This powerful speech was written and delivered by Frank Sutliff to a crowd of concerned citizens and educators at the Oneonta (New York) Forum on January 18, 2014. Sutliff is a Principal and is also the President of SAANYS (School Administrators Association of New York State).
He said:
I appreciate the opportunity I have been given to speak here today. Although I am the President of the School Administrators Association of New York State, better known as SAANYS, I am not here today representing this organization of over 7000 administrators. Instead, I am here as a veteran Principal with 26 years of experience running a junior-senior high school, as well as having been in education over 30 years.
”here is one main issue for me with the APPR, the common core, and what I call the corporate takeover of American public education. That issue is the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on something that is of questionable benefit to children in any way, shape, or form. This hysteria over college and career readiness is a manufactured crisis based on data that compares apples to oranges, a crisis designed to enrich the coffers of publishing companies. The illusion that children in the United States are ill prepared and that they will never be competitive in a world market has manifested itself in many ways. I will concentrate on three of these issues today- the corporate takeover of education, high stakes testing, and the questionable data gathering in New York State via InBloom.
“Recent announcements out of the Governor’s office state how students are being “put first” in improving and reforming education and that education funding has been increased by $1.8 billion over the last two years.
Let me talk about how students are being “put first” in my district the last two years. I am sure that many of you here in the audience have seen the same thing.
• Is cutting 14 courses so that some students sit in so called “study halls” or the senior lounge for five periods a day “putting students first”? We no longer offer Computer Graphic Design, Construction Systems, World War II, or History and Digital Media just to name a few courses lost to cuts to teaching positions.
• Is the end of all professional development, including curriculum mapping and data analysis “putting students first?”
• Is cutting a guidance counselor as students’ academic and emotional needs increase “putting students first”?
• Is the cutting of numerous sports, clubs, and activities “putting students first”?
In this state and across the country, where we have been sold a bag of goods with Race to the Top, we are supposedly “putting students first”. In my district, we could “put students first” by providing them with needed and desired courses, providing their teachers with professional development, and providing these students with services and activities. Instead, on the Friday before Christmas, I received yet another huge shipment of common core modules where kindergarten students can learn about Mesopotamia, fifth graders can do close reading of passages from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and high school students can close read documents from the Federal Reserve Bank. As I sorted and distributed these boxes of material, I could see my senior lounge where students sit period after period due to the lack of course offerings. However, the millions and millions of dollars for Expeditionary Learning and Common Core Inc. continue to flow unabated.
“I am encouraged by the efforts of groups such as yours and I feel that grassroots efforts such as those done by the “Oneonta Area for Public Education” are well worth the effort in trying to effect change.
“I would like to share an email that I wrote about these issues and then sent to my teachers a few months ago. I believe my email sums up where we now are in this fight to restore sanity to our schools and how groups such as yours came to be.
“As the wasteful APPR system came into being with hundreds of millions foolishly allocated through Obama’s Race to the Top, there was little public outcry against it. Any objections were mainly from educators and the public could have cared less due to the disdain spewed against teachers and administrators by our governor and others. When the common core came in with it, there was little outcry against it, as no one understood the implications- a few “shifts” here and there and a few billions for testing and publishing companies. Again, no one outside of education really cared as criticisms were viewed as just those of whiny teachers and self serving administrators.
During this time, various educational groups formed to fight back against these initiatives, particularly on Long Island and in Western New York. However, these were isolated pockets and the public took little or no interest, nor did the legislators.
However, when students returned to school and began to have hours and hours of homework with the expectation that parents would help with things they did not know and when young elementary students started saying that they hated school, things began to change quickly. The final straw was when the test results were sent home; parents who had previously been told that their children were above average and doing well found out that their children were instead, barely achieving and in need of AIS. This is when the heat got turned up, resulting in common core forums where parents (“special interest” groups according to Commissioner King) got involved and heatedly voiced their opinions. As we know, this resulted in the cancellation of these forums by King and a public outcry.
What Commissioner King does not understand and has not dealt with in his limited experience as a school administrator is the vehemence of parents when it comes to defending their children. Any administrator with experience understands this and this is when the top down and forced compliance of the APPR/common core debacle thankfully went off the track. When parents got involved because their children were treated as lab experiments and started to voice their opinions as well as contact their legislators, the “revolt” against this nonsense found its voice.”
This is the voice with which you are all now speaking- speaking out against all of the testing, all of the squandered resources, and the decisions being made by corporate leaders with no experience in public schools. I look at my own district and try to find one positive thing about the APPR and the common core and I find none. However, when I look at the negative impact it has brought us, I see morale at an all time low, teachers reluctant to share their practices with colleagues due to concerns about their “score” and money spent on purchasing tests that could be spent on students. This is my own experience; to be fair, I know colleagues in other districts and within my own professional organization who appear to be quite pleased with the so called reform agenda, particularly the common core. My question to them would be the same- could these hundreds of millions have been better spent by providing services and opportunities to students instead of being spent in a top down experiment?
I would like to take a few minutes to talk about the testing. I have been giving 3-8 assessments (in my case 7-8), as well as Regents exams for years and years. I never had a problem with these tests before, other than a few blips along the way (a 2004 fiasco with Algebra being a prime example). Overall, it was an excellent system with tests of relatively high quality administered from district to district. What we did at my school with the 3-8 assessments in particular was to invite K-12 teachers as a group to scrutinize and study them in the following year. We looked for strengths and weaknesses, not to get better test scores, but to inform instruction. In fact, leading these data groups was one of the highlights of my professional career- to have 3rd grade teachers discussing math standards with the trig teacher is a wonderful use of educators’ time. However, with no money for professional development and the secretive nature of the tests now, this activity no longer occurs.
Now as part of “putting students first” and the mantra of college and career readiness, we give 3-8 tests that are longer than the law boards and include concepts and topics never taught. This is part of the now famous State Ed analogy of “building the plane in the air.” However, as we “build the plane in the air”, we not only fail children, we fail their teachers in the quest to make teaching an activity that can be assigned a number.
Another thing associated with testing that I find truly disingenuous is the notion put out from Albany that all of the additional SLO testing is the fault of districts and the APPR plans they adopted. The fact that we spend money purchasing these tests for the so called non-core courses and then waste students’ time giving them came directly from State Ed as they instituted the APPR. This testing, given for no other reason than to give teachers who do not get a NYS growth score a number, comes right out of Albany’s directives and their inability to answer simple APPR questions with one consistent and correct answer. To suggest otherwise and to blame districts for this is disingenuous.
I am not going to go into specifics about the common core due to time limitations today; I will leave that better said by others. However, as a former librarian, it is hard to see the little regard with which fiction is held as we are given mandated acceptable levels of nonfiction. As a child growing up in Gloversville, my books came from the Gloversville Free Library and so did much of my education. I know that I loved reading due to the worlds that it opened; I also know that our so called close readings of prescribed documents and passages will not open up that same love of literature in today’s students.
Everywhere I turn the common core rears its head. One of the most disappointing recently was on the Kindle Free Time product that Amazon.com offers. My soon to be four year old granddaughter enjoys this feature of the Kindle with all of its games, activities, books, and videos; it really is a wonderful product. Recently Amazon tweeted out “Kindle Free Time launches Learn First and Bedtime Educational Features.” I saw the tweet and thought great, a good product getting even better. I clicked on the link and saw the following- “Now with thousands of educational titles- hundreds of common core aligned level readers and supplemental readers.” Enough is enough- preschool?- can’t kids just have fun?
Finally, I want to discuss one other area of Race to the Top that is very concerning to me and should concern you as parents and educators- InBloom. This is the data system New York State has bought into where students’ confidential information is stored by private companies in the cloud. In fact, this data system is so concerning that some districts are returning Race to the Top funds in an attempt to not have their children’s private data stored in this way. One example is the Pearl River School system; on October 31 they voted to opt out of Race to the Top, due to concerns about privacy. Their Superintendent, Dr. John Morgano, was quoted as saying “However, we learned from the State Education Department that they will be collecting individual student discipline data and sending it to InBloom. There is no need for a private company to possess a child’s disciplinary history so that it is potentially available to prospective colleges and employers. I will not be a party to this infringement of privacy rights.” Kudos to Superintendent Morgano and I second this, as should each of you. I have handled all the student discipline in my school for the past 26 years. I send a form or letter or a certified letter home, depending on the incident, and then put a copy in my desk for future discarding, never in the student’s permanent file.
Although I know my way around data, computers, and student systems, I do not put discipline in digital form in our student system for just that reason. I have no problem reporting out to State Ed that I suspended 20 students out of school last year; however, I can think of no reason why they or a private company needs the name of these students. This assault on privacy, which is all too commonplace in our country today, should concern each of you.
In closing, I received a memo dated October 24, 2013 from our Education Commissioner, as did most of you working in schools. This memo detailed changes in testing, continued the illusion of our failures as educators, and ended with the statement “Teaching is the core.”
Of course, “teaching is the core” but making a difference in the life of a child should be more of the core. Learning and motivating children to develop their full potential is the core art of teaching. I could stand here the rest of the afternoon as could each of you and mention a teacher or adult who has impacted our lives. For me it was Zane Peterson from Gloversville High School, Dr. Wayne Mahood at SUNY Geneseo, and Esther Tasner, Children’s Librarian at the Gloversville Free Library. For you, the names are different but the idea is the same.
An anonymous public school teacher in Delaware wrote the following which appeared in a blog site on Washington.com; it was then quoted in an article by Valarie Strauss and I would like to share it with you. “They assume the best teaching and best learning can be quantified with tests and data. Yet I’ve never once had a student compliment me on my academic knowledge or my data collection skills. I’ve never had a student thank me for writing insightful test questions or staying up late to write a stunning lesson plan. But students HAVE thanked me for being there, for listening to them, for encouraging them, for believing in them even before they could believe in themselves.”
In our field of education, these stories happen every day. Just a few weeks ago, my ninth grade English teacher spent hours of each day helping a young lady who had previously met with very little academic success in her life. This teacher worked with her as she prepared her speech for a local oratorical contest, and this same student placed and went on to the next levels. To see the hugs and the high fives for this girl’s success and to see her beaming with pride is really what it is all about. This young student, years from now, won’t recall her close reads or the scripted lessons that have resulted from the state’s fabricated illusion of our failing students and failing educators. However, she will recall the kindness of this teacher helping her to be successful; this kindness is not quantifiable, data driven, or able to be reported to the state. Really, at the end of the day and at the end of a career, isn’t it all about helping a child to be successful?
Thank you for allowing me to share some thoughts with you this afternoon and I thank you for your efforts on behalf of all of our children.
Great… KC
Sent from my iPhone
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Reblogged this on Transparent Christina and commented:
This is EXACTLY where DE is heading, full speed ahead. Click to read the rest, it’s particularly well written.
Each and every day I leave my classroom wondering, did I really help a child learn today? Or is it all just for the tests? Yesterday we worked on similes, such as sly as a fox, cute as a button, sharp as a tack-no one hears or knows them any more. How sad that generations of kids no longer even know the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf? What are we doing here? Where are our traditions going to? How will America’s children remember the past? It scares the heck out of me.
Bravo.
Oh MY….
This is a perfect assessment of the Failing of the Common Core $$-hungry Deformers…
All of this post is so true…..
I was wondering if it is against the law to share the student data…discipline or academic?
Am I wrong on this?
It really is a perfect assessment!
It used to be illegal until Arne Duncan’s DOE gave away FERPA student privacy rights via regulations issued a few years ago authorizing the sharing of PII (personally identifiable information) with third parties such as inBloom who in turn can share it with private businesses. It’s all on the DOE website if you’re interested. They are very helpful to these corporate interests providing forms & such to guide the corporate interests along in their quest to profit from our children & usurp our taxpayer dollars for themselves.
Integrity in Education, led by Sabrina Stevens, has just filed a FOIA for all DOE documentation, emails, etc., to find out exactly how DOE has been infiltrated & carries the water for the corporate interests & private foundations who are attempting to takeover education. DOE just denied Integrity in Education’s request for a FOIA fee waiver to effectively make it cost prohibitive for this non-profit group to force transparency on DOE.
If you follow Teacher Sabrina on twitter you can learn more.
Unfortunately, legal proceedings, if any, will be buried until Arne is long out of office.
The following from Franks’s post sums it all in a nutshell….Is anyone listening…???
Now as part of “putting students first” and the mantra of college and career readiness, we give 3-8 tests that are longer than the law boards and include concepts and topics never taught.
This is part of the now famous State Ed analogy of “building the plane in the air.”
However, as we “build the plane in the air”, we not only fail children, we fail their teachers in the quest to make teaching an activity that can be assigned a number.
“Building the plane in the air” is an expression that proves the idiocy of the people who use it. All you have to do is think what would happen if we actually built a plane in the air, and who would be willing to get on such a plane. But idiocy, sadly, rule the day. Thanks to all those parents and this administrator who know horsepucky when they see it.
Bravo. Good for him. One of the things I think parents have been told all of these reforms are supplemental, a benefit IN ADDITION to what they had in public schools, but that isn’t true. This is a fairy tale. The truth is there are only so many hours in a day and dollars in a budget and trade-offs have to be made. The truth is the reform agenda is supplanting what was there before, a decade ago, or it is here.
We’ve lost a lot. We’ve lost millions in funding. I remember the year we lost field trips and the following year we lost art and the following year we went to “pay to play” for school sports.
So the question then becomes for me, “is it worth it? is what we’re getting in return valuable”? I’m not seeing any benefit after a decade of this. I’m seeing a lot of LOSS, but no benefit.
Serving as a inner city high school librarian, I really appreciate Frank’s quote on how Fiction books have been de-valued in the age of Common Core. THANK YOU for this statement!
“I know that I loved reading due to the worlds that it opened; I also know that our so called close readings of prescribed documents and passages will not open up that same love of literature in today’s students.”
Poweful indeed. I’m always thrilled to hear of administrators backing their teachers. That’s what I call teamwork.
On the subject of loss, and telling people fairy tales, here’s the Mayor of Chicago struggling with his sales pitch:
“Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Tuesday dismissed criticism aimed at his hand-picked school board’s decision to approve seven new charter schools after it shuttered 47 neighborhood schools last year, saying they’re two separate issues.”
It’s all upside! Choice! No one loses, everyone wins!
It’s just nonsense. The fact is those people lost their neighborhood schools. They were told the school wouldn’t be replaced by charters, and then they WERE replaced by charters, so in addition to their schools, I imagine they have completely lost trust in the ed reform leadership in that city.
These are losses. Maybe he’s offering them some future benefit, I don’t know, but to deny that they lost something is delusional.
I think it goes to a difference in what the two groups value. He didn’t value those schools so to him closing them is all upside. It’s all GREEEAAT! How is this fantasy sales pitch “telling parents the truth”?
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-01-28/news/chi-emanuel-defends-new-charter-schools-20140128_1_seven-new-charter-schools-chicago-teachers-union-hand-picked-school-board
Amen and Amen.
Too, listening to the SOTU, and the now rote repetition of “Tennessee and DC” as ed reform success stories is not at all persuasive to me.
I don’t want a privately-run school system supplanting the publicly-run system I have, and I’m not interested in hiring people who don’t value public schools to run public schools.
Maybe President Obama could point me to an ed reform leader who strengthens or at the very least supports or maintains existing public schools. I might be interested in hearing about that. How many times do they plan to repeat “Tennessee and DC”? Show me a state, district or city where the PUBLIC schools are doing well under ed reformer leadership. That’s what we were promised. That this was “about” improving public schools. I’m a decade into this, and all I hear are charter/voucher/charter/voucher. When does the “PUBLIC school improvement” part begin?
As a public school teacher in Tennessee, I feel the same way you do! I have sent many letters asking that question!
This response open my eyes to the middle class crunch which is being created by funding shortages. I happen to be exposed to two districts that are very affluent and very well funded.
I was not aware of the situtation in middle income schools. My passion and professional experience has been urban education therefore I have intimate knowledge of both ends of the spectrum.
Under the current system the top district will continue to soar
From internal and external funding. (Rewards from Race to the Top)
The urban district are destined to become educational for profit
factories. The quality of the middle will continue to erode resulting reduced opportunities for their students.
“As I sorted and distributed these boxes of material, I could see my senior lounge where students sit period after period due to the lack of course offerings. ”
While I agree with what this principal has to say in general, I also sense that if he hasn’t begun to have done anywhere near enough as he could to combat these educational malpractice as evidenced by his statement above. If it’s wrong, don’t do it. Oh, I know that there are grey fuzzy lines of right and wrong so that it is way too easy to flush away the blame as to who has and continues to “cause” these problems. It’s so easy to be a GAGAer when the shit is hitting the fan in some else’s living room and not one’s own. I am glad to hear this backlash but to put flesh on the bones would have been to return those boxes of materials unopened and refuse to “go along to get along”.
He says “I never had a problem with these tests before. . . ” Yeh because it probably wasn’t negatively affecting his school and position. Now that it is, well time to reconsider being a GAGAer, eh!
Disgenuous fluff is what I read.
Hey folks, it’s an election year. If you want to support Frank and other educators in this fight, find out where the candidates stand and vote the corporate carpetbaggers and their political lackeys down. Get active in the primaries if you can. Try and support candidates while the competition for party candidacy is still open. If you live in a district with an elected school board, organize and vote the bums out. And keep them out! Start facebook campaigns to share information with friends and neighbors. 2014 can be the year that the mouse roars, and the lions shudder. We will know we won when Obama is forced to accept Duncan’s resignation in December! That would be a terrific Christmas gift indeed.
WOW!!!
WOW again. Perfectly put, I will forward this to all my colleagues.
Well said, however I don’t believe any grand testing has value. Assessment must be built in locally and connected with the daily education of the student. You can start today be developing a proficiency based system of education where fasilure is a part of the learning process, a positive thing, and no one is stupid. Here are some thoughts http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/accountability-with-honor-and-yes-we.html
You can see a bigger picture with other blogs of things we actually did many years ago at http://www.wholechildreform.com. Yes they were actually field tested
Perfect. I’ve had the pleasure of working with this man for many years. He is an honorable man – through and through.
Deformers are on the defense thanks to Diane and others like Mr. Sutliff who are standing for public education and exposing the corporate fraud via the USDOE at the same time.
It’s a must read –
Michelle Rhee invites Twitter queries, gets a screenful
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/michelle-rhee-invites-twitter-queries-gets-a-screenfull/2014/01/15/79bdc73a-7dff-11e3-93c1-0e888170b723_story.html
I love it! She really makes me sick.
Just published today-
DC Chancellor Was Informed of Cheating Claim
WASHINGTON January 30, 2014 (AP)
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/dc-chancellor-informed-cheating-claim-22298992
I am a high school AP Language teacher in a suburb of Atlanta, GA, and many of your statements resonated with me:
“This hysteria over college and career readiness is a manufactured crisis based on data that compares apples to oranges, a crisis designed to enrich the coffers of publishing companies.”
— Yes! It IS hysteria, and our students are getting more stressed out each year. They think they have to know everything, and they’re scared. They feel pressured to choose their career path when many of them don’t even know who they are and what their values are yet. They are afraid of failure, and they aren’t allowed to try new things in case they do fail It’s scary and sad. I have so many students who are so worried all the time.
“However, when students returned to school and began to have hours and hours of homework with the expectation that parents would help with things they did not know and when young elementary students started saying that they hated school, things began to change quickly…”
– – Wow. As a parent of a 5th grader this hits home. First, my son is already overloaded with homework, and since I have huge class sizes (35 per class, even though with my gifted endorsement I should be able to have much smaller classes so I can best teach the kids who are gifted but who certainly have their own issues) I do not want to spend hours with him at night. It’s hard. Also, he is already saying he hates school. This makes me sad and a little nervous. But he’s so worried about the testing, the writing assessments, and the labeling of “gifted vs. regular”.
Anyway, I could go on and on. Thanks for a great article.
Elizabeth Jamison
http://www.dissertationgal.com
http://www.writewordediting.com
As a retired teacher (10 years ago) and grandparent I am stunned that this has gone so long without a parent saying; “Hold on, how do we know this is an improvement. Show me the trials and tests of this new Common Core.” There aren’t any, why? Because it has never been tested or evaluated by attempting to implement it. Our kids are going to be the experiment, and if it doesn’t work, oh well there is always some more kids coming along we can try something else on. Educators (teachers, principals and superintendents) weren’t involved in the design nor were they asked for input. Now we are told that there is no place for recommendations, or we can’t even ask for a hold. Parents demand that State Ed. at least hits the pause button before we go over the cliff.
This has been field tested and the data is in our first book, Quashing the Rhetoric of Reform. http://www.wholechildreform.com
More important than the data is seeing the light go off when Sonny discovered the joy or reading. When, instead of raising hell in the hallways, he was still shouting but it was for more reading. This is real, I was there. In fact my blogs are based on what we did in our innovative, fully public, w union, school. Here’s a snap shot of the assessment we used.
For most areas of learning demonstrated proficiencies were the assessment. Your thoughts? http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/accountability-with-honor-and-yes-we.html
Frank,
What you have written makes me so proud to be your cousin. Your references to our wonderful childhoods in Gloversville, where the mission of the adults was to enrich the lives of children through language, reading, playing and other deep experiences that taught us empathy, consideration, civility, and most importantly, to do whatver good we could to benefit others, makes me realize that the childhoods of those who proclaim this nonsensical good of the Alphabet Soup of Reform must have been totally devoid of these experiences. One wonders of what their childhoods did exist, and what the adults in their lives considered their responsibilities to their children, to have created these villains.
Only those who have had the good fortune to have had close relationships with those teachers whose missions were to cultivate the deeper wells of character and talent by caring about us and providing the supportive experiences that would lead us to valuable futures could grasp that what is being fostered upon us today is but a poor imitation of educational policies. Underneath that veneer is the rotting corpse of corporate America, where bureaucrats chase every possible dollar to line their already overflowing pockets at the expense of the lives of vulnerable children and adults.
Please continue use your position at SAANYS this year to educate others, especially the greater public consisting of the families of our students, of the irreparable damage being done to this generation of students. it will take a choir of voices to rise up against this morass of a mess that has been made to education in our state and nation.
With gratitude and pride.
Kathy
Great speech. I wonder if the powers that be will ever hear this, though? As a nation, how will we be able to turn the tide of our national education system becoming more and more privatized? How will we convince the powers that be that we are testing our kids to death? I recently read an article by Mike Schmoker in Ed Week that curriculum designers would have trouble creating lessons based on the Common Core Standards because of the CCSS’s ambiguity.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/01/15/17schmoker_ep.h33.html
As a special education teacher at the middle school level, the focus is on getting the special needs kids to proficiency on the almighty tests. State accommodations for these tests trump the accommodations that are spelled out in their IEP’s. Seems backwards to me. It breaks my heart. I see a two- tiered educational system emerging; those that have and those that have-not. When are we going to view the whole child, and not look at the child as a data point?
I still cling to the hope that our public will dig a little deeper to see what is going on with our public education system and put the brakes on this runaway train called the “reform” movement.
Peace, Dale
It was refreshing for an administrator to speak the truth. Unfortunately, those of us who try and/or have tried to “fix” a broken educational system are bowled over by those higher-ups within the system itself who continue to blindly follow those who do not possess any real educational experience. Personally, I was forced into early retirement for becoming the “squeaky wheel.” I asked one of our district directors why we were following a program that did not meet the needs of our at-risk student population? She snapped back, “We have to because that’s the way it is!” I replied, “No we don’t. We need to lobby for other standards that do meet our students’ needs.” Several months later, it appeared in the educational journals and media that the current standards were not meeting the needs of our students.
I asked the district superintendent why we waited to be told that our standards were off target, instead of actively pursuing directives that were more appropriate to our students? I got no response. So many seem to wait to be told what to do. As a result, we have given away the control of our schools to outside groups or individuals who have absolutely no experience in the educational system. This would be a lot like someone who buys a Chrysler automobile then assuming they could then run the automobile business, without resistance. We need to take back control of our schools.
After all, when those in charge could actually make decisions and teaching was fun, the U.S. was at the top of the 34 industrialized nations of the world. Now are ranking has slipped substantially and of those who do make the decision to attend college, 80% now have to take at least one remedial course and the previously four-year program has now become a six-year program as students struggle to catch up. The current trend hardly seems to be putting “students first.”
Pushing the notion of college for all students is a ludicrous notion to those of us who have worked with at-risk students. When we can hardly get them to attend school on a regular basis, what makes those powers that be assume that these same students are going to miraculously begin regularly attending college classes? The whole notion comes from those without any experience working with students.
Visit the site, “bigpicture.org” to see a system that really works for students. There are several other examples. However, most of us have not heard much, if anything, about these program.. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation thought so much of The Met program that they put 50 million dollars behind it. My feeling is that we should emulate those programs that really work and go back to revisit what it was we did when our educational system really “worked” but each school and district seem to feel the need to reinvent the wheel. As-long-as resistance to change continues to prevail, our broken system with continue to be broken.
I missed Principal Frank Sutliff’s address to concerned citizens of Oneonta, NY. But I can’t let this phenomenal address to go by without a comment of bravo! When people don’t bother responding to evil we can end up losing the power we do have.
The Nor’easter that has hit the eastern seacoast, reminds me of the Common Core. Instead of being destructive to travelers CC is destructive to our children. Just as drivers are abandoning their cars so too our children are giving up. Some people just don’t understand that when students constantly are put down, constantly are confronted with tasks that are too difficult, they give up. Children at a very young age develop a defeatist attitude making the teacher’s task more difficult. Anyone who knows anything about child psychology knows the importance of students experiencing success but the CCStandards are indifferent.
The opening paragraph of the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts, “One of the key requirements of the Common Core State Standards for Reading is that all students must be able to comprehend texts of steadily increasing complexity as they progress through school. By the time they complete the core, students must be able to read and comprehend independently and proficiently the kinds of complex texts commonly found in college and careers. …” It becomes obvious that the developers of CC couldn’t care less about the students.
If we don’t stop this CC madness, we as a nation can blame ourselves for building that pipeline from school to prison.
I observe from my four-year-old grandson on how he keeps striving to increase his vocabulary by listening keenly to new words and using them. I also observe how despondent he gets when he is asked to do something he can’t do regardless how hard he tries. At four years of age he thinks of all kinds of excuses not to go to pre-school, e.g. coughing spells, tummy ache… He is not good at pencil and paper tasks. He loves to role play; he loves stories. He once told his mother that he likes to be alone. That is when stories come to him. We need to build on students’ strengths; don’t start with what they don’t know or what is not age appropriate.
elizjamison stated, “However, when students returned to school and began to have hours and hours of homework with the expectation that parents would help with things they did not know and when young elementary students started saying that they hated school, things began to change quickly…”
As Edward Lowe said, “Hey folks, it’s an election year. If you want to support Frank and other educators in this fight, find out where the candidates stand and vote the corporate carpetbaggers and their political lackeys down. Get active in the primaries if you can. Try and support candidates while the competition for party candidacy is still open. If you live in a district with an elected school board, organize and vote the bums out. And keep them out! Start facebook campaigns to share information with friends and neighbors. 2014 can be the year that the mouse roars, and the lions shudder. We will know we won when Obama is forced to accept Duncan’s resignation in December! That would be a terrific Christmas gift indeed.”
Mary DeFalco