Amanda Shaw writes here about what happened when students were allowed to write without the threat of a test hanging over them. She is a full-time elementary school teacher of music, who also helps students learn to write. In this post, she describes an experience that reminded her why she loves teaching. Imagine giving students the freedom to be creative!
Archives for the year of: 2013
I received this comment after writing that Moses had to take his people into the desert for 40 years because a new generation had to be born who would think as free men, not slaves.
Kathy wrote this:
Dear Diane: Learning how to think like free people/educators and not slaves really is the central message. I am hoping you have a slew of press appearances when the September book debuts. I know that will be physically taxing so please, everybody send Diane the required energy because we desperately need you to broadcast loud and clear. This may be our collective last chance to really get the word out. The corporate culture of NCLB and the advent of Common Core are the new Jim Crow but this incarnation is attacking the growth and development of every USA child. Crippled citizens won’t take this nation forward and neither will an oligarchy nurtured in a wave of not very good, (segregated by color and class) private and charter schools. This is a democracy where we receive our possibilities from one another, a gift and a responsibility. Kathy
Kathy, I need your good wishes, and even your prayers. Given my age, I need all the energy you can send my way.
There will be many speaking engagements, many opportunities to explain to the public what we should be doing instead of demonizing teachers and public education.
Hopefully, even some TV time, though I don’t know about that yet. Until now, the privatizers have commanded the air waves.
I promise I will stand up for you, I will fight for you.
I can’t do it alone.
I need you.
I need all the Badass Teachers.
I need everyone to speak up, act up, act out, in defense of children’s right to a childhood; in defense of a noble profession, which is being destroyed by heedless politicians; in defense of public education, which is an essential institution in a democratic society.
You may find this hard to believe, Kathy, but I think the tide is turning.
I think the whole ed reform project is collapsing in slow motion.
Not only is the public awakening to the damage the “reformers” are doing, but every one of their ill-founded ideas has failed.
Thus far, they have “succeeded” only in demoralizing teachers and principals, closing public schools by the dozens, and turning education into nothing more than testing and test prep.
We will win, because we are on the right side of children and of education and of democracy.
Tim Slekar is a teacher educator and a fearless firebrand, known for his work @the chalkface and for some very pointed videos. He recently became dean of teacher education at a college in the Midwest. His college president asked for his opinion of the recent report of the National Council on Teacher Quality, which lacerated teacher education in America by reviewing course catalogues and reading lists, not by personal campus visits.
Tim gave the president his candid opinion. Read what happened. It will surprise you.
A teacher in Broward County writes:
“I am tired of hearing about data. We teach CHILDREN, every time I hear about the data, I feel like they think we are training lab mice,”
A reader sent the following commentary on reformers’ efforts to lower standards for educators and to welcome people without professional preparation and credentials to teach in and administer the nation’s public schools and charter schools. His response was prompted by a post about teachers in Arizona with online degrees. He writes:
“Arizona teacher: “I have seen staffs comprised of high school graduate teachers who bought their degrees online and took not one college level course.”
To the Arizona teacher… destroying the profession of teaching and filling it with unqualified faux teachers is not a bug in the privatizers’ “reform” model, it is a feature.
I just found this from the Connecticut Policy Institute—a “think tank” and “a non-partisan research institute on Connecticut economic policy and education reform” that fronts for for-profit business interests that are trying to profit from the privatization of education. To do this, they put out bogus “studies” and “policy papers” in support of these business interests’ practices and approaches to privatized education:
In this op-ed, Ben Zimmer defends Vallas’ lack of credentialing, but goes one further.
Not only should there be no credential requirement for Superintendents, THERE SHOULD BE NO CREDENTIALING OR EDUCATION REQUIREMENT OF TEACHERS (???!!!) as well as ADMINISTRATORS.
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Ben Zimmer: “With a few exceptions, Connecticut law requires teachers to have a degree in education, meaning many talented people who didn’t decide to become teachers until after completing their educations have difficulty doing so.
“This serves the economic interests of existing teachers and administrators by limiting competition for their jobs, but does not advance the goal of obtaining the highest quality teaching and administration possible.”
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Don’t you get it? If the government entity in charge of education requires thing like ohhh… bachelor’s degrees, or even 2-year community college associate degrees… or even one single college course… well, you’re just “serving the economic interest of existing teachers and administrators by limiting competition for their jobs.”
Those teachers who’ve actually achieved these “worthless degrees” will bring along with them accompanying demands for a decent salary, health benefits, retirement, etc…. AND WHO NEEDS THAT when you’re trying to make a profit… err… excuse me… make “transformational change” in education?
Oh, you don’t believe this? Well, Connecticut Policy Institute’s “studies and papers” have “proven” all of this to be true… that you need nothing more than a high school diploma to teach in K-12 schools.
Zimmer goes on:
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Ben Zimmer: “As the Connecticut Policy Institute has discussed in our papers on education reform, there is no evidence linking certification regimes to teachers’ or administrators’ effectiveness in increasing student achievement. They simply serve to limit the recruitment pipeline of outstanding educators and keep the antiquated education administration departments of the state university system in business.”
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An organization fronting for business interests that want to profit from the privatization of education—some of them charter school chain CEO”s making $500,000/year or more (Geoffrey Canada)—has its spokesman attacking education departments—some of them Ivy League universities… most of them having turning out quality teachers for 100-150 years or more—as only being “in business” to advance the selfish financial interests of their administrators and professors that work in them. They are deliberately blocking “outstanding educators” from entering the field because they are out for themselves, and not the students’.
Wow! I”m so glad someone’s finally blowing the lid off this!
But then look at this assclown Zimmer’s bio at Connecticut Policy Institute:
http://ctpolicyinstitute.org/about/bio/ben-zimmer/leadership
He proudly touts his own education credentials:
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“Ben received a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he specialized in business law and economic policy, and a B.A., magna cum laude with highest honors in history, from Harvard College.”
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But Ben, I thought those high-falutin’ things like degrees didn’t matter. Aren’t those “J.D.’s” and “B.A.s” and “magna cum laude’s” just worthless pieces of paper spit out by “antiquated” entities that are only trying to keep themselves “in business” to pay the undeserved salaries of the folks who work in them?
No, no, no… you see in Ben’s world, rigid requirements like… oh… years of post-secondary education, or even passing a certification test…. those things only matter in OTHER careers or professions. They don’t matter in the realm of K-12 education… as his noble “kids first” organization, Connecticut Policy Institute, has produced studies and papers” have “proven” that.
No, according to Ben, teaching is like working the fry machine at McDonald’s… just let anyone in the door—education and credentials be damned—to have at it and compete for the job, then just keep the ones who do it best. And THAT is how you end up with a staff of what Ben describes as a nation of “outstanding educators.”
Got that?
You see the way to get better teachers in front of kids is just simple… so simple that those antiquated ed departments full of money-motivated hacks have been missing it for over 150 years.
The way to fill our country’s schools with “outstanding educators” is to lower or even eliminate the standards and requirements for becoming one.
That’s it!!!! Why hasn’t anyone thought of that until now?
What’s that, you say? The highest achieving nations like Finland and South Korea don’t operate that way? In those countries, becoming a teacher is as difficult and demanding as becoming a doctor?
Well, that would never work here in the United States.
Anthony Cody describes his debate with a reader who thinks Public education should be wiped out and started over from scratch. The reader remembers seeing a few stories about some schools that succeeded with every single child. Cody gently explains why some schools produce miraculous results by excluding the children likely to get low scores and by losing a significant number of students before graduation.
This is the exchange that all of us have had again and again. We have to keep putting facts and reality on the table, and eventually people will be embarrassed to offer silver bullets and miracle cures for education.
Anthony Weiner took his faltering campaign to Staten Island, to talk about the aftereffects of Hurricane Sandy, but he can’t avoid questions about his “sexting.”
In this instance, he was confronted by a teacher, and she let him have it.
She asked the simple question, where do you have the moral authority to lead the city?
Weiner ducked the question.
Stick to the issues, he said.
Joy Resmovits, the education reporter for Huffington Post, is usually a sharp and thoughtful reporter, but she had a bad day today.
Today she posted an article blaming “bad” teachers for the achievement gap between black and white students.
Along the way, she makes some factual errors. For example, she states that the achievement gap in ninth grade reading narrowed from 1994-2012, from 33 points to 13.
But that is wrong, for two reasons.
First, NAEP doesn’t test ninth grade. It tests fourth and eighth grades.
Second, the achievement gap for eighth grade shrank during that period from 30 points to 25 points.
She says the achievement gap persists because black students get less experienced teachers (Teach for America?) and have less success in raising test scores (tautology, anyone?).
Joy should know that the achievement gap exists before the first day of school in kindergarten.
It is nourished by large socioeconomic differences.
The achievement gap is an opportunity gap.
Black students are far likelier than white students to live in poverty, to miss school because of illness, to live in bad housing, to be homeless, to have less access to medical care, to live with tremendous economic insecurity.
Their families have fewer resources to invest in them.
The fact that there is an achievement gap is not prima facie evidence that those who teach black students are not good teachers.
Frankly, it is not like Joy to sound like Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, and Arne Duncan.
Joy Resmovits owes an apology to the many thousands of urban teachers who are hard-working, dedicated to their students, and determined to educate them despite the insults hurled their way by politicians and the media.
A comment from a reader who has seen the results of No Child Left Behind:
“1) The system is broken from top to bottom. The vast majority of people making these decisions have not set foot into a classroom since they graduated from college.
2) An administrator makes any where from double to four times as much money as the teachers who work 50+ hours a week teaching, prepping, and grading.
3) Common Core, NCLB, Race to the Top, and any other program designed to “make education better” are nothing more than band-aids that only slow the bleeding. We need to completely reconstruct our education system from the bottom up and focus more on the individual needs of every child through curriculums designed to highlight the creative exceptionalism of each child.
4) Cutting money from the public system to then allow room for vouchers should be a red flag to any citizen with an ounce of common sense – we’re not addressing the issue of horrible school reforms of the past, but instead we’re aiding in the speed of how fast our public system will die. If every child deserves a quality education, why aren’t we evaluating our current system and finding ways to completely reconstruct it in a way that it is successful.
5) For everyone on this board who has attacked educators and their apparent “lazy” behaviors, it is obvious that you have no idea what is happening inside the classrooms now. Since “A Nation at Risk”, teachers have been slowly stripped of their ability to do what it is that they are overpaid to do: teach. Instead, they have been forced into a world of teaching to a test that barely covers the amount of practical knowledge students need. I am an English Teacher at a community college here in NC, and every semester in my 2-3 freshman comp classes I see the results of NCLB. I have 30 18-21-year-olds who can’t write a complete sentence. I have never blamed a single high school teacher, middle school teacher, nor have I blamed any elementary teacher for this lack of skill. 15 years ago when I entered the profession, the quality was much higher even for a community college. I have witnessed the slow decline of intelligence, and it has nothing to do with the teachers, but the resources that these teachers are losing. You want to support the cut in funding? Fine. Let’s divert the money that administration is getting into better programs, let’s re-envision how education works and construct a system that allows for the money we are dealt, and let’s face the facts: “bad” teachers make up less than 5% of the working population. The rest of the teachers out there are fighting to keep this sinking ship afloat.
If you think you can do a better job, get the damn degree and do the job yourself. Other wise, let the people who have been trained to do this job do their job.
Supporters of public schools in Virginia will be car-pooling to join the weekly protest at the North Carolina state Capitol called Moral Monday. If you can be there to support public schools, to oppose budget cuts and privatization, please join them.
This comes from Rachel Levy in Virginia:
“There is going to be a big Moral Monday event in support of public education & in protest of education cuts in NC: http://www.ncae.org/whats-new/moral-monday-protest-walk-join-us/
The VEA in neighboring Virginia will be hosting car pools to the event. From the VEA: “car pools are forming at VEA headquarters, 116 South 3rd Street, Richmond, at 11:15 am for a noon departure. The rally is being organized to protest steep cuts to North Carolina public education. The North Carolina Association of Educators HQ, the pre-rally meeting spot, is at 700 South Salisbury St. NCAE asks that you wear RED. Get more information at http://www.ncae.org.”
