Matt Mandel is a National Board Certified Teacher in the Philadelphia public schools.
He has figured out reform.
He explains it here for those who were puzzled.
The most important thing you need to know is this:
“It’s not about the children.”
The reason reformers keep saying that it is “for the children,” is because it’s not.
They say that to confuse people.
Read Matt Mandel and learn what it would look like if it were really “about the children.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you Matt…please read and send to all:
I liked this:
And if it were about children, teachers would be respected partners in any dialogue on necessary reforms. In what other profession are practitioners in the field given so little respect for their knowledge, insights, and contributions? And if it were about children,
teachers would be respected partners in any dialogue on necessary reforms.
And this:
Education reform, here and elsewhere, is about a lot of things. It’s about access to billions of public dollars. It’s about politics and kickbacks for friends and donors. It’s about retaliation and retribution. It’s about religion, right-wing values, and anti-unionism. It’s about creating more, but for fewer, and to hell with the rest. It is, in effect, a form of child abuse in a digestible political wrapper.
But it certainly isn’t about children.
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Matt nailed it.
It’s never been about children. If it had, we wouldn’t have 25% of our nation’s children living in poverty. A wealthy nation, with one quarter of it’s children worried about food, housing, clothing and security; that is the shame of our nation.
Real reform would recognize that if our children’s basic needs are not being met, their learning potential is compromised.
But, there’s no money to be made in exposing poverty and working to make sure kids and families have what they need. Instead, it’s far more glamorous to slap together some charter schools, fill them with the “right” demographic, and living in a happy, shiny world.
Thank you, Matt. What you wrote should be published on the front page of every newspaper in the land.
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I”m sorry, I don’t see it. Kids in Catholic schools are some of the poorest and in some of the worst neighborhoods. The focus is on academic excellence and discipline. Instilling good values is also a priority.
This is done with a fraction of the money public schools get.
Until the focus is on education instead of turning the public schools into medical facilities and replacements for the parents, I don’t see this vision as the right solution.
I can certainly sympathize with the teacher/school system that has to deal with the child of a drug addict or neglectful parent. However the STATE is not a good substitute parent.
The school system is being stretched thin. We expect the school to feed and transport them. Teach them about sex ed, alcohol ed., drug ed. They now give them dental exams, medical exams. Hand out condoms, birth control pills, and force them to do community service and political action.
And we wonder why kids are graduating illiterate?
Cradle to grave leaves academic excellence in the dust. Parents are fed up with their kids getting condoms but not learning grammar. They are disgusted by the culture of no discipline and bullying while the administration refuses to do anything.
We pay administrators 6 figure salaries and yet these kids are passed on from grade to grade not knowing how to read and lacking knowledge of their math facts. Flash cards cost almost nothing!!! Voyages is cheap and old grammar book that you can’t find in many public schools.
When a home-school mom with no formal education can pick up a Saxon math book and teach her kids basic math and offer her children a quality education, there is FAR more to reforming ed.
Just ask a home-schooler!
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Mom,
Most people, including you apparently, assume that parochial school students perform better than public school students on standardized tests. However, a couple minutes on Google led me to a comparison of private (including Catholic) schools versus public school NAEP scores and found that is not true. I found that in most cases public school students performed better than or about the same as parochial school students after adjusting for selected student characteristics.
http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/studies/2006461.asp#section4
You state that parochial schools “do it with a fraction of the money public schools get.” I doubt that this is true, especially when the services donated by parents are factored in.
Also, parochial schools do not provide many of the services that public schools are required to provide. For example, I am a special education teacher and if a student at the nearby parochial school qualifies (based on testing provided by public school staff) for sped, my school must provide services, including transportation, at the district’s expense.
Glad you and your child are enjoying Saxon math, I have used Saxon materials with some of my students and found them to be very good.
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Good points and link, Washingtonian!
Self-selecting populations differ greatly. Whether poor and on scholarship or paying, those are parents who are motivated and invested in their kids. And if the school concludes that things aren’t working, they can counsel out or expel the child. That’s different from public schools which take everyone. I’ve worked in all of these arenas: private schools, parochial schools, home schooling and public schools. Very different ball games from the latter.
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Thank you for your comments and insights. MOMwithAbrain, you make some fair points. Missing from your analysis, however, is the fact that once a parent enrolls and writes a tuition check for religious/private school tuition, s/he is already an active and involved parent–a critical if not THE key component to impacting on a child’s education. Further, while I laud your own abilities, many parents are not as equipped. Finally, you unwittingly speak to argument I make of the roles of schools. In a perfect society, schools would be charged solely with educating children. In a nation rampant with child poverty, those we work with need far more than education. They are bereft of basic needs that no children in the world–let alone America–should be without. To use test scores to measure the impact and need for public schools is scientifically invalid and socially naive.
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My favorite part:
“If it were about children, we wouldn’t value differentiated instruction, then test children all the same way.”
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Oh that was such a great part. So true
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I had been thinking about this very thing just earlier today while I was putting my classroom to rights after the summer.
As teachers, we are expected to differentiate for all types (and we should) regardless of the student’s issue. Yet, somehow it makes complete sense for all these children that we have to make adjusts for in the way they learn are tested in the exact same way.
If we have to teach a student in a different way for them to understand, we should assess students in a different way.
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My favorite part too, I teach resource, all the IEP accommodations that are allowed do not help.
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What a beautiful article. Ok I was going to chose a favorite part but I love the ENTIRE THING!! Sharing this everywhere!!
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What an awesome piece of writing. Every paragraph hit it right on. Some day Momwitha Brain might understand. I’m not going to hold my breath!
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All true. And this: if it were really about the children, then every union would be out there like the Chicago teachers, fighting on the front lines instead of cowering in fear.
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Is there an underlying assumption here that public schools ARE about the children?
Political decisions made by local government involve many stakeholders, including the interests of children, but also including taxpayers, employees, parents, high school sports fans, etc.
I think high school start times are a good noncontroversial example. Research seems to have shown that the teenage mind produces a different sleep pattern from the adult mind. Teenagers do not get sleepy until late in the night and, given the opportunity, will benefit from sleeping well into the morning. (I know my three sons were/are like this).
If high schools were run in the best interests of the children, they would start at 10 a.m. instead of 7 or 8 a.m. and go later in the day, to 5 or 6 p.m.. High schools have not changed their schedules because other stakeholders, parents primarily but perhaps also teachers, would find these hours more difficult. The start time in high school is detrimental to the child, but helpful to others, and the benefit to others outweighs the cost to the child.
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TE,
Interesting, your example of start times but I don’t know if it is quite as uncontroversial as you may think. Do you have a study on this?
I’m not that convinced that it has to do with time of sleeping as much as the amount of sleep.
If teens need nine hours of sleep a night then how do they get it. That would be going to bed at 9:00 and waking at 6:00 to get to school by 7:30. Good luck on that, hell all the “good” programs come on TV after 9:00. Not to mention how many work to way after that and texting, game playing etc. . . . You know maybe some good ol parental encouragement for the students to go to bed early and get a good night’s sleep.
Could the high school schedule be adjusted to start maybe a little later? Probably, but the problem with that ends up being transportation costs of double and triple runs (especially here in the rural areas), so that all the schools in a district would have to adjust. Which is a problem out here in that many parents leave by 6:30 in the morning to get to work themselves and prefer to drop off the kids, kind of like a “free” hour of day care. The myriad problems of changing schedules belie your “non controversial” characterization.
To me it’s the parent’s responsibility to see that the children get the correct amount of sleep.
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Duane-
Here are some results from a quick Google Search
From the National Sleep Foundation:
“Teens’ natural sleep cycle puts them in conflict with school start times. Most high school students need an alarm clock or a parent to
wake them on school days. They are like zombies getting ready for school and find it hard to be alert and pay attention in class. Because they are sleep deprived, they are sleepy all day and cannot do their best.
Schools that have set later bell times find that students do not go to bed later, but get one hour more of sleep per school night, which means five hours more per week.
Enrollment and attendance improves and students are more likely to be on time when school starts. Parents and teachers report that teens are more alert in the morning and in better moods; they are
less likely to feel depressed or need to visit the nurse or school counselor”
From Kidshealth.org:
“Until recently, teens were often given a bad rap for staying up late, oversleeping for school, and falling asleep in class. But recent studies show that adolescent sleep patterns actually differ from those of adults or kids.
These studies show that during the teen years, the body’s circadian rhythm (sort of like an internal biological clock) is temporarily reset, telling a person to fall asleep later and wake up later. This change in the circadian rhythm seems to be due to the fact that the brain hormone melatonin is produced later at night for teens than it is for kids and adults. This can make it harder for teens to fall asleep early.”
From USA Today:
“A good night’s sleep is also crucial for learning.
“It helps you to prepare to learn, and also to benefit from what you’ve learned in the day,” Carskadon says. “It’s the glue that keeps that information and sharpens it in your brain.”
But kids, particularly teens, still get too little sleep. With the hormonal changes of adolescence, body clocks shift later. The average teen can’t fall asleep until 11 p.m. or midnight — and when they need to wake up at 6 or 7 a.m., there’s no way they can get sleep they need, Carskadon and others say (Carskadon is a Professor of psychiatry at Brown University and director of Chronobiology and Sleep Research at E.P. Bradley Hospital in Providence.)”
There are many other sources.
You are making the same point I am making. You point to the costs of starting school at a different time to taxpayers (higher transport costs) and to parents (due to not getting the extra hour of “free” daycare). The myriad of problems are not problems for the child’s learning, but about other things. In this decision, public school is NOT about the children, it is about the adults.
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To say that school reform “is not about the children” is demagoguery plain and simple.
Read today’s Wall Street Journal editorial on Chris Christie and NJ School Reform. In talking about teachers wanting to preserve seniority rules it reads: “There’s no better illustration of the reality that [teachers] unions exist for the benefit of unions, not kids.”
Eerily similar demagoguery from both sides of the debate.
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The advantage of being trained as an economist is that you view the world understanding that everyone comes with their own set of interests, even economists.
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Do all economists come with such an inflated ego?
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Possibly.
My point is that some teachers here may be arguing for policies based on their self interest rather than the interest of the child or the community.
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Who may that be? Can you determine from the posts who cares about children and who only cares about themselves? You appear to an expert on many issues.
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No, I can’t, though many people here seem to be able to tell the difference.
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The main difference I notice is that YOU are not a teacher, the kind that dedicates their lives to children, teaching and learning. You have your own self interests and you are very impressed with yourself. Done!
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Sigh,
I have taught 13th grade for thirty years, almost all of it under annual contracts with no “job protection”. Some years the contracts were for single semesters.
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So you think school district’s should be free to fire higher seniority teachers to save money with lower paid lower seniority teachers? If someone is higher seniority they have more experience which in previous societies was called wisdom. You want administrators to have arbitrary powers to fire without due process. This has nothing to do with democracy.
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As a tax payer, that would certainly be in my interest if children can be equally educated at lower cost.
I have no doubt that more experienced teachers are likely to be better teachers, but i would rather the school district fire bad teachers and keep good teachers than fire young teachers and keep old teachers.
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What shall we do when the good teachers are “old”?
What if they are bad and “young”?
At what point is a teacher “old”?
What shall we do with “old” economists?
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When a teacher is good, keep them. When a teacher is not, fire them. I was very sad to see that the just named “teacher of the year” was fired by the Sacramento school district because she was young. I don’t think that was in the interests of the students.
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And neither is crafting ways to fire great teachers who are “old” and cost too much. That happens as well. Be informed. Don’t cherry pick your sob stories.
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I specifically said that we should not fire good teachers, much less great teachers, so i certainly would not craft any system that fired great teachers. If any great teachers are fired, that is a loss to the children.
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In a profession where 50% turnover in the first five years is not uncommon, there is not a crying need to remove job protections. Teachers need job protections or they will be unable to teach classic works by John Steinbeck and others or to teach evolution. If the choice of whom to trust is an experienced teacher or Chris Christie, who likes to bully and berate teachers (especially females), I vote for the teacher.
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Why do you bother posting here? You believe we are all lazy good for
nothing union slobs who could care less about kids. If we want to have some security in our profession then that is equal to not caring about children.
My teaching environment and their learning environment are one in the same. They cannot be separated.
Continue to berate and demean us. We don’t need to explain anything to you anymore. You have your preconceived notions and you don’t want to learn.
Class dismissed. Done with you…the energy I have left will be
devoted to my students.
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Linda-
I think you might be directing this at me.
I do not know why you characterize me as believing “we are all lazy good for nothing union slobs who could care less about kids.” I have never said anything remotely like that. I also do not think I have berated teachers or demeaned anyone with my comments. If I did by accident, I certainly apologize.
I have learned a great deal exchanging ideas with others on this blog, and hope that others have found the exchanges interesting and useful. If, however, if the community feels that I have been rude or insulting with my posts, than I will certainly stop posting here.
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I had some trouble posting earlier and it didn’t line up. Trying again.
No, that was for Ed T. at 2:34, but it didn’t line up correctly.
But you seem to dismiss those with experience over new teachers as though they must be better just because they are not old.
I am getting tired of all the bashing. I suppose I should take a break.
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Linda,
Lord knows I have had trouble guessing where WordPress would end up posting my comments. I don’t discount experience, I just value excellence more. The two often coincide, but not always.
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To their credit, conservatives have successfully secured claim to being on the side of ethical/moral living in 21st Century America. (Why Democrats don’t drive home the fact that it is immoral to not ensure basic needs for struggling citizens I’ll never know!) So, too, have “reformists” maneuvered into the position of being the real advocates of children–at the national, state, and local levels. Teachers unions, I do believe, must engage in image rebranding efforts that communicate that they are civil rights advocates, often for those without any. As long as unions are viewed as they are by Mr. Turley and others as being solely concerned with wages and benefits–public support will continue to erode. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, Mr. Turley and others has decided it is. Interestingly, everyone believes they have the cure for what ills our schools (in this case teacher tenure/seniority rights) because they were once students. I’ve been to the ER more times than I care to remember, but I don’t suggest that I know how to improve one. Teachers teach where our children learn. School environment and respectable careers that offer middle-class salaries and benefits that help attract and retain professionals who can find these elements elsewhere is not a bad place to start for improving schools.
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I can’t tell who is responding to my post versus other posts on this thread.
If anyone was responding to my post, clearly the one point I tried to make did not come through: Anyone who labels pro-reform parents, anti-reform parents, pro-union teachers, etc., as “they don’t care about children” is engaging in demagoguery. It’s shameful.
That applies to comments by Diane Ravitch and Matt Mandel at the top of this post, as well as The Wall Street Journal editorial today and Chris Christie.
The example I gave in my original post shows people engage in this shameless behavior on both sides of the reform debate.
I don’t support the Wall Street Journal’s or Christie’s anti-teacher union position.
But most of all I don’t support people on either side of the argument who label pro-reformers as engaging “in form of child abuse” (per Mandel) or teacher’s (union or not) not caring about children (per Wall Street Journal).
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I don’t even know what pro and anti reform mean anymore. I view the pros as anti because they have the least experience and they are motivated by money. To me they are worthless words. Stop talkng and start doing.
All the money Rhee has spent (and many others) could have gone directly to kids and schools and it would have made a huge difference: books, instruments, field trips, technology, art supplies. They have wasted their money trying to make money off of children.
I am not explaining anymore.
As of 8/2212 I will be doing something every day to make a difference. I won’t be appearing at staged events where I spout 8 memorized talking points ad naseaum for a speaking
fee and free airfare and hotel accommodations.
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Mr. Turley, I respect your comments and the way you’ve conducted yourself on this blog. To be fair, although I disagree with your premise, you’ve been honest and fair, and have been subject to people putting words in your mouth. That aside, I took literary license with the theme “it’s not about the children” to underscore how misguided most reform efforts (and proposed solutions) are. Further, I balanced each troubling belief with examples of what life would be like in a world where we did what we already know makes a differences. That, in a nutshell, is perhaps the biggest difference between Ravitch and her peers (I, on the other hand, am merely a full-time classroom teacher), and the plethora of reformists lobbying for business-model solutions. The former rely on research; the latter on repeating failed initiatives because of the political and financial opportunities they continue to offer.
In closing, those who teach are on the front lines. Our views should not be discounted or ignored because of the false assumption that we are operating with only our own interests in mind. That is a highly insulting premise, one that brings us no closer to the collaboration needed to improve public education for children.
Teachers want things done with us, not to us.
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Speaking of recommended reading, here’s another thoughtful piece on the topic of school “reform”:
http://truth-out.org/news/item/10773-ten-ways-school-reformers-get-it-wrong
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