “zip code” talking point? These schools won’t be more economically diverse. They’ll be LESS economically diverse, and the public schools will inevitably have a harder go of it than the “choice” schools. That isn’t “equitable” at all.
Instead of the insane national laser-like focus on charter schools, shouldn’t we be asking how these public schools are doing AS WELL as the wealthier charter schools that surround them? Maybe Bill Gates could fund a study, huh?
http://tamaractalk.com/public-schools-outperform-charter-schools-in-broward-county-12731
Here is my six piece series on the unconscious as it relates to education, alternative schools, reform, etc.. I will post VI first and follow with I thru V.
Part VI
THE UNCONSCIOUS AS SOUL
This series has been about soul searching as much as anything. In education, as in all of life, the highest priority should be given to making a consistent habit of searching one’s “soul” to know better where one is headed, where one is “coming from”, whether one might have been fooling one’s self or dishonest with one’s self about beliefs and feelings, and what one’s values mean or portend for the future. Parts I through V have described a substantial divide within the mind of every human, with a level of conscious awareness and thinking that is fairly easily traced and explained using language, and one or more levels of cognition/emotion below conscious awareness, which can only be traced and explained with intentional effort, mere approximations and great difficulty.
The unconscious mind may or may not be all that exists as a soul. What has been termed the soul may ultimately turn out to be something non-cognitive that remains after death. That sort of question can’t be answered in this kind of inquiry and may never be answered for ordinary humans. However, we can say with certainty that what has been called “soul searching” is a process of looking into aspects of cognition or one’s mental life to discover a type of thinking, feeling, and believing that is not normally part of conscious awareness as we conduct our daily affairs.
Adults who have been primarily preoccupied with externalities and who have not cultivated a habit of looking inward and reflecting on their own thought patterns and reasoning or on the less obvious and less rational reasons for certain attitudes, actions, or feelings are not likely to inspire self-scrutiny and honest self-appraisal in the children with whom they interact. When pleasing others, achievement, competition, obedience, acquisitiveness, and striving toward distant other-directed goals are at the forefront and are the things one learns to value, the habits of introspection and self-awareness tend to atrophy, if they ever had been part of one’s training and experience.
Once again, we should readily see that the hypocrisy and contradictions built into our traditional schools and into some alternative schools are not conducive to healthy soul searching and honest self-evaluation. Instead, those corrupting factors engender bitterness and cynicism, rationalization and deception. These are things that cannot be wished out of existence or rendered innocuous by special training or Pollyannaish encounter group type experiences. When authority is imposed arbitrarily and the daily routine is managed by people outside the classroom, as it must be under compulsory attendance, children receive a variety of messages, mostly destructive or negative. The writing is on the wall and it is transfused directly into the brain. Children are particularly sensitive to messages of this nature.
Questions for Child Advocates and Public School or Alternative School Supporters:
1. Do you sincerely believe that public schools under the current compulsory attendance paradigm have not done profound damage to millions of children, or that they can be reformed without eliminating the laws under which they are established as hierarchical authoritarian bureaucracies? (If so, don’t bother with soul searching. Seek professional help, post haste.)
2. If you agree that schooling as we know it has been a disaster and that alternatives are essential, are you screaming bloody murder and shouting to the rooftops in order to hasten the day when the laws will be eliminated, or are you willing to blow off the whole idea and leave it to others to advance the message that reform is a fiction and accommodation is cowardice, and too bad about all those crushed spirits? If you have supported alternative schools and believe that you have been honest with yourself, how do you explain abandoning the victims of systems that you have condemned?
3. If you believe that an authoritarian framework is harmful and counterproductive, and you have failed to take firm steps to oppose such systems, do you think that your shining example will ultimately change the world and that people must just be patient, or do you have some other rationale for what appears as indifference, elitism, or gross negligence?
I’ve waited for answers to these questions to no avail. If I don’t deserve answers, I wonder if
I at least deserve an explanation for why not?
HOW TO GAIN ACCESS TO ANOTHER TEN PERCENT OF YOUR MIND
One often hears that we humans utilize only about ten percent of our brainpower. Albert Einstein first made that claim. He was probably quite right, since he apparently used about ten times more brainpower than the average person. More recently, George Lakoff and coauthor Mark Johnson have postulated that most people only have conscious access to about ten percent of their mental or thinking capacity, or to automatic interior thought processes.
The actual proportions of conscious and unconscious (not quite the same as the subconscious popularized by Freud) thoughts vary from moment to moment and from one individual to another. However, there is a substantial body of new research documenting claims that people typically engage heavily in thoughts and imagery that are not experienced as articulated language, concrete ideas, conscious concepts, or beliefs of which they are fully cognizant or able to identify as such. This comes as a shock and is sometimes even considered offensive to people who think of themselves as highly cerebral, intellectual, or contemplative persons.
The metaphor for this phenomenon is “being on autopilot”, since we can find innumerable examples of ‘thoughts going through our heads’, daydreaming, or multitasking, where we might be performing our job, driving, or even carrying on conversations, while there is a drama playing itself out in the “back of our mind”, or while we are reliving an earlier experience and possibly making decisions without recognizing what we have done. We are on “autopilot” much more often than we can imagine. More often than not, we have multiple tracks operating simultaneously, with intense activity and little or no coordination or correspondence between them.
The autopilot metaphor isn’t the best way to speak about what actually happens however, for a number of reasons. Consciousness isn’t well understood, but there may be multiple levels or types. Even when we are concentrating intently on one task, or one thought stream, or one image, or feeling, other levels may be active or somehow a part of the primary process.
Traditionally, we have been taught to think of thoughts and emotions as quite different. The best advice, ostensibly, has been to use our rational abilities to figure things out, to analyze alternatives or circumstances, and to calculate strategies and avoid being swayed by “blind” emotion. The backlash, when that philosophy has produced poor results has favored being “in touch” with one’s emotions over being too analytical.
Yet, emotions and thoughts are two sides of one coin. Or, they permeate the coin in some inextricable amalgam. There are no thoughts totally independent of emotional connections or elements, and no emotions completely separate from thoughts, Furthermore, both thoughts and emotions exist and “interact” on two or more levels most of the time.
The implications of all this are mind-boggling. One could make a case for saying that education is primarily a pattern of increasing awareness and moving more mental processes from the unconscious into the conscious mind. Certainly, it is hard to imagine an educated person whose thought/emotional processes are largely hidden from his or her awareness. Education starts with introspection and self-knowledge, which is why so few people qualify as educated according to traditional conceptions.
Modern tendencies toward excessive rationalization, self-deception, lack of healthy intimacy or self-disclosure, chronic denials, and the proverbial disconnect from one’s emotions represent signs of repressed thinking, or a failure to develop greater levels of conscious awareness. One has to make a conscious effort to catch one’s self engaging in the sort of fleeting thought or the nascent rumination that has never appeared on one’s ‘radar screen’. One has to be vigilant about how one comes to believe certain things and thoroughly honest about how existing beliefs have been formed. This must become a habit and a way of life. It isn’t easy and it would be foolhardy to imagine that one could ever achieve full awareness much more than a fraction of the time.
Do even our best schools engender this sort of consciousness? Do our alternative schools encourage introspection; maximum possible self-awareness, and this type of honesty or an appreciation for an emotional/rationality connection? Can this sort of mind expansion occur in any school context? Our work is cut out for us. It isn’t about teaching so much as about providing the right examples and a climate where these things flow out of an organic process of interaction and relationship. That means we all have a lot more to learn about our minds, our bodies, our brains, and their synergies.
Part II
IMPORTANT IMPLICATIONS OF UNRECOGNIZED UNCONSCIOUS THOUGHT
Not everyone will easily accept the premise of Part I of this series, which is that presumably all people have ideation or mental processes much of the time of which they are typically unaware and which they can only access partially or only through intense conscious effort. This probably means nothing to those who have no confidence in neuroscience, linguistic, and other studies which have established a degree of certainty that, despite our ability to bring a wide variety of things to conscious awareness, our unconscious minds are very active on levels or in ways for which there is no easy analog in language or media. However, an effort must be made to use this new knowledge to explain behaviors that are not well understood. Those efforts may in turn illuminate things about our mental processes which are exposed by certain behaviors.
Lakoff and Johnson, mentioned in Part I, devote much of a nearly 600 page book on the way language and comprehension are tied to metaphors. Metaphors are essential building blocks of thought. “Building blocks of thought” is a fine example of a metaphor. It is probably not possible to engage in the articulation of any meaningful cognitive concept without using multiple metaphors. We employ them so intuitively and automatically that we take them for granted. Directionality is primary. Up is an increase, forward is progress, spinning is confusing. Backup is a dual metaphor.
Embodiment is another topic crucial to this discussion. Every conscious thought we have and every application of language or symbolism is connected more closely to our physical bodies than we can imagine. In addition to metaphors, which are based in our being and moving within our environment, our abilities to process concepts, to visualize, to experience time and motion as mental constructions, to sense or feel relative to an idea, to formulate belief, to become motivated, or to imagine depend on millions of physical neural connections and on the transmission of electrical impulses throughout the body that originate from sensation and stimulation, (actual) chemistry, bodily fluid flows and oxygenation, movement, growth processes, and impacts from the exterior world on skin or other organs and bones.
Ordinary life depends heavily upon belief systems. If we didn’t believe there is water where we found it Monday, we might die of thirst. If we don’t believe that we can trust family members and others, we might become isolated and paranoid. Belief systems may be extremely narrow and simple, but many are true systems in that they are derived from a long series of experiences, learned concepts, innate or genetic predispositions, observations of things around us, deductions based on feelings or more elemental beliefs (i.e., snakes and dark places are dangerous), and possibly even sensory impressions, such as pleasant odors, unpleasant visceral reactions, or visual images. There is no knowledge or education without a cognitive framework consisting of impressions, visualizations, beliefs, images, and emotional memories creating reference points and physical connections within the brain.
In Part VI, we will elaborate more on how these atomistic processes make physical exercise, movement, object manipulation, deep breathing, environmental awareness (in the personal sense), dance, autonomy, light, sound (esp. music), touch, and socialization all fundamental to effective learning and education. For now, we will further examine the notion of expanding access to aspects of the thinking mind that are ordinarily beneath the level of awareness.
We usually suppose that we have a clear conception of why we believe something. If one believes in a deity, that refined sugar is bad for health, that a high from smoking marijuana is rejuvenating and stress-relieving, or that learning by studying intently makes one a better person, we may suppose we’ve been able to pin our belief on an experience, or one set of influences or thought sequences. However, all thoughts are generated from pre-existing cognition utilizing pathways, circuits, memory units stored in multiple locations within the brain or body, and the synthesis of physical materials available, including minerals, vitamins, chemical substances, nutrition, and possible contaminants or foreign microorganisms and organic or inorganic material. Suddenly, beliefs or belief systems are not so straightforward.
We must be more aware of just how intricate and extensive the networks are that have led us to a particular belief or set of beliefs. It isn’t as difficult as one might think to develop a disciplined habit of ferreting out and analyzing our own thinking to determine more accurately cause and effect, motivation, need, emotional facets, maturity at given points, reliability of sources, and other input factors.
Educators often presume to know a great deal about learning and education. Those who have extensive knowledge and experience should be respected and rewarded for their work and dedication. However, they should also make an effort to follow the scientific research that is relevant to their field (including the field of education) and to understand that changing beliefs (education) is more complex than discovering scientific principles, setting good examples, criticizing those who wish to exploit others, and proclaiming victory when minor skirmishes have been won.
PART III
THE RADAR SCREEN OF CONSCIOUSNESS & CONSCIOUSNESS ABOUT EDUCATION
In Parts I & II, an effort was made to paint a picture of an unconscious mind operating simultaneously, or more or less in parallel with the part of the mind that is known to us as our conscious mind, which we customarily recognize as internal thinking and logic-producing awareness or intellectual capability. The unconscious “part” may be appreciated as more significant and substantial than the conscious mind in certain respects. That mysterious unconscious ideation or mental process is transferrable to conscious awareness only through intentional introspection, personal honesty, memory sampling, and fearless analysis.
The ultimate objective is to assist those who hope to become educators, or to become better educators, to develop an adequate understanding of cognition and learning, and to cultivate habits of bringing to conscious awareness ideas, beliefs, prejudices, fears, and often elusive concepts that have been part of one’s obscured and ordinarily inaccessible thinking processes.
A word of caution first. One should not assume there is necessarily something undesirable or unsavory about this “invisible” mental content/process. Cartoon depictions of a person with a tiny demon perched on his or her shoulder whispering in one ear are common. An angelic figure is often seen on the opposite shoulder representing conscience. While these images may reflect a duality in human nature, that duality is probably neither cause nor effect of unconscious processes. Whether one tries to understand dreams, imaginary playmates, contradictory behaviors, or the habitual masking of intense psychic pain, anguish, and fear with a façade of boisterous laughter and gaiety to project or feign happiness, the phenomenon of a superego serviced by a deep reservoir of unmoored cerebral material has been validated.
Unlike the subconscious that ostensibly derives from the repression of antisocial or socially unacceptable thoughts and feelings as postulated by Freud and others, the unconscious is like a well or a reserve of loosely structured, unarticulated concepts, images, feelings, memories, impressions, and perspectives relative to life, people, and experiences. The “well” may include repressed memories, feelings of guilt and shame, antisocial urges, or forbidden sexual impulses, but those are surely normally a tiny fraction of the whole.
A glance at the special case of “Multiple Personality Disorder”, currently known as Disassociative Identity Disorder may be instructive. People have been shown to have compartmentalized their minds to accommodate separate personalities or identities, each with its own particular name, voice, characteristics, and other features. According to psychiatrists, these are defensive mechanisms resulting from trauma; usually extreme physical or psychological abuse. More than likely, this is one exaggerated utilization of a mind “trick”, or capacity that we all possess and use. It is surely a beneficial adaptation or by-product of evolution that can be put to good use, and occasionally misused.
Job one for educators and everyone else is to stop thinking of the brain as a calculator that has evolved into a supercomputer and the mind as a mere repository of information. Perhaps no less important is to acknowledge that we have all been dishonest with ourselves about certain facts and factors relative to our own thinking, motivation, morality and emotions; a dishonesty made tolerable by our ability to maintain a state of cognitive dissonance or contradiction through parallel thinking.
The range of human variability and diversity is phenomenal. We have many dimensions. We have a variety of intelligences or capabilities, attributes, orientations, potentials, personality characteristics, and perspectives. Categorizing and classifying people is a thorny business. It is made infinitely more difficult by the occurrence of mental dynamics that are unknown by the individual. These complications matter a great deal in how we approach education.
The infant lying in the crib may have an exploratory and engaging disposition, or she or he may be a bit withdrawn or even cranky as a consequence of some combination of genetic predisposition, prenatal sensations, or environmental and experiential factors in the first weeks or months after birth. The new mother may be debilitated by post-partum depression without an adequate support network, the baby may have colic or some other malady, or on the other hand, she may have an enriched atmosphere and active caretakers who meet her needs, while not smothering her. Not everything has a lasting impact and each child already receives events in his or her own way, but the mind has a capacity and range from birth that we have yet to imagine.
Self-talk and impression formation are primary mental exercises from our earliest moments in life. Tracing what one has come to believe through rudimentary feelings and attitudes that have not entered conscious awareness is a task for all of us. Sometimes there is considerable convergence; sometimes there is a shocking level of divergence. This is education that must precede more academic learning.
PART IV
THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND FIELD, OR UNCONSCIOUS MINE FIELD
In Part IV, we speculate more about the significance of the unconscious mind for the individual and for the larger social community. To refresh, the unconscious mind is a domain ordinarily outside our conscious awareness that exists and functions largely independently from the mental domain over which we typically have more executive control. The conscious mind is simply thinking that is easily accessed or recalled. Scientists have found new ways to verify and validate their suspicions and hypotheses relative to the mind and its duality as a human phenomenon. However, we will be extrapolating here to some extent in order to make sense for the time being of what the totality of the research shows. Our main focus is education, which is impacted in myriad ways by both the conscious and unconscious minds and which to some degree defines their content and applications.
Thus far, we have not tried to spell out why or how unconscious processes affect and are affected by the conscious mind, or the larger implications of this apparently universal phenomenon within groups and within institutions. Although this is certainly an inexact attempt to draw conclusions and connections, we are not without clear and specific points of reference in earlier research that provide great confidence in sorting out meaning and function.
The revelations that are becoming known relative to this huge unconscious creation in no way indicate that all educators must now have master’s degrees in neuroscience, or professional training that prepares them to fashion a particular kind of unconscious, or to develop some technique to teach children to distinguish the separate mind fields (and in some cases, mine fields). There are good teachers in most schools who already do what they can under difficult circumstances to model and encourage healthy thinking habits, such as introspection, honesty, appropriate self-disclosure, awareness, and openness.
Experience and perception involve an incredible amount of information and interaction within the environment. Indeed, that is an understatement. We are ordinarily stimulated by a constant stream of events, sensory input, and information from all directions and all forms of media. In turn, we virtually never stop sending signals and feelers out into the world via our physical being, our speech, movements, and expressions.
In Part III, mention was made of self-talk. Self-talk is not a monologue in the usual sense and may or may not consist of a coherent train of thought and language using actual words as we normally conceive of them. Self-talk appears to utilize unique internal representations that may be more like private symbols, visions, or complete cognitive scenarios that have a particular significance for the person. Children at an early age appear to have private ideas, impressions, thoughts, beliefs, feelings, attitudes, and other internal mental exemplifications, which may be reinforced by repetition, or which may be transitory and replaced by other similar whole or partial images and representations. These are formed in a context that is alive with a sense of previous experiences, emotional sensations relative to both present and past, expectations or predictions for future experience, and comprehension and interpretations that flow from the holistic combination of all these.
One should be very cautious about supposing that one is ever able to know what another person of any age “knows”, thinks or feels on any level. The unconscious surely feeds into the conscious mind and vice versa. The nuances and shadings are infinite for all practical purposes. The more others try to manipulate and analyze the internal representations of another, whether conscious or unconscious, the more communication (and education) become muddled and complicated by error. Messages, such as “not working up to potential” do not serve children well.
None of this means that educational endeavors are futile or too intricate and personal to warrant our best attempts when education is the bona fide objective. However, failure to appreciate our own limitations as educators or the capabilities and needs of students is indeed hazardous. If the person to be educated is not fully engaged and if ways are not found by people in intimate contact with the student to help them fill in specific blanks answering their own individual questions of the moment, opportunities are frittered away and damage is compounded.
No less crucial is the context and environment in which education takes place. Context and environment include the national scene for youth as a whole. Even the most basic instruction must take into account the special background and present perceptions and experiences of the student, moment to moment.
The holistic approach in education takes the child as a whole person, without trying too hard to control and “engineer” experience or perception. It is likely that those children whose needs are met and who are not inordinately interfered with, intimidated, or abused will have less internal dialogue that is not within their conscious awareness and more conscious awareness that is not contaminated by negative, cynical, or irrational emotion tinged mental processing.
PART V
GOING NOWHERE FAST, THANKS TO UNCONSCIOUS PROGRAMMING
In Part V we elaborate on how the unconscious contributes to and perpetuates educational failures.
It makes perfect sense that as our brains were developing the capacity to think (perceive, analyze, create, combine, and process information) they would simultaneously develop economical short cuts and efficiencies to access notations and connotations sparing us from agonizing repetition and re-creation. If we had to methodically and consciously go through all the motions of making regular choices or actions, decisions about ordinary reactions and relationships, and refiguring how we should think and feel about personal, philosophical, or other questions each day, we would still be out on the savanna. The unconscious mind with a large reservoir of ready but unseen content and automatic responses is as essential to computer-like speed and other amazing features as is the conscious processor we experience and conceptualize as the more readily accessed aware mind.
As might be expected, there can be complications and failures of various types with any cognitive system. If there are misperceptions or input errors in the original processing of information, these may become locked into the repetitive loops that exist in the unconscious mind, leading to fallacious conscious beliefs and behaviors that are harmful in some way. If we allow ourselves to rely excessively on the unconscious mind, without checks on both the conscious mind and on the material that is already in the unconscious, or on content that is being input to either, the consequences can be devastating. If you doubt this, listen to talk radio.
Education is most assuredly about refreshing the unconscious mind with updated content, drawing out as much as possible obscure content from that foggy domain. It entails being cautious about checking what transpires on a conscious level against as wide a variety of sources as possible, training oneself to be honest about emotional stimuli and feelings, and being aware, with an eye toward both social consensus and science.
All of the above require mentors, tutors, authors, and educators who have worked through their own habits and practices in these regards. That is a tall order. The ideal is the impossible. Nevertheless, everything possible should be done to move in this direction. Awareness and honesty should be promoted as primary objectives, with every possible attempt to modify calcified attitudes, thinking that is stuck in another century, and mythology created by unconscious motivations and repressive or unhealthy conditions.
One thing can make more of a difference than any other change. That involves removing the major factor that stands as THE barrier to change and clarity in education. That factor is the authoritarian bureaucracy that is indispensable to compulsory attendance laws.
It is worth noting here that there is an alternative school movement with many supporters who have made great strides in the right direction. Unfortunately, many of those fine people have not gained access to the subterranean thinking processes preventing them from coming to grips with root problems and the fundamental flaws impacting them and their students. By failing to look beyond their exclusive enclaves and to work on behalf of millions of children who are being severely deprived, they contribute to the national malaise and the perpetuation of profound missteps in policy. Some are guilty of gross neglect, thanks to denial and evasion, which only unconscious minds can tolerate.
Half the battle is in recognizing that to win hearts and minds and to overcome the overwhelming popular resistance to the thought of eliminating compulsory attendance, it will be necessary to get past the conscious belief systems to deeper levels of “thinking” and emoting, where irrational fears and mythology hold sway. The public has experienced a relentless chorus elevating school attendance to a sacred status, while having the ideas implanted far beneath the surface, that if they haven’t attended or succeeded in school, they alone are to be blamed.
Another front involves informing reformers and alternative school supporters that they too have an unconscious that often leads them astray. They must realize that good intentions, good feelings, and good ideas are no match for the power of official laws and the structures they require. They must come to know that they are wrong to pin their hopes for significant long-term change on gradual amelioration, charismatic leaders, tons of enlightening literature, astounding technology, or cultural shifts aided by good governance at some level. They should ask whether or not their involvement has morphed into a gigantic ego trip or membership in a mutual admiration society.
It is self-delusion to think that the world will be a much better place merely because one has had a powerful influence on hundreds of students. Amazing teachers whom have sacrificed their entire lives and benefitted many students over generations are legion. Yet, education is at an all-time low.
Very cool.
I mean, even if that wasn’t the intent of ed reformers, that people would self-segregate into “wealthier charter” and “poorer public”, if public schools have become sort of a “safety net” public system in these “Milton Friedman’s life-long dream choice systems”, shouldn’t that at least be recognized and discussed?
I’d say they should be “compensated at a higher per pupil level”, but that’s me 🙂
Also, if the charter schools are not actually testing better than the public schools, then why ARE wealthier parents clustering in charter schools? Is it just better marketing, the sense that the schools are “selective” although they don’t appear to be “better”, or is it natural and inevitable that wealthier people would tend to want their kids around kids of the same economic class? Is that why they’re creating zip codes?
Which political leader will act as an advocate for these “safety net schools”? Which one has the spine to buck the media/political narrative on the absolute wonderfulness of “choice” and the delusional refrain of “everybody always wins with choice!” and address this honestly?
Everybody isn’t winning. A lot of people are taking a hit. Obviously, they’re soldiering on quite admirably in these Florida public schools, but they’re definitely taking a hit.
Yes, wouldn’t the spirit of the phrase “no child left behind” mean that more resources are directed at the children who are starting to be left behind? Higher per pupil compensation for those students seems logical to me.
Oddly enough the very goals of kindergarten teachers to help acclimate the little ones to school and life and fair play and kindness etc. are common sense and all kids need the love and warmth of the classroom that’s safe and supportive as they explore the world. What could be more common core than that? Evidently not if you are a high tech wizard billionaire.
What an engaging and insightful piece! I am proud to say that Dr. Yohuru Williams teaches at a university in my neck of the woods. Thanks for your support of teachers and students everywhere, Dr. Williams.
How about this???
http://truthabouteducation.wordpress.com/2014/03/06/the-disturbing-transformation-of-kindergarten/
This is an excellent article. However, many people are either too young to recognize that complaints such as this that have been articulated eloquently by many observers for many decades and are not new at all, or they are pretending that they are only the result of the misinformed or malicious current group of “reformers”. When we carry compulsory school attendance and the inevitable paradigm of authoritarian bureaucracy that it necessitates, this is the logical and virtually the only possible conclusion. School is no place for education. Forced schooling is an abomination. Changing the scenery or the actors does nothing whatsoever to change the script. Kindergarten has never been the wonderous and idyllic place for child’s play in many locations because it is still school that is micromanaged in order to satisfy legal requirements that emanate from the law and which must be controlled in every way by the ham-handed state apparatus. Everyone is wasting their breath and their time arguing about which reformers are going to save the day. Change the law or go home and curl up into a ball.
Sorry, I got in a hurry. The sentence should have read, “when we carry compulsory attendance to its logical conclusion,…