EduShyster gets amazing tips.
This is a description of the typical day of a child in a new “no-excuses” school.
She answers questions with a programmed response.
She walks in silence.
She does exactly what she is told.
The teacher speaks in scripted language.
The child obeys.
What did this child do to deserve this treatment.
I recall visiting a Chinese prison for disobedient women about 20 years ago.
The prisoners worked in silence all day.
At the end of the visit, my group was treated to a performance in which the prisoners sang about how happy they were to be confined and how happy they were to know that they were being rehabilitated and turned into better people.
The first words out of my mouth were not fit to print. I was laughing so hard until it hurt. Then I realized, it was serious and the only hurt inflicted would be on the kids.
If approved, can social services be called on the founders of this institution and those who approved it? Just to be on the safe side, perhaps the can have a soft opening. I think all parties involved should undergo a dry run, you know to work out the kinks. Maybe a week or so?
Yes, silence, obedience and rote responses: sounds like preparation for the labor markets charter supporters (oh, excuse me, Job Creators!) have created for these young people in the coming years.
Read about their behavioral modification system. You get money on Monday, but then it is ripped out of your tiny little hands when you don’t slant, chant, track and nod.
And you get to save for your DREAM college Tshirt because these are “scholars”….the kind that follow orders, practice taking tests and walk in silence…the charter scholar.
Token Economy System: The Merit/Demerit system feeds into our token economy DREAM Dollars Program. Students receive $100 of mock money every Monday and work to maintain those dollars every day based on their demonstration of our DREAM Values, both behaviorally and academically. Each week scholars and families receive a weekly balance sheet totaling earned token dollars that they can save or spend on DREAM-value items (DREAM pencils or Excellence pencil case), school supplies, college t-shirts, or uniform items. We train, support, and hold all scholars to the highest academic standards beginning with our Code of Conduct, Honor Code, and Attendance Policy. We sweat the small stuff in a reasonable but incredibly Determined way so that Excellence can be achieved. Our DREAM Values stand for Determination, Responsibility, Excellence, Ambition, and Mastery.
Tony Bennett is the new Florida Education Commissioner. Boo!
Tony Bennett
http://www.indystar.com/viewart/20121212/NEWS04/212120338/Indiana-school-superintendent-Tony-Bennett-named-Florida-education-leader?odyssey=tab%7Cmostpopular%7Ctext%7COPINION
I have a student in my after school program who faced severe penalties for violations of these norms in his charter school (I’m just gonna call it out: Achievement First in East New York, Brooklyn). This is a place where he received a demerit for picking up his pencil from the floor without first raising his hand, a “ghost demerit” for having part of his shirt untucked in the hallway (he was sanctioned from afar and found out about this violation when he got a print out of the summary of violations for the week), and a demerit for being off task during a test (he said he was thinking about the math problem), among many other things. He’s been suspended countless times for the sum of these infractions each week. Oh. And he’s TWELVE YEARS OLD. Racial and cultural dynamics enter as well. Adolescence be damned, I guess.
I called for a meeting as a community partner – no response. His mom was consistently ignored. My student was discouraged and finally was able to transfer a few weeks ago.
I still want to visit…
Ah, if we only could make the teachers and students into interchangeable, identically machined parts! How well the machine would operate then! What a vision for the future! Identical standards, curricula, texts, teaching methods, assessments–that’s the way to go. How very wonderfully our schools and economy will work when we have eliminated all variation, all uniqueness, all individual passions for particular topics (with their associated dangers to the all-knowing, all-benevolent state)! How comforting to know that we will be able to walk into a classroom, anywhere, and see that students are “doing” standard number 3.W.6a from 10:13 to 10:42 on November 2nd of the year, following precisely the same protocols! None of this fussiness, anymore, of teachers and students having “ideas” and “interests” and “passions” and “unique learnings, propensities, and experiences” of their own! Identical outcomes for everyone! That’s the ticket and the goal, and IT WILL BE ENFORCED. Welcome to the machine!
P.S. Dr. Ravitch: Cease and desist order. It has come to our attention that you have been using the terms liberty, freedom, individuality, etc., which are registered trademarks of PearsonGoldmanBainAmerica, Inc. Don’t make us turn you over for reprogramming! A gentle reminder.
reposting this with a slight correction of the grammar. It was, alas, written in haste
Ah, if we only could make the teachers and students into interchangeable, identically machined parts! How well the machine would operate then! What a vision for the future! Identical standards, curricula, texts, teaching methods, assessments–that’s the way to go. How very wonderfully our schools and economy will work when we have eliminated all variation, all uniqueness, all individual passions for particular topics (with their associated dangers to the all-knowing, all-benevolent state)! How comforting to know that we will be able to walk into a classroom, anywhere, and see that students are “doing” standard number 3.W.6a from 10:13 to 10:42 on November 2nd of the year, following precisely the same protocols followed in every other classroom! None of this fussiness, anymore, of teachers and students having “ideas” and “interests” and “passions” and “unique learnings, propensities, and experiences” of their own! Identical outcomes for everyone! That’s the ticket and the goal, and IT WILL BE ENFORCED. Welcome to the machine!
P.S. Dr. Ravitch: Cease and desist order. It has come to our attention that you have been using the terms liberty, freedom, individuality, etc., which are registered trademarks of PearsonGoldmanBainAmerica, Inc. Don’t make us turn you over for reprogramming! A gentle reminder.
Alas, still a grammar error in that post: “of their own” is, of course, redundant given the preceding word “unique.” Gee, if only I had had a Brave New World education conducted by teachers with no minds of their own, I would have mastered the relevant standards and wouldn’t make these careless human errors.
All satire aside, I want to say this: The people I learned from, the teachers whom I shall honor all my days, could not have given a hoot for top-down standards and curricula because they were, to a person, at every grade level, the ones who were quirky, individualistic, passionately interested in what they had learned in their unique paths, and I received the windfall of those passions. That’s what happens when real learning is really transmitted. These idiot corporate reformers and their wind-up toys in Congress cannot have any notion what real learning is if they think that it can be standardized and enforced from on high.
Just read this comment in the EduShyster post regarding “non compliant” students and disciplinary procedures there:
“My experience has been that these students aren’t visibly “forced out” or “counseled out”–they’re just completely ignored by the administration. Suspended twice per week? Oh well, try again next week. Detention every day? Keep at it! With no intervention in place, parents inevitably pull these students from the school, and the admin can claim no one was counseled out.”
Yup. This was my student.
I’m the author of the comment you cited. And I just wanted to follow up by saying that this form of counseling out is far more pernicious than any overt exclusion since it’s much, much harder to prove.
Something needs to be done about this. Charter schools should be forced to specify what interventions will be in place for students who are obviously struggling to meet behavioral expectations. Repeated suspensions–in school or out of school–and detentions are NOT interventions.
So, do they serve Soylent Green in the cafeteria?
The only thing I can do when I read such absurdities is to reach for another beer to numb myself. And I thought the nuns back in the sixties were bad.
Malia and Sasha wouldn’t last a day.
Yup. I have a friend who worked in a charter school like this. Silent breakfast and silent lunch! Kids marched around the common room while chanting. Rapid fire drill questions from the principal in the morning before class. Kids must be on task at all times. Parent concerns were ignored. To her credit, she quit after 4 months saying that she didn’t agree with their philosophy.
Isn’t this approach similar to the ones in Teach like a Champion? We have to read it and discuss it monthly as it was touted as one of the best books about how to teach. I dont like it at all, it reminds me of basic training, but many here love it.
We are “teaching like champions”, too. I think the charter school described goes farther than anything I’ve read about in TLaC. Parts of the book are common sense, I think. But it disturbs me that my administration keeps jumping on every zeitgeist wagon that rolls into town. My brain is cluttered with all the techniques that I have to utilize in my lesson. The what of my teaching sometimes takes a back seat.
Sad to say that the public school in which I work has adopted many of the strategies that charters use. We now have silent passing in our halls, despite the fact that the walls are covered with colorful children’s work which no one is allowed to look at or comment upon. After lunch those children who spoke during lunch are denied recess.
I teach pre-k and have noticed in the last year or two, but particularly this year that many of my students no longer have any curiosity. When we talked about what they knew about snow and what they would like to know more about snow, not one child could think of anything he/she wanted to know. They have become robots who just wait to be feed information which they can vomit back. We talk about higher level and critical thinking but we are doing nothing to encourage it.
There is “no excuse” for a school like this to ever be in existense. I hope the parents and the comunity reject this school.
existence
Shades of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Mao must have been an early education reformer. Who knew?