A new blogger enters the national scene!
This blog is devoted to fairy tales and other simple legends that show the fallacies of the corporate reform movement.
This post is about Chicken Little. Remember Chicken Little? He was hit on the head and went to tell the world that the sky was falling.
There are many other great fairy tales, Dr. Seuss tales, myths, etc. to explain the current madness of “reform.”
The one that comes to mind immediately is “the emperor’s new clothes.” Just guess who the emperor is? Who will tell him the truth.
What is your favorite tale that strips bare the pretensions of those who think that testing will close the achievement gap, that privatization is the way to advance equity, and that constant battering of teachers will attract better people into teaching?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane, thank you for helping me try to start a following! This Chicken Little story is actually a very slight rewrite of the one I wrote for an old blog I had back in 2007-2010. I quit teaching in 2010. It is possible a tiny handful of your readers might remember the piece from back then. Just didn’t want to convey the impression that it’s a brand new piece. I’m a little embarrassed I only have a single post thus far but I will be adding more asap. Again, thank you so much.
Tauna, I’m working on a radio show for KBOO.fm (local community radio in Portland, Oregon) about our teachers’ struggles locally and the defense of public education. Any chance I could call you and record you reading this story? It’s great.
Megan, I never saw this until just now. So sorry. Can we connect? My email is tauna.renee@gmail.com
Years ago, when I first started teaching, I remember a few fellow teachers who felt that some of their colleagues needed to be “reigned in” by administration for being too… well, there were different things, but they all had in common that they were behaviors and characteristics that the complainers didn’t agree with. Some of these things were very minor, like wearing jeans to school or not insisting that students keep notes the “right” way. The complainers wished and wished for an administration that had more power to control their wayward fellows and “make them right”.
Every now and then a new policy would be enacted that the usual complainers would get excited about and then dismayed by when it didn’t force their colleagues into line as much as they had hoped it would.
Back then, I photocopied and distributed one of Aesop’s fables — The Frogs who Wanted a King — to a faculty member who had told me that she mentally checked out of faculty meetings whenever she heard the usual complainers start up about “too many kids in the hall”, “teachers who were too permissive”, “inappropriate dress”, etc.
That was back at the dawn of NCLB, and the faculty member passed away between then and now, but I think she would agree with me that things were better under King Log than they are under the tyrant Stork.
Full disclosure — my school is a Transformation School.
I remember a cautionary tale I saw acted out as a kid whereby a man goes in the shed to get some cider and he sees an axe. He begins to cry. A gal comes in and asks why he’s crying. “Supposin’ we were to get married. And we was to have a son. . .,” he explains in dialect, “and supposin’ that son grows up to be a boy and he comes out here to get some cider and that axe falls on him,” and the weeping continues. Then she joins in and grandma comes out to the shed and she shares the story and grandpa and uncle and auntie and they are all wailin’ and weepin’ until finally the young boy in the family comes out the shed and they tell him the story and he tells them how foolish they are being crying over speculation. I have thought of that story a number of times in the last year from what I read on education reform. The whole global readiness and global economy bit with people wailin’ about whether the next generation will be ready.
Secondly, I think of a Caldecott book I have mentioned before whereby an inch worm measures different birds—the robin, the flamingo, the heron, the hummingbird, having a wonderful time. Then the nightingale wants him to measure her song. Perplexed, the inch worm informs the nightingale that a song cannot be measured. So the nightingale threatens to eat the inch worm. Cleverly, the inch worm agrees to measure the song, and so as the nightingale sings, the inch worm measures away. . .”inch by inch. . .until he had inched out of sight.”
Even though my state has introduced a bill to take a good hard look at Common Core, nothing will change (based on that legislation) until 2016. I hope somehow we can have the good fate of the inch worm and that the wailing over the global economy will cease.
“Of course you realize this means war!”
~ Bugs Bunny
I like that one!!!!
No Fairy Tale! Just got an email from a desparate teacher who needs help trying to save her outdoor water garden that she and her students built on their campus. It seems that the school building inspection police believe it is a safety hazard. They have drained the pond (without even informing the teachers/students who built it and were using it for instruction) thus destroying its aquatic inhabitants, and told the principal to get rid of it. This isn’t corporate education reform, it’s just shortsighted bureautic bull#^&*. Similiar things happen every summer when the kids plant a school garden and then leave for the summer. The summer maintenance crew, even when informed to leave the garden alone, often comes around and just mows right over the garden as if it were part of the lawn. It shows how far we have gone away from putting CHILDREN’,S EDUCATION as the top priority in many of our public schools.
What I REALLY liked was the comment about the Lincoln Tunnel, the boy & the stuck truck! Is that true? (Someone from NYC–Diane?–please answer–I MUST know!)
If so–amazing!