This third grade teacher responded to the post and comments about the heavy emphasis on testing students in third grade.
She wrote:
I thought that maybe a third grade teacher in NC should weigh in on this. I can only speak for what is occurring in my county, but here is what I am up against: I have to complete all reading 3D data within an approximate 2 week period. This involves a three minute fill in the blank test (whole class), three one minute timed reads with three one minute retells of each read, and a diagnosis of a students independent reading level by testing their reading, writing, and oral comprehension of leveled passages. The writing consists of two questions which are scored against a rubric and you must take the LOWER of the two scores. This must be completed on every student in my class.
In addition, our school opted to give EVERY child the portfolio assessment. Why? Because there are many reasons why a child might fail an EOG test. Some may not be good test takers, some may be sick, some may misalign the test, others may have something happen to them or their family but their parents decide to send them to school anyway because of the test. I cannot tell you how many children have been sent into my room feverish, throwing up, having little to no sleep due to a family emergency, etc. Therefore, every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, our students will take an assessment based on whatever standard the county has stated we are testing on that particular week at least until we get to a review week where students will be retesting on the tests they failed.
Janna, I read your post. I analyze the data and look at which students need remediation but honestly, right now, all I see is testing with this: portfolio assessments; benchmark testing, Reading 3D testing and AR testing. Let’s not forget these are children. Little people with strengths and weaknesses. Children who have dreams and aspirations. Children who develop at a highly individualized rate that cannot be changed by any state test or legal mandate. Children who want to have FUN. Children who should be having fun while they are learning. What areas do you excel at-the ones who are fun to you or laborious?
At some point I am still supposed to TEACH literacy. Whole and small group-with rigor and engaging activities. In small groups I should be spiraling back to the necessary weak skills that my students may need extra help with and challenge those students who need the challenge. Do not forget that I have to make sure that all students are staying on task while the small group and independent testing is occurring. ALL of this is to occur within a two hour block of literacy. Our school also uses accelerated reader so the students then test on the books they read independently because they need to meet their AR goal. I am also held accountable if that goal is not met by the majority of my class.
Afterwards, I need to continue to teach math, science and social studies lessons, make sure students have opportunities to interact with technology (I have 3 outdated computers in the classroom), lunch, recess (which is mandated as well let’s not forget), and usually fine arts taught by a specialist. During that time, I am supposed to plan with colleagues, grade the portfolio assessments, grade, meet with parents, make phone calls, and if I am lucky, use the bathroom.
You want to talk about the test? The test is skewed to white upper/middle class students who have had certain experiences. My students have never seen the ocean. They have never touched a seashell before my class. These students don’t have gardens, haven’t seen deer in the wild and many of them don’t ride in cars because their parents don’t have one. Their parents don’t talk to them. Not because they don’t care, but because they are working two and three jobs just to try to survive. These babies are being watched by slightly older babies who use Disney and Nick as babysitters. My students need to be immersed into museums and places in our state. They need to feel the sand between their toes at a beach and feel the cold mountain air blow in their face. They need to visit a real farm, not a pumpkin patch and smell the earth when it has been freshly turned by a plow. They need to see works of fine art and go to the symphony. They need to go to a fine dining restaurant and learn the proper etiquette for eating out. You want to equalize the gap? THAT is how to do it. NOT through testing. They need experiences.
I have two important questions. Where is the student accountability in this? Also where is parent accountability? When you have students who flat refuse to do what you ask them, how is that MY fault? I have had classes where the majority of my students were labeled oppositional defiant, autistic, ADHD, bi-polar, etc. I have had students in my class who couldn’t speak English or even read in their native language, but I am supposed to get them ON grade level? Did I teach them? YES. Did they grow? YES. However, try as I might, they did not get on grade level. I never quit teaching them, but what happens when teachers no longer want little Johnny or Susie because it affects their salary? What about the parents who make excuses for their children’s lack of performance? Explain to me how it is my fault that they have not raised their child in a manner that would allow them to succeed. How is it my fault they argue and scream at the teacher instead of doing their work. How is it my fault that they refuse to complete assignments? Parents blame the teacher because obviously it is their fault-the legislature says so. When teachers can no longer teach, when they no longer have the respect of society, how long do you think they will stay in their job? I guess we will see soon.
I LOVE my students, I LOVE teaching, but what I am doing now is a pale comparison to what I used to do and I would not classify it as teaching. I spend hundreds of dollars a month on my class. Money as a single mom that I really don’t have, but if I don’t spend that money, my students don’t have pencils, paper, or tissues or other supplies. Parents feel it is MY responsibility to provide these supplies. Schools cannot give out what they do not have, budgets have been cut and schools have to make choices between staff and supplies. I love North Carolina. This is the only state that I have ever lived in and I cannot imagine leaving but I will be hard pressed to continue to do what I love because I cannot pay my bills. I had to tell my high school senior that I have no money to help her with college. Not even for her textbooks. She doesn’t have her driver’s license because I have been unable to afford to put her on my insurance. I will very soon be faced with the choice of moving to another state or choosing a new career. I never thought that my own state would force me into that kind of decision.
I teach high school in NYC and your post brought tears to my eyes. If this is what happens in third grade than it’s little wonder that children have no desire to learn by age 14. You are not alone in your dilemma of whether or not to continue as an educator.
I agree!
Well said, Cathleen. The deformers’ sick extrinsic reward and punishment theory of education is destroying our schools. It’s child abuse, and it will have effects precisely the opposite of those that they claim for it.
Another powerful story of how detrimental ed. policy has become. Are there any people left who support “school reform” as it is who REALLY think they’re helping? If so, they need to learn to LISTEN! As for the rest of the reformers, they know better, but are listening to their own greed rather than to those in need.
Move over Arne. We just found an educator to replace you. This third grade teacher gets what public education needs in order to thrive.
I agree!
Ditto
Thanks for posting this Diane. This was a long discussion in mid January I am the Janna she was talking to. I want to make sure you all know she was agreeing with me but voicing her frustration. I went back to see my reply to her and it is even a bit strange for me since I go from research to religion and all over the place. I am not as good of a writer as many of the posters here but I do know the research and am passionate that this law does nothing but harm children and make them hate reading. There have been several updates since this post last month. There are new options since the pretests demonstrated that approximately 2/3 of the children were going to fail and need these summer camps/retention. I think our state department realized this was a catastrophe in the making.
Here was my attempt to be supportive but rambling response:
Kudos to you! You are exactly correct in everything you said. I hope you do not leave NC since you are the type of teacher we should be fighting to keep. I do not mind you having data so you know where your students are at but enough is enough! It is not your fault when a child is constantly absent or has a reading disability. And the way we are overtesting is just going to makes sure our students hate reading and refuse to do it.
The recipe for teaching reading is not to keep testing. It is to make sure students have at least 90% success and get a lot of support. I could get students even with significant delays to learn to read by making sure I kept it fun and relevant. I always kept it challenging but not frustrating. The second I see frustration I usually change gears since too much of it just shuts children down. I give students a lot of feedback on what they are doing correct so they see their successes. Then they are will to hear suggestions and corrections since they know I know they can I believe they can improve. But I may alter this depending on the child.(There are exceptions- some children thrive when challenged).
I have taught children with significant reading delays by having them read material that suited their interests and choosing reading methods that matched their strengths. I had great success with Language Experience Approaches when working with students who had limited backgrounds since I needed to make sure I only judged their reading on topics I knew were in their listening and speaking vocabularies. I also had great success with some very basic skills approaches like VAKT, Slingerlund,and some SRA. Starfall.com was a life saver for a few young readers. Even some packages like Wilson or Failure Free Reading worked for some older children. Writing to Read program work well for some and I could go on and on.
We do not diagnose a lot of language delays and they only manifest themselves as reading problems. So we spend a lot of time working on phonics when the issue is that the child does not have the conceptual understanding so they do not comprehend the word even if they can learn to sound it out.
Sorry to go off topic- As to your question to accountability- here is an answer I gave to a previous post:
“Learning does not occur on an interval basis. Children do not necessarily learn the same amount in one year as another due to multiple factors. But even if one did, the teacher is just one variable in the mix. Right now, experts are arguing that poverty is the issue, other experts blame the teachers. I know that the truth is much muddier than that. Hattie’s work shows over 100 variables that impact achievement. Approximately, student characteristics impacts 50% and schools approximately 30% of student achievement. According to Haertal, the teacher impact on student achievement is only 10%. But regardless of the research, common sense dictates that blaming all of an achievement score on any one cause is irrational. And for each child it is probably different.”
Sorry to ramble here but I just want you to know that you need to ignore the EOG and just teach reading to the best of your ability for each child. And teach them all subjects and teach them to think well of themselves and to be kind to others. Teach critical inquiry and discovery. I want a teacher who loves my children like you and will make sure they are safe, secure and thriving. See their strengths and let them use them. I am so sorry that you will be judged on criteria you have very little control over but in the meantime realize they still cannot turn you into a lousy teacher unless you let them.
I am not religious but this quote has helped me in times like this:
God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
I think we accept this for the short run and work around it for the students we have now, but fight it so it will be changed in the future. I am so sorry you and all the teachers have been thrown into such an impossible situation.
As for the new updates- each district is submitting waivers and coming up with alternative assessment to avoid the catastrophe of us failing the majority of 3rd graders. My original post stated that retention is the only intervention we know does more harm than good. Retention is highly correlated with dropping out of school. There is zero research that retention helps reading level.
http://www.wncn.com/story/24654495/alternative-read-to-achieve-assessments-approved-by-nc-board-of-education
and my understanding is that the pushback is helping; Raleigh changes the requirements every day, from what I understand (at first in a frustrating way, now in a more realistic way).
I really think contracts and legislation have created a perfect storm for third grade. No one is allowed to apply common sense because hands are tied by mandates and laws.
You have HIT the Nail on the Head!!!!!!!!!
In most districts, you can count the number of 19 or 20 year olds on the high school graduation stage on the finger of one hand.
Just do the math: A 10 year old in 3rd grader stands little chance of ever graduating HS. An 11 year old in 3rd grader has virtually NO chance. With all we know about brain development, how can this institutionalized crime being perpetrated on children be allowed?
grade (no r)
Again, here is a Perfect Example of the Wishy-Washy -Sloppy-Floppy-implementation of this Horrible excuse for a curriculum..
I do not get it… Most teachers plan for an entire 9 weeks at a time.
You can not plan for two days in this State …and..
You are planning How to Teach to the Test.
I have seen pacing guides change on a weekly basis.
Frustration has , for certain…Reached the Top ……
while our Children are Stuck in the Quicksand and sinking quickly. .
M-Class.
Everyone needs to be aware of this. It is what is impacting the classrooms the most right now. Look at the website for Amplify Education Inc.
My understanding is it is a contract that resulted from our Race to the Top money.
Race to the Top is expired, so it seems to me some contract lawyers need to be looking to get us out of the contract for M-Class. It is truly dampening the learning and teaching experiences of NC elementary students, particularly in schools of focus (which come from achievement gaps, mostly in line with free lunch numbers as we all know).
Every 10 days. Children who are low are assessed one on one by the teacher on an Ipad every ten days. And those who are not low are sitting doing activities to keep them busy so the teacher can assess.
Major loss of instructional time.
Time to get out of some contracts.
Good point Joanna. There is a lot of money going into this and people who stand to lose it will fight back. In fact, every initiative so far has lined some one’s pockets. We really need to look into finding an attorney that specializes in politician ethics law.
or we could just start with getting out of the contracts. Even if they were already paid for. Like an expensive divorce; sometimes it is warranted.
I heard a politically minded friend say that most of that Race to the Top money never made it 10 miles out of Raleigh. The application we submitted to “win” was so peppered with contracts here and contracts there. A dividing up of the public school carcass.
Sorry for another long post but here is what I wrote to explain this mess to people who did not know the sordid story.
There is educational research that demonstrates that a child’s reading level by 3rd grade is a fairly good predictor of later school achievement, graduation and adult success. So the legislators passed the Excellence in Education law in 2012 that included the READ to Achieve Program. This program mandates the students must read on a 3rd grade level or they will be retained. There are several problems with this legislation though.
A. The Ann E. Casey Foundation who conducts the KIDS Count studies where the 3rd grade reading research has been most often cited and reported, attributes the problem to poverty which is not addressed in the Read to Achieve law.
B. Poverty has risen and now 50% of NC children are living in poverty.
C. The recommendations of the Ann E. Casey Foundation were not followed. These included:
RECOMMENDATION 1 Support parents so they can effectively care and provide for their children.
RECOMMENDATION 2 Increase Access to High Quality integrated programs for children from Birth-8 beginning with investments that target low-income children
RECOMMENDATION 3 Develop comprehensive, integrated programs and data systems to address all aspects of children’s development and support their transition to elementary school and related programs for school-age children.
Click to access AECFTheFirstEightYears2013.pdf
D. If we were improving education then this mandate could possibly be phased in and in 8 years we could expect improved results. Instead a series of new tests were mandated starting in Kindergarten and now students are tested all the time to see their progress. Since the only alternative until this week was a portfolio of tests, teachers were scrambling to squeeze in tests that should take years to complete all in this one semester. Early estimates are that only one third of the student will pass the test. School districts cannot afford a summer camps for the large numbers of students who would be required to go since the state did not fund for 2/3 of the children. The largest problem is all this testing is harming children rather than helping them since it is taking away from instructional time and making children dislike reading.
The largest travesty is that if the law was meant to help children, why would the main intervention be retention when retaining children has never been shown to help other than a few children? Overall, retaining children in school leads to a much higher likelihood of them dropping out of school. The whole reason that the law was put in place, supposedly, was to ensure successful school children who would graduate. If that was true, then it would also fund evidenced-based effective reading programs or implement the recommendations for early child care supports by the Ann E. Casey Foundation to help students from poverty. Instead, the legislature chose to just test children and fail them. So now that the problems are coming to light the state department is trying to find solutions that will not harm 2/3 of the NC school children but also be acceptable to the legislature. I wish them good luck.
Janna, sadly the reason the changes are coming is that our General Assembly wants Read to Achieve to be budget neutral. That’s all. That’s where their concern is.
The other changes (like reducing the number to 11 out of 15 instead 3 out 4 three times and so forth) are from pressure to DPI (who it seems are building this plane as we go, in response to the General Assembly law AND the contracts we have from RttT). I am not sure if Atkinson defended the bar being high (which Berger ridiculed because it means more failing third graders attending “camp”) because she has to because contracts already in place (like M-Class), or she just really believed that was the right thing to do. It is very hard to know what contracts determine the desired outcome and or method of getting there. And it is something I think parents should demand more clarity on.
Joanna, you are correct- money talks. The real test will be when it all hits the fan. They have all these plans to pass children but regardless of all the waivers- it is impossible to achieve the goal of all children reading on a 3rd grade level. Even by the end of 4th grade. NCLB saw that legislating ability does not make it so. The only time we ever receive 100% success is we exempt students who do not make the standard, lower the standard to where everyone can reach it, or cheat. Right now there is no plan for what to do if a child still cannot read on a 3rd grade level at the end of 4th grade.
Joanna and Janna, here in Florida we simply keep them in third grade for years. We have children who are in their third and fourth attempt at third grade in some schools, despite the summer camps and after school and Saturday school, and all the miracle reading programs and data collection. No one seems to want to say what happens when they reach young adulthood and are still in third or fourth grade, even after teacher after teacher has been fired or excessed and they still can’t pass the ridiculous test.
I joke that we will need to start offering driver’s ed as an elementary special class but it is macabre humor indeed. No excuses laws and stubborn ideologues who run our state DOE refuse to acknowledge or deal with the fact that some children may not ever achieve success on the state reading test in third, fourth, or any grade because it threatens their ideological foundations and political beliefs. The children suffer greatly, as always.
Chris- that is really sad. Florida was so “successful” with reading that our legislature copied your program along with your grading of schools. (That comes next year too). Why aren’t the FL parents up in arms? I know there has been some success with some backlash in FL but people just allow their kids to remain in 3rd grade for years?
Diane, thanks for sharing–and to the author, thank you for the courage to put into words your frustration on behalf of all teachers. I wish the world could see this, because as a middle school ESL teacher whose students are tested 5-6 times a year, each time for at least a week, the lost instructional time is almost as bad as the bruising of their student egos when they get more test data that says they’re behind their peers.
This isn’t the way we experienced education, and it isn’t the way today’s student should experience education. Kids are so much more than a score…
Yes, Beth Morrow.
And as an ESL teacher myself, we get to be judged and evaluated on it . . . . .
Beth
Do you have OCS students in your Middle School?
If so, do they take the same test as the others or a different test.
Year before last, they took the regular test.
Last year , in HS they took another test called Extend whatever and this year, so I have heard, they will once again take the regular test.
Check out this you tube:
Dr.Luksik is right, though I wouldn’t use a red meat issue like climate change as an example. As a fifth grade teacher in 2001 I noticed that the State reading tests began having odd questions and even the teachers did not know the answers. One example was a story about a tropical bird accidentally being released in the classroom and the children were all excited. Children were asked their opinion about how they would feel. Would they feel that this was improper and should be remediated or should the bird be allowed to fly around the room and the kids be entertained. It is against Federal law to give psychological tests to children without written permission. A leader of this movement was BK Eakman in her book, the Cloning of the American Mind.” . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY4iMwlarNA
Good to know this Joseph.
This is exactly my experience teaching in the city of Phoenix. Our students take 5 standardized tests a year plus the state test. The 5 tests are used to give teachers a score for pay for performance and our school it’s letter grade. Really only the first and last but our district thinks teachers need these to tell what their kids can and can’t do. As if we don’t assess, observe and know this already.
The bottom line is this…we test kids not for their sake but do the sake of holding teachers accountable. Meanwhile a student and their parent has no accountability for their education. This is totally backwards.
All of this demeans the professionalism of teachers and makes our jobs more stressful than they naturally are. Oh and I forgot to mention we have 5 formal evaluations in my district that also count towards our score. Teachers spend hours getting ready for those evaluations in our own time trying to game the system. It’s sad and heartbreaking but I don’t think I can continue to teach for the rest of my life as I’ve planned.
How does North Carolina have the money for all these tests and not enough for simple supplies? It seems to needs of testing companies have the priority while the students and teachers get shafted. Has anyone in North Carolina asked to see the budgets schools use to look at how the money is appropriated? Your legislators need to be held accountable and serve the people, not the lobbyists schilling for testing companies.
I surely did and never received any answer.
Wanted to see where the RTTT money was going, to whom,. when. where, for what…
No answers..yet..
Your thoughts about not being able to provide for your daughter are the same I have for my kids. Why as teachers are we expected to pay out of pocket to give everyone else’s kid an advantage to the detriment of their own kids?
It is really sick that school budgets are cut for basic essential supplies like paper and pencils, and teachers end up picking up the slack because they don’t want to see their students go without.
My local municipal animal shelter is also under-funded for basic supplies, and staff and volunteers pick up the slack even though most can ill-afford to do so.
Contrast that with prisons, police departments, the military, and the NSA, where no expense is spared. I’ve read in the New York Times about the military paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for handmade wooden conference tables, some with hand-carved inlaid images of jets. The NSA has a glitzy control room designed to look like a sci-fi movie set.
Priorities are wrong, and the military-industrial-congressional complex has been allowed to dominate. Now we’re fighting the educational-industrial complex, where public schools are expected to spend billions on tests and technology, while still skimping on basic supplies, repairs, and experienced teachers.
Sickening!
Join the tea party to bring down federal government spending and let citizens locally keep more of their money to fund schools.
Harlan, I am not being snarky here, I mean this question in all curiousness. What governments are Libertarians ok with? I am feeling like they are anarchists. Are they ok with city council? At what level do they believe government is too much? Is there a cutting off point?
I am not an official libertarian, or even tea party member, and thus can’t speak for them, but just for myself. Yes there is a line. Of course I support city councils, county governments, and state governments. They have their responsibilities for policing, for roads, for welfare, for tax collection, for courts, and for all other internal affairs in a state, including education and automobile registration. These are all legitimate STATE functions.
What I object to is the federal government involving itself in what should be state matters, such as education, health care, welfare, marriage, abortion, environmental matters and so forth. The federal government should STRICTLY adhere to the limitations in the constitution. The federal government is there to protect individual rights, and not to do anything else. National defense, a sound currency, inter-state disputes, immigration, federal guarantees of civil rights—these things are legitimate.
Promoting a national curriculum is not.
I don’t know if that goes anywhere near even beginning to answer your question.
Harlan, I thought . . . I could swear you declared yourself to be a member of the Tea Party. . . . . so you are not officially a member, but you espouse and extoll all their ideas and what you consider to be virtues.
I am very confused . . . . .
If you are aligned with them but are not an “official” member, then what is the difference in theory and practice?
Please clarify to your fan base here on this blog . . . . . .
The so-called “Tea Party” is not an organized political party. It is a network of local groups which meet together to listen to speakers and conduct grass roots organizing to petition legislators who are usually registered Republicans. It has no recognized leader.
And so far, I haven’t contributed any money to any of the various organizations that one can contribute to. It’s on no ballot. So, in that sense being interested in some of the ideas put forth by various conservative politicians does not make me an official anything.
I just speak for myself about those ideas, but sometimes I like to engage in nearly invisible irony by declaring myself a “Tea Party Member” in order to draw out some of the posters here to reveal the depths of their blind prejudices and abysmal ignorance.
Certainly MathVale ‘bit.’ I might as well have said I was a minion of Satan. The tea party devil is totally a creation of the liberal media and mind.
The single one tea party meeting I attended in the drab basement banquet room of a local restaurant was made up mostly of double wide farmers who didn’t want the local ecology center to run a hiking trail through property they owned that bordered a river. Not a horn or a pointed tail in the bunch. Just the conviction that they owned the land they lived on.
I’ll let that sink in.
My general judgement is that members of the tea party just want to be left mostly alone by the federal government to run their farms and businesses under state and local law. If anything, I would say it was really “the common sense” party as opposed to the swarm of buzzing ideological horse flies of the left who think they can change human nature and change the climate just by taxing enough and spending enough and buzzing enough so people will avoid the bother of public dissent.
Of genuine argument or debate, I despair, because modern leftism is more a religion than reasoned judgement. We hear wonderful, ringing statements of faith every day on this blog. I wish the misplaced faith were true. I don’t enjoy the personal attacks, but I don’t take them personally. I do believe we all want justice and prosperity for all, and just differ about the means to those ends.
“. . . with liberty and justice for all.” We do all agree on that, I bet.
Of course, I have to go back to work next week, so you may have a good deal less of the shock and diversion to your metropolitan smugnesses that I supply.
I read the author’s following comment (quoted below) and it was so spot on! I just wonder how this nation ever got to a point where sanctioned abuse of children is legal! Here is the author’s comment that our next secretary of education should abide by when setting education policy. In referring to school age children she states. “They need to visit a real farm, not a pumpkin patch and smell the earth when it has been freshly turned by a plow. They need to see works of fine art and go to the symphony. They need to go to a fine dining restaurant and learn the proper etiquette for eating out. You want to equalize the gap? THAT is how to do it. NOT through testing. They need experiences…”
No, no, no, no, no. Get the federal government COMPLETELY out of education policy.
Harlan, if Tea Partiers could just step outside of the white male privilege world for a day then they might understand why your statement is so alarming to many good citizens.
We have a Tea Party governor in Wisconsin whose assistant says “No one cares about crazy people,” while dismissing the concerns of a parents whose child died in state custody. Without Federal control anyone who is “crazy” in Wisconsin would be subject to the majority tyranny of this Tea Party governor and his ignorance. This would probably be true in many “conservative” states since this is what the past 20 years have demonstrated so clearly to all.
We have a Kansas Tea Party majority that just this week passed Jim Crow laws against LGBT citizens, making it legal for anyone to discriminate freely with the claim of religious “conviction”. Again, the LGBT students, LGBT parents, and the families of both are left without legal recourse in your Tea Party majority tyranny utopia. Again, this would prove popular in many gerrymandered Southern states where LGBT citizens are at risk of constant violence and discrimination with no recourse at all — more Taliban and Christian in my view.
We have Tea Party legislators and governors in several states that completely ignore the wished of the voters and their constituents as they pass law after law written by ALEC and designed to benefit no one but the corporate astroturfers that fund the Tea Party. The people have not bee empowered by the Tea Party tsunami of the past few years. Instead we are burdened with a congress full of crazies who refuse to govern at all, in effect running a government they despise and are trying to destroy to the benefit of no one.
We have Tea Party legislators and governors throughout the country passing laws to prevent liberals, progressives, people of color, and anyone who is not white, straight, and Christian from voting in elections and making their petitions known to their governments. Why does the Tea Party condone disenfranchisement and how will that possibly improve our public schools when the voices of the majority are shut out from the discourse entirely? It is now legal for frightened white men to shoot and kill black boys throughout the South. The Tea Party represents nothing more than a return to pre-civil rights segregation and discrimination if not an outright yearning to bring back slavery and second-class citizenship for all non-whites. Disgusting.
No, voting the Tea Party is turning out to be a return to the racist, misogynist, homophobic, classist, fascist past that exhibited the worst parts of our history and serves only the 1% well.
I know that dream is appealing to a certain segment of the population who feel threatened by change but it is no answer to the reform movement and the excesses of the Federal government which I probably agree with you on more than you would believe.
You have so many outrageous claims here with relatively little documentation that it is difficult to deal with them. But let’s take the voting question as the most important. Without voting we don’t have a country. Consent of the governed is one of the three bedrock principles of a civil society.
So what makes you think anyone in the tea party is trying to prevent anyone from voting?
I am no Libertarian but I definitely don’t like what DOE has done. At all. Hopefully next pres candidate will campaign on reining it in. RttT was out of control. (Is?)
No good mon.
Don’t forget that the DOE was responsible to also implement G. W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind”. This issue isn’t exclusive to conservatives, liberals or progressives.
The war against the public schools is more of a profit mongering, neo-conservative, neo-liberal, libertarian, evangelical fundamentalist Christian movement and it crosses all political lines.
And these different groups may not be working together but their goals are converging to achieve the same goal—to destroy the public schools in the US.
And what, Lloyd, does the public education system contribute to the culture that a voucher based system couldn’t?
I’ll answer your question with a question and an answer.
Are vouchers (funded by taxpayers) that pay for private sector schools that have no oversight equal to democratically run public schools where elected school board members hold public school administration responsible to follow state law and make sure the tax payers money is spent as the law for public schools dictate?
The answer is no.
Click the link and find out what happens when private sector schools are funded by tax payers without any rules, laws or oversight to make sure those schools are spending the money legally and following the ed code/laws for each state.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/54459821/#.Uwk7HPldV2o
If they continue to behave like RttT and NCLB, maybe this is a viable idea? But the feds better give us back our federal tax dollar so that we can apply it locally. . . . in fact, it better give us more of our federal tax dollar back to do so . . . . .
artsegal,
I thought too ..that those words are POWERFUL and this teacher needs to send it to the TESTERS sitting in their plush offices or at their mahogany conference tables discussing …
1. How to fire more teachers ,
2. Which schools to close
3. How to fail more students.
4. How to make more Tests
5. Who to blame for the FAILURE of this “Drop from the Top”..
and all the while ……the futures of our children are plummeting into the abyss..
Better yet….READ it …In Person…to these Plastic Politicians who are destroying the futures of the children.
To the Third Grade Teacher….Great Powerful Words..
You are not alone…this is happening everywhere – in differing degrees…huge waste of instructional time. Learning should be a joy – school should be a great place to be. Students do not learn under stress and teachers can not teach well under stress.
This story is very sad to me. I too am a third grade teacher. I teach in a state that has not yet implemented such Draconian measures in the schools in regard to teaching. Yet, I say , not because there is/was resistance from any powerful group, yet because we always seem to be behind trends. I am grateful for that in this instance.
Also, my students come from a middle to upper class family. Although we get few Federal Funds, our generous parents make sure we get whatever we need to run our classrooms. We take many field trips, Art is taught weekly along with Music, Social Studies and Science.
No, I am not boasting or trying to make someone else feel badly by stating these things. I feel for this teacher as she teaches the very students who need those field trips, need the Arts, need time to listen and think and process the most. And…she knows that, but she is being forced to do all this testing by people/ companies whose only 3rd grade experience is when they went through that grade.
If I didn’t know better i would say they are setting up North Carolina schools to fail, but if this is the case, then generations will be lost to this “test”. It’s not easy to change schools much less Districts or States so this teacher has a dilemma . I say stay, stay, stay…this can’t go on forever.
The standard answer is to take away money from your middle to upper class families and redistribute it to the poverty classes to improve their lives and education. Is that what YOU are advocating?
What kind of family incomes do you consider to be middle and upper middle class?
This is EXACTLY what I see in NY. My feelings about my work is identical….it is amazing. I work in a title one district, where the demographics are similar. Even in my district, which is a waterfront community, some of my kids have not felt sand in their toes in the sand or have even seen a seashell outside of my classroom!!! The only difference that I notice is that I am not a single mom. I am single but I am paying back $91,000 of student loans; after all paid will be $210,000. All of which I needed to get my teaching job and keep it. (I just did my taxes and spent $4,000 for supplies and necessities for my class. I had legitimate receipts. Even I was shocked! ). By the way, our governor wants to provide free college to incarcerated folks to help when they are released back into society. Hasn’t it already been proven by spending the money on children’s education prevent incarceration later???? When is all this craziness going to end? Where has common sense gone to?
****Rather my feelings are identical. Typing on my phone I missed the poor grammar!
I am a third grade teacher in NC and this teacher stated the reality so accurately that I almost cried. The only good thing about her response is the fact that it made me feel understood. We have been told my some people that if we were just.managing our time and giving the passages efficiently, we should have time for everything. I have time for everything except engaging lessons that would actually help children improve their literacy skills. My principal has been more than supportive, but she feels powerless too.
I could not agree more about the lack of experiences that some students have. I did an activity about the Olympics with my students this week. One of my brightest and best students is truly a miracle because her home life would not indicate high achievement. She is an exception. She could not answer a question about the Olympics because she had absolutely no idea what the Olympics were! That’s a TV experience and yet her family has never watched, never discussed it, nothing! I was sad because I love the Olympics. This a one small example; I could name many more. Yes, she is an exception. I love my struggling students so much and have high expectations, but poverty (often accompanied by addicted parents) most certainly DOES impact academic achievement. Of course there are exceptions, but they are very few.
Thank you for validating my experience and helping me know that my colleagues and I are not alone.
Melissa
A group of teachers though we were alone for a long while until we discovered this blog.
You need to come back and you will see this is happening all over our great country.
NC received the RTTT money and no one knows who received the money.
All that is perfectly clear is that the Testing in NC is Out of Control.
Teaching Out
Testing In
Any Knowledgeable TN folks out there know whether things have become this bad in our state?
Facebook discussion with parents who have children in TN-
Mommy S. So, I was talking to D about the things that work for him to help him remember things in math, hoping I could get some insight on things I can do to help him. What I found out is that the teacher gave them the questions that were going to be on the test and let them work them out ahead of time. They used this as the study guide. I told H this and she said, yeah our geometry teacher does the same thing. Nice. Real nice.
Janna: Can I repost this on a blog? I will not use your name. I want to make the point that data walls and using test scores to grade teachers
Mommy S: Be my guest. I am very frustrated with all of this right now.
Mommy J: I just quizzed L and he says it’s pretty much the same with his enriched math class
Mommy T: Do you remember being taught like that? Because my memories of school are very different.
Janna: What grade is this?
Mommy J: L is 6th
Mommy S: H is in 9th and in honors geometry. D is in 7th standard math
Mommy S: Mommy T, it was very different. We had to study and learn the material inside and out. We used study guides but they covered a wide range of things that could be on the test. We studied all of it in hopes that we would recall the correct thing at the correct time. We mastered the material. These kids are memorizing each test and dumping the majority of the material after they take the test. Most tests are multiple choice. It’s gotten stupid out there. Test scores are up but the kids aren’t learning like we did.
Mommy J: L’s weekly math ‘study guide’ is half a sheet of paper
Mommy S: It’s stupid. You know I was just telling you how Drew passed a prepositions quiz with a 100 just before I pulled him. We started on prepositions and he didn’t know crap. We had to start at the beginning and work on mastery.
Mommy J: Pretty easy to get 100 on a quiz if they give you the damn questions in advance
Mommy S: Yeah, but they reorder the questions so they can’t cheat lol who needs to cheat when you just have to remember the answers to the 20 questions. Who needs formulas when you’ve got calculators and a copy of the test? I really wonder what level my kid really is academically. Bc I am not seeing the ‘advanced’ that he scored.
Janna: Great illustrations of Campbell’s law. “The more any quantitative social indicator (or even some qualitative indicator) is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
Janna: In other words once we make a measures high stakes- we encourage teaching to the test and cheating. Your teachers will lose their jobs if they cannot make the kids testing machines. Teaching is secondary.
Mommy S: Exactly.
Mommy K: Makes me curious about H’s 7th grade enriched math class…he never seems to know how to do the work when he gets home, and I keep asking him what they go over during class without getting a real answer. I have even tried sending him to weekly math tutoring before school, and he said there’s too many people in there for her to help them all. Unless he’s going for a make-up test, he doesn’t even bother. There seems to be an important step missing in the learning process.
Mommy L: Well, at least you can count on public schools for continuity, as in they are continuing to deteriorate
Janna: Only because of legislative interference. If we just let professionals do their job rather than please federal and state mandates where legislatures are telling teachers what to do all would be much better.
I know of many fabulous teachers in TN resisting the urge to teach to tests but this illustrates what is happening for survival sake.
Thanks, Janna. I feared as much. It’s becoming tougher all the time for any teacher to resist the pressure. At least these moms are becoming aware and angry. Far too many folks still in the dark or still buying the glossy ad campaigns pushing common core. Makes me awfully sad. We need more angry, vocal parents. In my area, at least, it’s just too scary for teachers to be so bold. I never dreamed we would be bullied so much, but that’s exactly what’s happening.
I am so sorry. I feel sorry for the teachers, the student and the parents. But I am also angry. I think we need to write a Hippocratic oath for education. Doctors promise to do no harm and it seems our state and federal policies are design to hurt everyone. Here is a copy of the Hippocratic Oath for medicine. Maybe someone lie Robert Shepherd or Mercedes Schneider or even the clever Peter Greene will write an Oath for Educators.
Hippocratic Oath (Modern version)
I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:
I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.
I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.
I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.
I will not be ashamed to say “I know not,” nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient’s recovery.
I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.
I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.
I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.
I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.
If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.
Written in 1964 by Louis Lasagna, Academic Dean of the School of Medicine at Tufts University, and used in many medical schools today.
These Moms need to March
They are truly the only voice that the Portly Politicians will acknowledge.
They are teaching to a Test..Most likely the Benchmarks..not the State Tests…but you are told that the students must pass the benchmarks as they are supposedly aligned (BUT NOT) with the Real End of the Year Deal..
A friend just sent me two articles well worth a read… what a stark contrast to the testing and data obsessed climate that this NC teacher describes (and represents just about every public school teacher in every state nowadays).
http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/Lecker-The-disturbing-transformation-of-5256686.php
http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/comer_named_to_advise_president/ (this article gives me hope that Obama is starting to listen to those opposing “ed reform.)
What this NC teacher describes is the unfortunate reality of public school teachers across the US right now due to NCLB and RTTT. A friend just send me two articles that give me hope that common sense will prevail for the sake of really enabling our nation’s children to learn at school!
http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/Lecker-The-disturbing-transformation-of-5256686.php
http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/comer_named_to_advise_president/
That pretty much describes my experiences as a public school teacher for thirty years, but for most of that time, I didn’t have two hour teaching blocks. I had to accomplish most of what this letter describes in an hour with a six minute passing period between classes.
In fact, to avoid having to go to the bathroom, I didn’t drink anything after I left home in the morning until school ended. And even when the RR call couldn’t be ignored, we had to rush to the nearest teacher bathroom and then wait in line while watching the clock as it moved much too fast toward that tardy bell because when the tardy bell rang the teacher was expected to be there to let the kids in. If something happened to a kid who got in a fight after that tardy bell rang, the parents could sue the responsible teacher for negligent for not being their to stop the fight.
On average, the work week ran 60 to 100 hours with only 25 to 30 of those hours in the classroom teaching. How to describe that life—for the school year, you live on a treadmill running at high speed and you can’t get off. Even in sleep, your nightmares and dreams revolve around the politics of education and the kids you teach.
In fact, about two weeks before a new school year started, I’d wake up after rather bad nightmares of what was coming based on previous teaching experiences. Even after almost nine years of retirement from teaching, those nightmares return in August every year and when I wake up in a cold sweat, I have to remind myself that I’m not teaching anymore and it was just a bad dream.
It’s such a relief to know that I survived and escaped the American classroom. My sympathies and total support of public school teachers in America is based on my thirty years in the classroom.
If the majority of America’s teachers issued a call to arms to take this issue to the streets to fight Bill Gates (I’m thinking of something similar to the democratic uprising in the Ukraine), the Koch brothers, the Waltons and the other robber barons of public education, I’d start loading my weapons and getting ready.
What does that “total support” really amount to?
I don’t understand your question? What “totalsupport”?
I had to go back and read my comment to understand your question. I don’t have perfect recall.
Total support means I’ll do what I can to spread the truth about the public school reform movement.
It isn’t as if I don’t know what’s going on, because I taught in the public schools for thirty years.
I’m not wealthy. After all, I took a 40% pay cut when I retired and left without medical as part of the package. The only reason I had medical after I retired is because of the VA.
Therefore, total support means, I’ll do what I can through my Blogs and comments (etc) to keep this issue alive and educate others about what’s really going on.
I’m not a billionaire. I’m not even a millionaire.
“You want to talk about the test? The test is skewed to white upper/middle class students who have had certain experiences.”
So true!
When we (teachers of all races and ethnic backgrounds at my very diverse public school) talk about this fact, “white” is short hand for life long emersion in the dominate culture. We are talking about things like native english speaker, educated parents, many and varied life experiences. Questions that reference tennis, sailing, distant lands, various animals/ plants and musical theater are much easier and more comprehensible if you have experience with those things.
Funny that I have never seen a question about the properties of lipids that contained a long distractor involving manteca versus oil use in making tamales.
😉
Great point.
What solution would you propose (short of eliminating the test, that is)?
Why short of eliminating the test SCMT?
Betsy,
Considering that testing is unlikely to disappear, I was curious what Ant (or anyone else, for that matter) would do to minimize/eliminate this bias.
“Ang”, that is.
It is not having that having occasional standardized tests in reading is wrong -though I prefer more informal performance based assessment that occur naturally in class rater than take away class time. But the problem is using them for punitive rather than instructional purposes. Secret tests that do nothing but retain children are not helpful. Diagnostic assessment that help teachers teach are fine if done in moderation. We know there is error in all tests and that there is bias. But if they are not high stakes I can live with the error. It is the fact that uninformed people like legislators believe the scores have validity and use them to segregate people and refuse them services is where the danger lies.
SCMT,
Well, honestly I am all for getting rid of most of the mandatory, corporate made, standardized testing. I just don’t think any of them are really any use when it comes to actually helping students. I believe they are a BIG waste of money, effort and time. I think they lack validity for ranking, sorting, stacking and yanking students, teachers and schools.
However to your question, bias review teams could be a start. On the front end have committees made up of teachers who currently work with non dominate culture populations every day review and correct tests prior to publication. On the back end, allow teachers (parents?) to read the tests and file objections to questions deemed incorrect or unfair. That would require the test to be less “secret”, “confidential”. Hum, wonder how that suggestion will will go over!?
Another possibility, stop conflating a long question with a “good” question. Currently questions on the corporate made science tests go all around robin hood’s barn to ask what really could be a direct question. For example, in my original comment I mentioned a question about the properties of lipids. The current trend would have an unnecessary specific reference (usually tricky) or a long shaggy dog story (usually confusing) attached to simply ask the difference between a saturated and unsaturated fat. If the objective is to see what they know about lipids, why not be direct? (IMHO, the object was never to see what they really know.)
Or we could just admit this whole test and punish was part of a Reign of Error!
“What solution would you propose”
Replace questions that reference tennis with questions about tamales.
But why shouldn’t the “white” culture be dominant? It’s a better culture. This cultural relativism is the problem.
Are you serious when you claim that white culture is better? I don’t think so.
Of course I am, but we don’t have to call it “white.” We can call it global intellectual culture, as is implied in the International Baccalaureate schools. Math, Science, two languages, History, Arts, and Epistemology. It’s the liberal arts culture forming the core of all standard colleges.
The use of language is important here, Harlan. When you claim in your own words that “white culture is superior” that has strong racist overtones. Maybe you should have been more careful in your choice of words.
In fact, there is no easy way to identify a single culture to define America and there never has been and probably never will be.
You may want to read this Washington Post piece to see what I mean:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/08/which-of-the-11-american-nations-do-you-live-in/
My sister’s, who is 84, husband (dead now for several years) drove an eighteen wheeler coast to coast for years and said when he left any coastal area in the US and drove into what’s called America’s heartland, he felt as if he had entered another country.
The last resort of the liberal is to cry “racist” when they want to avoid discussing the issues.
Who is avoiding the issues?
I have often noticed—for instance, that the “Limbaugh” brain-washed conservative often resorts to calling people liberals and other ad hominem attacks instead of debating the issues with valid, supportable facts.
I notice that you are really good at the ad hominem attacks and accusations. Where are your facts to support your freedom of expression.
Freedom of expression fails when all one has is an endless list of opinions that can’t be supported to win an honest logical debate.
In a democracy where we have freedom of expression and we end up debating issues, an honest debate is built on facts and solutions, not name calling and accusations.
If you want to call me a liberal, prove it with facts. For example, what issues to I support and what party do I belong to.
But Harlan has a point that there is an underlying “problem” of poor minorities. I think what he is saying is that protective measures, sometimes, to keep things “fair” is really just an effort to keep the traditionally white concepts and values as the important ones. Have we asked poor minorities to write is a common core? Or any test questions?
The growing pains of our cultural shifts would be less harsh if we would quit trying to control them so much (I am certain there is a balance, like I am uncomfortable about the Gulen schools), but the achievement gap could be better dealt with if we could meet people where they are a little better. I am looking forward to hearing Dr. James Johnson at Kenan Institute speak in a few months about the changing demographic in US. Nevermind the global economy. We have new unity to figure out at home.
“there is an underlying “problem” of poor minorities”
This is nothing new. Every wave of immigrants to the United States bought poor people fleeing from famines, war and persecution of one sort of another. And it is a fact that wealthy people seldom immigrate from other countries. Most immigrants are poor when they arrive and then work themselves out of poverty over time.
For instance, “The authors find that international immigration to the U.S. between 1970 and 2005 has increased the overall poverty rate due to the facts that (1) immigrants are more likely to be poor and (2) an increasing proportion of the U.S. resident population is foreign born.”
Click to access dp134708.pdf
“Between 1850 and 1930, about 5 million Germans immigrated to the United States.”
“Young people age 15 to 30 predominated among the newcomers. This wave of migration, which constituted the third episode in the history of U.S. immigration, could better be referred to as a flood of immigrants, as nearly 25 million Europeans made the voyage. Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, Poles, and others speaking Slavic languages constituted the bulk of this migration. Included among them were 2.5 to 4 million Jews.”
“This era, which reflected the application of the 1924 legislation, lasted until 1965. During those 40 years, the United States began to admit, case by case, limited numbers of refugees. Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany before World War II, Jewish Holocaust survivors after the war, non-Jewish displaced persons fleeing Communist rule in Central Europe and Russia, Hungarians seeking refuge after their failed uprising in 1956, and Cubans after the 1960 revolution managed to find haven in the United States because their plight moved the conscience of Americans, but the basic immigration law remained in place.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_immigration_to_the_United_States#1980s
In addition, there’s a transition period while the immigrant are assimilated into the dominate culture. You may want to read this study “Measuring Immigrant Assimilation in the United States”. Click the link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_immigration_to_the_United_States#1980s
The Huffington Post also published a piece on this topic.
Her immigrant parents each arrived in New York City poor but eager, searching for a better way of life. They found work – and each other – in the garment district; they married, had children, and sent their girls to parochial school where nuns taught proper English.
Arlene’s parents told her and her sister that here, in the United States of America, they could do anything. So the girls went to college, became professionals, married, and had children of their own – English-speaking children who would never consider themselves anything but American.
It is a familiar, almost nostalgic, narrative; one that evokes sepia-toned photos of Ellis Island, Little Italy boccie players, German grandmas, or Eastern European deli proprietors.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/08/immigrant-assimilation_n_3560830.html
The original comes from the Christian Science Monitor:
On the other are a slew of academics, armed with studies from think tanks and longitudinal research projects, who say that assimilation these days is as strong as it has ever been, that immigrants as a group are still more enthusiastic about the country than the native born, that immigrants’ children tend to do better than their parents by a host of socioeconomic indicators, and that within three generations an immigrant family fully identifies as American.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2013/0707/Immigration-Assimilation-and-the-measure-of-an-American
Assimilation does mean White Culture. It means American Culture, a culture that has been influenced by every immigrant wave to the US.
As for poverty, you may want to read this from one of the Koch brother’s puppet foundations, The Heritage Foundation. The conclusion of the report may be biased but still offers proof that poverty is more of a result from immigration than the American culture.
The fact is that, on average, it takes three generations to assimilate and the latest Latino/Hispanic wave hasn’t had enough time yet to adapt and assimilate a migration that has been going on for decades.
Importing Poverty: Immigration and Poverty in the United States: A Book of Charts
Overall, 49.3 million first-generation immigrants and their family members lived in the U.S. in 2004; some 13.9 million were children. First-generation immigrants and their family members comprised 16.9 percent of the population. The non-immigrant population numbered 241.8 million, or 83.1 percent of the population. Of these, 59.7 million were children.
Among first-generation immigrants and their families living in the U.S. in 2004, Hispanics and Asians predominated. Half of first-generation immigrants and family members lived in Hispanic-headed households, and 20 percent lived in Asian-headed households. Some 21 percent lived in households with white non-Hispanic heads, and 8 percent lived in households headed by blacks.
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2006/10/importing-poverty-immigration-and-poverty-in-the-united-states-a-book-of-charts
My wife was an immigrant who arrived in the 1980s not speaking one word of English. When she started out, she lived in poverty. In time, she learned the language and went on to earn a BA and MFA from the Chicago Art Institute sometimes working several part time jobs to make ends meet.
Eventually she gave birth to a daughter in Chicago who grew up speaking Mandarin and English fluently and without an accent.
Our daughter has already assimilated into American culture enough to sometimes clash with her mother’s cultural beliefs that were carried over from China but the daughter also holds some values that come from Chinese culture. For instance, respect of older people (and teachers) that many children born of American parents don’t have.
Our daughter is only 22 and she hasn’t married or had children yet. This year she graduates from Stanford. Technically, she is the first generation to grow up from birth in America. The assimilation won’t be total until her grandchildren, the third generation, are adults and this may cover a period of about 50 to 75 years.
Do you understand what I’m getting at here?
There is no such thing as white culture. Please describe. White is a color, not a culture, unless you are referring to the master-slave mentality and identify with that as a “culture”. Then you have a culture which dehumanizes others who are not like you.
Sorry, I meant to say: Assimilation isn’t into white culture. It’s into the American culture, a culture that evolved and changed over time from every wave of immigrants resulting in a unique culture that is Amreican and not white.
Harlan, here’s a new party: “Whites Will Win” founded by a fellow libertarian who also calls for murder of all Jews in the USA. How is your position different? Prove that “white” culture is a “better culture” for anyone who isn’t white, male, straight, and Christian. It’s impossible. But go ahead and keep echoing the white supremacist Tea Party/Fox News party line about limited government, evil liberals, and unfair taxation, ad nauseum.
(by the way, how do you explain away those top 20 international corporations like Exxon Mobil that pay NO corporate tax at all? How do you overlook all the corporate welfare laws and tax breaks that prop up the mythical “free market” you worship?)
Where do you draw the line and denounce your fellow libertarians that are little more than garden variety racists, anti-semites, homophobes, and generally intolerant protectionists? Or do you?
I do denounce them. There is absolutely NO place in American culture for racism, for judgements based on skin color or sexual preference, or if I may also say, religious affiliation. Everyone should be judged ONLY on the “content of their character” and on their intellectual performance.
What standard do you want?
Harlan, about white culture being better, you are being facetious, are you not?
Provocative nose twisting, not joking.
Lloyd I understood without you having to type all that. I set it in quotes to show it is taken for granted, not an observation on my part.
I almost always write too much to make my point.
Reading the responses to my post gives me the impression that most seemed to have missed the point I was trying to make.
It was not how long it takes to assimilate (however, I firmly agree, that this does not happen quickly) or which culture is “better” or that we should have questions about Latino foods.
I was trying to point out that, in my experience, these corporate made, standardized test do not measure what they claim to measure.
The public seems to believe that these tests are a wonderful, infallible, totally valid measure of content knowledge, teacher ability and school quality.
I do not believe the science test are a good measure the biology my students have learned, nor do they measure how well I taught them. I believe this for many reasons, but especially due to convoluted sentence structures, type of examples chosen, heavy use of distractors, and non subject area vocabulary usage.
In my experience, they mostly measure how well the student is immersed in the dominate couture and language.
Now, if that is what you are trying to measure…..
This commentary is heart-breaking. Every educational “expert” in the country should read it and respond to it.
You are spot on! I’m so glad you wrote this. This is exactly how I feel.
This story is heartbreaking. Being forced to torture children by testing, testing, testing. The public has no idea this is going on. For crying out loud. Most college courses only have a midterm and a final! Kids will be totally off by 4th grade. I taught K-2 and I notice my students were bright-eyed and eager to learn. It was an adventure for them. Yet the upper grade students seemed listless and unfocused with no interest in learning. And this was before the deformers and Common Core got their hooks into them! This is abominable. For a teacher who has spent years preparing, working hard in the classroom, spending lots of her own money, and now not sure if she can even keep teaching in the state where she has lived her whole life is beyond the pale. Our educational system has become a monster that is eating our young, and companies are prospering financially with no shame and no let up in sight. I am going to Austin next week to see what I can do along with others to destroy this advancing plague on everything I’ve lived my life for.
My principal uses your word; torture. We have taken so much joy and natural curiosity from the classroom.
2nd grade is the last year of the human spirit.
I was disappointed to learn that the “portfolios” are just mini-EOGs that take more time away from instructional time.
Portfolios were introduced to the English department of the high school where I taught until August of 2005.
When the Portfolio project was mandated by district administration, we had to attend a full day workshop on how to use them. It was obvious from day one they would end up useless and achieve nothing academically but add hours time to an already challenged workload.
The concept was that each English teacher would keep the portfolio (starting in 9th grade English) in their classroom and follow the protocol from the workshop. At the start of each school year, teachers would carry a box filled with the previous years Portfolios to a common room where the other English teachers would have to spend a lot of time digging to find all the students on their new rosters as they went from box to box. That turned into a fiasco.
I can pinpoint the year it all started. It was in 1994/95 because I wrote about it the daily journal I kept that year—-a journal that I made sure to keep up-to-date by sitting down every day right after I got home and writing the daily entry taken from fresh memories, notes, my lesson plan book, and my copies of memos, parent contact forms and referrals.
By year three the project faded from sight and was forgotten by just about everybody—except the district office. By the time I retired in 2005, that useless portfolio project had vanished and was mostly forgotten even by the district office because most of the administrators who launched it had left the district or retired to be replaced by new administrators who weren’t part of the Portfolio launch.
The teachers were never asked what we thought about the Portfolio project. The district didn’t care. And the district never followed up to see if the project achieved any of its supposed benefits and goals from the theory behind it.
The kids didn’t care either. Right before graduation, we were supposed to pass back the portfolio to the seniors to take home for them to do whatever they wanted. What the students thought of the Portfolio became clear because the nearest trash can to every English teacher who taught a 12th grade quickly filled with those folders as the seniors left for the last time.
That’s why the project silently slipped into obscurity and was forgotten. I wonder if the new administrators revived the Portfolios with the new teachers after us veterans retired.
Until this kind of top-down, time-and-energy-wasting approach to education is eliminated in the public school environment, don’t knock charters and private schools. Freedom permits failure; big government education guarantees it.
As long as private schools and charters run by the private sector and paid for by siphoning (stealing is more apt) away money taxpayers paid to support public schools are not held accountable the same as public schools, I will criticize those private schools and charters all I want.
It’s up to you to defend the schools you worked for in the private sector for more than thirty years.
In 42 years I worked for only two educational institutions, one a small private college in downtown Detroit, the other a small private 6-12 middle and high school. The former went out of business after the Detroit riots amidst the population flight from the central city and also because community colleges were started that took away our students. The other is still in business and thriving. What’s to defend?
The money to fund public schools does not belong to the public schools. It belongs to the taxpayers. So the money that goes to charters can’t be “stolen” because it never belonged to the public school systems in the first place.
Why should not the money follow the kid?
Sorry Harlan, but tax money meant for public schools is “stolen” when the voters have no say or the voters were fooled to support them with a massive campaign of lies and cherry picked misinformation paid for by a few billionaires.
For instance, in Washington State, the recent Voucher/Charter initiative, the third one, won the majority vote by less than a half percent after outside funding from the likes of Gates, the Koch Brothers and the Walton family swamped the state with $35 million dollars in advertising and fear generating PR. The first two attempts lost by a hefty margin of votes. But the deep pockets of these billionaires can afford to come back over and over like termites that are allowed to keep eating away the frame of a house until it collapses.
The robber barons of public education and the Wolves of Sesame Street are thieves.
Charter schools in NC who accepted RttT funds are required to follow the same guidelines. I am a Kindergarten teacher at a charter school in NC and I’m doing the same pointless testing on my 5 and 6 year olds. The charter schools who are not doing the ridiculous Mclass testing did not take your precious taxpayer money. Although technically it’s our taxpayer money too. Besides charter schools get ALOT less funding from the state even though all the charter schools are required to give EOGs, EOCs, and all other state-mandated assessments. We’re also required to use the same teacher evaluation system and our 3rd graders are still affected by the retention/portfolio mess. There’s no reason for the charter school attack.
Because I live in California, a portion of our property tax supports Charters there and I’m not sure how that money is divided up.
Maybe our property tax only goes to local schools and I don’t know of any Charters run by private sector interests in our area.
Charter schools in my city keep class sizes very low (15 K vs. 25 K in my neighborhood school). Charters could get more money if they increased class size, correct?
I can’t address your question without knowing what kind of Charter you’re talking about.
There are Charters that are still part of public school districts and then there are the Charters outside of public school districts run by the private sector where the CEO might be paid a high six figure income while teachers are earning half that of public school teachers.
Charters that operate within a democratically run public school district are still held accountable for how they spend money and treat kids.
Those outside the system, usually aren’t held accountable depending on a state’s charter laws. And when the robber barons of public education spend millions to subvert democracy and change a state’s laws, they tend to go for laws that strip away all accountability that public schools must adhere to.
What Charter are you talking about? From what I’ve read of the original Charter movement that was started by two teachers back in the 1970s (?), the intent was to offer smaller class sizes using strategies and teaching methods to work with at risk kids (including kids with severe learning challenges).
Originally when professional educators were in charge instead of a Bill Gates, the Walton family or the Koch brothers, Charters were never meant to be an escape from a public school for a normal/average or above average child.
In fact, a child should not get into a Charter because they enter their name in a lottery. The original Charter concept would have meant kids at risk would be referred to the Charter by other educators and possibly parents.
Then there would be an assessment to determine if the child was qualified for the special attention a Charter was designed to provide.
All a lottery does is insure the parents are more involved with the child’s education. A lottery doesn’t usually identify kids that are at risk who need special programs designed by teachers working in teams.
Lloyd,
I agree with you in order to determine if the (supposed) innovations charters use work, they need to have the same class size and the same demographic.
I was responding to the comment that Megsby made about charters not receiving enough money. My point is, charter could have more money if they increased their class size to match those of the traditional public schools. The fixed costs would not change, in my town, the majority of the per pupil spending is on salaries, an increase in students would increase charter’s funds without increase their overall costs considerably if they increased class sizes.
In NC the money follows the child. Charters do not get money for buildings and perhaps some other things, but all the per pupil money goes with the student.
NC is trying to pass a law that would require local districts that are not using a building to rent the building to charters for $1.00.
Re; Portfolios – thanks for the insight. When I heard portfolios, I thought it would be made up of work the students did that the teacher assigned, not just more tests. I am sad to hear that the “portfolio model has been around a long time and even though it didn’t work well, it is being adopted here. 😦
The portfolio I was talking about did include student worth but the kids weren’t interested in it. And in the end when they were seniors getting ready to graduate, we gave the portfolio to them to take home and keep.
They would’ve had all the essays and research papers anyway because that work would’ve been passed back to them with grades during each school year. If they or their parents were interested in keeping the writing they could’ve done it anyway without all the extra work on teachers.
All the portfolio project did was add more responsibilities to teachers—more hours of work to squeeze in to organize all that stuff and hold on to. If a parent involved in their child’s education was interested, they could’ve kept the same writing assignments in a folder at home in a scrap-book collection of their child growing up.
I meant “student work” not “Student worth”. What went in those folders called portfolios was essays, book reports, etc. Not tests.
For HS students, I would expect they could keep their own portfolio.
My child is in 3rd grade,I would be willing to help him keep a portfolio.
However, I think because this is a back-up in case they fail the EOG’s. They would not allow parents to keep the work. The portfolio is supposed to be one way students who fail the EOGs can avoid repeating third grade or attending a summer reading camp,
The NC Read to Achieve Portfolios are not real portfolios in the traditional sense.
How will we determine that your child is reading at grade level?
Students will take the NC end-of-grade (EOG) reading test at the end of 3rd grade. If they pass the EOG reading test, they are eligible to be promoted to the 4th grade. If they do not pass the EOG reading test, there are other factors called good cause exemptions that will allow your child to be promoted to 4th grade. Students need to meet at least one of the following good cause exemptions:
-is a Limited English Proficient student with less than two years of instruction in ESL
-is assessed on NCExtend 1 or NCExtend 2
-received reading intervention and previously been retained more than once in kindergarten, first, second, or third grades
-received a score of 442 or higher on the 3rd grade beginning-of-grade assessment
-received a level 3 or higher on any of the ELA Case 21 assessments, quarters 1-3
-earned a level P or above on the TRC portion of mCLASS benchmark assessment
-has a completed portfolio that includes a combined score of 70% or higher on 3 passages for each standard
http://www.wcpss.net/parents/guides/read-to-achieve/
Perhaps this is what we need to do: leave the profession (when we can). This way they’ll be left with young incompetent teachers who cant be fired because there won’t be anyone with credentials to step in.
Now I remember why I swore this site off. As if I’m not depressed enough about my children’s education.
You flounce.
Then return.
Snark a few times.
Then witch about the level of communication.
Thank you for all you have done to elevate the discourse .
Are you flouncing again?
If so it is a shame.
I do my best. I know it’s not very good.
Yep. Pretty depressing. It’s a foreshadowing of what the President and the Democrat party wants for the country in every area, control and submission. But will the sheeple go into the streets against it? Nope.
How naïve, Corporations run the country since Kennedy. Do you still think that the President matters, especially in keeping the masses down? This left/ right stuff. Time to turn off Fox News. All of the hand wringing about what is wrong. One point made is what are you going to do about it?
An interesting claim. I may be naive. How do “Corporations run the country”? I do think the President matters. Obama and Bush, bad. Romney and Clinton, good.
Interesting, you claim Romney is good but where’s your evidence he would’ve made a good President?
As for corporations and the billionaires who control or own them, they don’t rule the country yet, but due to the Supreme Court, they now may pay out hundreds of millions of dollars to influence elections. That’s undue influence.
And that is the only way they have managed to gain ground in their war against public education.
Undue influence in your opinion, of course. Others see it as free speech. I read your remark as as preference against the 1st amendment. Your position sounds like Maduro’s in Venezuela. Or Putin’s about Ukraine. That’s why I debate
Iberals, because they so often SOUND like tyrants. They want to suppress dissent. The FCC wanted to send “researchers” into news rooms. Did you support that?
So you see free speech as an excuse to lie and cherry pick facts instead of search for the truth through all the facts to reach the best choice.
What would a tyrant do? Tyrants would use propaganda—-lies and cherry-picked facts—to achieve their political agendas. These are tactics that are no different than what Bill Gates, the Koch brothers, the Walton family and the other critics of public education are doing all the time.
It seems that your definition of free speech is the right to lie to confuse and fool people and use logical fallacies to make it seem as if you are right and everyone else is wrong.
Hitler, Stalin and Mao would have been proud of you along with every other tin-pot dictator and tyrant out of history.
I see free speech as a fair public discourse where both sides are allowed to have equal time to use facts to support their opinions. My wife grew up in China and lived through the Mao era and his Cultural Revolution and she knows that what happened in China and she also knows that what’s happening in America with the propaganda being spewed from the robber barons of public education and the Wolves of Sesame Street is exactly the same thing Mao did to China to achieve his political agendas.
There is no way these false critic of public education can win honesty and fairly so they wear a cloak called free speech to justify their lies.
You see, when you used the “1st amendment, Maduro in Venezuela, or Putin’s about the Ukraine” you used a logical fallacy to paint me as some sort of evil person to change the subject. There’s a name for that logical fallacy in the textbooks but I’m not going to waste my time to slip one those books off the shelf to find the term.
Anyone who is familiar with the use of logical fallacies in a debate should recognize the use of these false tactics.
I’m not a very good debater, but I’m trying to improve. Might I ask whether you think there are any legal limitations to 1st amendment protections of free speech? I don’t think the amendment stipulates that only “true” free speech is allowed because “truth” tends to differ from person to person. And besides, who would decide what was “true.” You may think truth is obvious, but what is perceptually obvious to one person is not to another.
If the criterion of “truth” is to be applied to public political speech, then the President would have to be silent because he lies transparently most of the time. Remember: “You can keep your health care if you like it. Period.” And of course there’s the notion that the stimulus grew the economy or at least mitigated what would have been a depression into a mere recession. There are many other pronouncements of the President that are clearly unfactual, but it would be illegal to require him to speak only when he is telling the truth. I’m sure to don’t want the President silenced.
If I attack you personally, it is only as a metaphor intended to help characterize your position. Don’t take it personally. It isn’t personal, it’s only debate. And I don’t see it as the informal fallacy called “Ad Hominem,” attacking the man to discredit the view. If we did that, we’d have to say that because Bill Clinton was a sexual libertine his economics view were wrong. But I thought he did some great stuff economically, welfare reform among them, even if the did stain with semen the chest of the blue dress in which Monika Lewinsky gave him a blow job. It’s not the man, but his policy which matters. So, if I call you “Maoist” it’s not because I see you, literally, as a part of that oppressive communist regime which failed so terribly and killed so many and of which your wife can testify so clearly. Not in the least.
But sometimes I do hear you say things about free speech that REMIND me of the policies of oppressive regimes like the old Maoist regime which punished speech not in harmony with the party line by death or “reeducation.” Or reminds me of the policy of the current government in Venezuela which controls television and newspapers for its own benefit. In spite of your condemnation of the way tyrants use propaganda, you personally, in your words, seem to imply that there is a way to differentiate between “true” speech and “unfactual speech” that can be practically implemented.
My view is that propaganda can ONLY be fought by more free speech. You want to shut down Gates and the Kochs because their large amounts of money allow them to put more of their views on the airwaves than you can. Yet the left has it’s own propaganda machine in the commercial media which is almost totally liberal. The Kochs and Gates are merely countering a monopoly media phenomenon. I may not agree with their positions, but that is not the criterion for their freedom to promote their views.
Nor are your opinions the criteria for permitting this or that to be promoted in paid advertising.
And now I’ll try to twist your nose a little bit as a way of trying to bring home to YOU what I see as the unconstitutional AND the irrationality of your position. Your wife is entitled to her opinion of the Maoist culture which she saw and endured, but that does NOT guarantee that she is perceiving properly the advertising and propaganda she witnesses now. Citing your wife as an authority to buttress your own argument does not wash with me unless she is a professional scholar of media. She is just a private person, same as you or me. Thus, I believe you have committed the informal fallacy of what is called “The Argument From Authority.” We may cite Einstein as an authority in Physics, his field, but that does not give credibility to his views on anything else, e.g. world peace, about which he spoke often and movingly.
I do urge you to read up a little on first amendment theory before you advocate again for what used to be called ‘the fairness doctrine,’ which was ruled unconstitutional a long time ago (in the 80’s, I think).
We X English teachers do tend to burble on, don’t we.
Huffity puff, boo hoo.
My kids are acing elementary school no problem, really it is too easy nowadays because we have to dumb it down for the low ones which seem to be more each year.
Maybe the gap is just natural and the sooner we admit it the better off as a country we will be.
If any other test that is designed that is not culturally biased if that is even possible, after one year the breakdown will be exactly the same, I guarantee it. Asians at the top, then whites, then Hispanic , then blacks.
Better to have testing, and hopefully we can have some different schools and different tracks for kids that will obviously never be able to get past algebra or formulating a thought based paper beyond three paragraphs.
At least here in NC we are getting to a point where we will be able to effectively stratify in this manner by using school choice.
B, you would loved it in the 1940s. Racially segregated schools. Tracks for all. No mixing of kids with different abilities. Exclusion of kids with disabilities.
So, your point, Diane is ?
Racially segregated schools and churches may not have been so bad. They had teachers of their own color. The Black community was unified around the church, which is powerful, and gave rise to MLK.
Now Blacks are lumped in under Federal spending and they are denied a caring community.
The point being that this reform movement has precipitated and accelerated more socio-economic segregation and polarization because of funding and rules for teaching and learning . . . .
How did you miss that, Harlan? . . . . .
Well, B effectively sums up the choice camp.
Which side are you on?
( rhetorical question we should all ask ourselves )
I would not pretend to speak for the choice camp, just saying what I see as a parent with kids in elementary school.
Should my kids teacher have to deal with uhhhh cultural issues like whether a kid is wearing a red or blue bandana while trying to give a lesson on spelling rules?
Should my kids teacher have to simultaneously administer 6 different IEPs in a class of 22 while trying to teach my kid long division?
The low ones and the special ones clamor and clamor for more and more resources and effort and time at the expense of educating our brightest.
I have even seen schools that forced the best and brightest kids to mentor pair with the lowest ones. Disgusting.
Diane, they don’t call it the greatest generation for nothing. The vagaries of the depression surely instilled in everyone in this country a sense of the order and indifference of nature. Truth known to those generations has been deeply buried under a stinking radioactive pile of sociology and political correctness. Anyone who dares try to fetch from the bottom of that pile risks cancer to career and even life, but when times change again and morsels of natural truth again become necessary for survival, some will venture it.
A Race to the Top?
or
A Waste and a Flop?
I’ll take A Waste and a Flop !
OK NY Teacher..Thx for my morning chuckle after this heart wrenching and so true post.
Let’s add to your lyric…
A Race to the Top?
or
A waste and a Flop?
Is that a question on the Test?
or
I need to answer it my Best?
and..
I’ve been racing round and round.
Just about to hit the ground..
and..
I ‘m spinning minds in the mud
To cut though this CC$$ Crud.
“Drop from the Top”
A Race to the Top??
I’m spinning in the mud..
Trying to get through
This CC$$ C-R-U-D
Duncan’s entourage..
Just a messin’ around..
While our kids are plungin’….
Head first ..to the Ground..
Reblogged this on suburbanprincessteacher and commented:
A heart-breaking look at teaching in the U.S. I am deathly afraid that Canada is headed down this path.
Fortunately, Canada is not headed on the same path. I taught in North Carolina for 20 years, but moved to Canada in 2012 and have been studying the two systems quite a bit.
I got a chance to ask John Abbott http://www.21learn.org/staff/john-abbott/, creator of the 21st Century Learning Initiative, if Canada was headed down the same educational path as the US and he said no. England is, but Canada is headed in the right direction.
Look at Canada’s 2012 PISA scores on p. 19,35,36. http://www.cmec.ca/Publications/Lists/Publications/Attachments/318/PISA2012_CanadianReport_EN_Web.pdf British Columbia scored better than Finland this time.
British Columbia is currently reworking its entire vision of the curriculum where they are trying to implement the latest educational research. http://www.bcedplan.ca/welcome.php BC’s Superintendent of Learning told me that Finland is looking to BC as a model because it has good scores with a diverse population, which makes educating the public much harder.
Although BC teachers score higher internationally, they aren’t any better than the teachers I worked with in NC. The biggest difference is that the teacher’s main focus in BC is on the child. NC teachers would score just as well if they were allowed to teach to the child (as they were trained), instead of to a test.
Please keep up the good work in Canada. One day the US will wake up to the deceptions and start following your example.
I thought you’d both be very interested in reading a blog I follow who wrote on this topic. I thought it was shocking and informative, and like you she’s a teacher who writes from the heart. http://momshieb.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/monopoly/
Unfortunately, you have only uncovered one of the many monopolies that are extracting wealth from our democracy, if you can still call it that. A 1999 deregulation laws allows the mega-banks to have a monopoly on everything. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-vampire-squid-strikes-again-the-mega-banks-most-devious-scam-yet-20140212
It is like the horrors of Enron, gone global. https://archive.org/details/Enron_TheSmartestGuysInTheRoom
In my view, the US has long been drinking the supply-side/consumerism Kool-aid too long and will have to relearn history the hard way. Canada is on the threshold and still has a choice. Many are doubtful here, but I think Canadians will choose the better path because they think more collectively than people do in the south. The south is much more individualistic, so personal egos tend to trump the collective reason.
In the end, I hope, Americans will realize the right path following Canada’s example. The two system are much more alike than different. Both are filled with hard-working, heart-filled teachers. Simply allow the US to teach to the child instead of to a test and they would be scoring as well as British Columbia too.
******STOP!
*Stop spending your own money.
*Stop doing everything to a “t”.
*Stop feeling guilty for what you cannot change.
*Start telling the parents how much testing is taking away from their children’s education.
*Start a blog or social media site where you can get info to parents under the guise of “This is what we learned today!”
*Start talking with colleagues about the local UNION.
*Start attending union meetings.
****Continue to share with Diane and other bloggers- your story can be used to “turn the tide”.***********
1.We have no unions in North Carolina.
2. If we didn’t spend our own money our children would do without. We do not want our children to go without what they need for school because they go without so much else.
3. If we don’t do things to a “t” we will be denigrated and eventually let go.
Respectfully, that is why the problem will continue. I say this as a fellow teacher in a Title 1 school.
The “straight A” perfectionist attitude is going to kill- literally from heart disease- those who continue to try to do it all. I have two cousins who are teachers in NC, so I know you are having a time of it.
What has been done to rectify the “no unions” position there?
We have the NCAE which is an educators’ organization. Teachers pay dues for some type of representation. I am not a member. It is my understanding that this is a right to work state and that government workers cannot legally strike etc. I am not the best person to ask but this has been addressed in other posts on this blog. I do believe that the NCAE does not have any political clout and has allowed the governor and legislature to basically sell educators down the river. NCAE does have some lawsuits which address tenure etc. but you might find more information on their website. Locally (in my school and system) I have heard nothing about them this year.
I understand your position but I cannot do anything less than my very best at work and the teachers I work with seem to do the same. My school has about a 98% free and reduced lunch population. Sadly, this is not uncommon anymore in the state and in our country.
Unions and strikes are more or less against the law in North Carolina. NCEA is more of a advocacy group that offers liability issuance than a true union like they have in British Columbia.
It is bad, because the teacher’s union in BC went on strike in 2012 and raised the amount of money allocated per child by $2,200/yr.
Massachusetts, the highest scoring state in the US, also has teacher’s unions. The lowest scoring states are in the south, where there are no unions.
These numbers should reveal the truth to the public, but they don’t. Figuring out why and how to better educate the public seems key to me.
Thinking more about the $. I personally spent until almost financial ruin for my classroom. Anyone can “buy” things… It is the SKILL in TEACHING that makes the difference. Your SKILLS and EXPERTISE as a PROFESSIONAL EDUCATOR is the KEY. If it isn’t, then we have been wrong in our stance against TFA, charters, and the privatization movement. We are not wrong, are we? Then, the most valuable resource we can bring into our classrooms to our charges is a healthy and whole self. Please consider this, even if it seems naive. I am trying daily to walk this path myself. I will not divulge what I have sacrificed personally on the altar of the expectations of “the others”, but know that what I say is with the best of intentions… For your good and the good of my colleagues in the teaching profession.
When I was still teaching, I often charged hundreds of dollars adding to my own debt to buy material for my classroom because the district refused to offer the support the kids needed. I bought printers, computers, etc.
And the key word is “charged”, which I have done in the past as well. When we so this, we “hide” the reality of the situation from those who might otherwise lend us aid. If everyone stops this madness, then IT WILL BE SEEN. And we will have made a choice to value ourselves, which is that not one of our highest aims for our students? We cannot give them what we ourselves do not yet possess.
I’ve seen a comment comparing schools in the north to schools in the south. Want to know one of the reasons schools in the north typically are better? Funding. I grew up in northern states and have family in NC. Additionally I attended university in NC. The amount we pay in local property tax to fund our schools in the north is MUCH higher than what our family in NC pays. It really shows. I had a classmate in NC that attended a private school and when talking about our high school experiences she was absolutely shocked to find out I attended a public school (she was sure I had attended a private school).
Family members in the public school system in NC have had to do a fraction of the work I was required to do by my northern schools (I’ve lived and attended school in 3 different northern states). I actually had classmates in college that did not know what a statement of development was, what a thesis statement was, etc. My northern school district required all of its high school students to write twenty papers a year. We were writing a paper almost every week in English class and we had Theme Readers who read and graded the papers (as the teachers couldn’t manage to read and grade that many papers on top of all the other school work we did).
I have many friends that are teachers in NC. I know what were already not ideal teaching conditions are just getting worse. Many changes need to be made. Most of these changes need to occur nationally and not just in NC, but NC needs to start properly funding their schools. That way students and teachers have the proper supplies.
There is a constitutional amendment in NC that prohibits state unions for any organization. However, there can be national unions for say plumbers, electricians, etc.
NCAE is a teacher organization that fights for NC’s students and teachers. Currently, we have 2-3 lawsuits pending against our state Legislature and the latest laws it enacted during their 2013 session. This year is a short session for our legislators and it starts in May! We have had Moral Mondays with the NAACP chapter, our President and Vice-President of NCAE were arrested during one of these gatherings for civil disobedience to show a united front against our General Assembly (GA).
As a 5th grade teacher, I see what my 3rd grade counterparts are going through. Thankfully, we here in Scotland County, have one to one virtual classrooms. This helps teachers keep students on task by using educational websites like MobyMax, Study Ladder, and ScootPad for students to practice Math and ELA skills.
Thank you for the information, Melanie. I am going to look into that a bit further.
I am thrilled at the resistance being demonstrated in your state. In our nation’s history, resistance movemts had greatest strength when they united with other groups that valued worker’s rights.
Check out (of course, when you have time -ha!) Howard Zinn’s “a People’s History of the United States”. It might provide some “seeds” for further resistance.
If united, perhaps NAACP, NCAE, the trades unions, and teachers can demonstrate together and find legislative support for constitutional amendment. This can be a goal for next year if not this one… You guys are in “survival mode” right now.
Again, PLEASE remember
* If you exhaust all of your personal resources, you may have a job but not a LIFE.
*In your resistance, YOU are CHOOSING the hill upon which you fight. You even get to stash your “battle implements”.
*If we allow ourselves to be broken, defeated, or in any way malnourished spiritually/physically/mentally — THEY WALK OVER US and WIN.
Nice to see you here Melanie. (we are usually on FB together)
I know of two action events in NC. One is on March 8 and one just occurred one Feb 17. I am not sure what happened but it gives me hope that the idea of unions is being discussed in NC.
Organize 2020
On Saturday, March 8th, from 10-4pm (lunch provided), join educators from across our state in the Koury Auditorium, 601 High Point Rd, on the Jamestown Campus of Guilford Technical Community College (GTCC) in Jamestown, NC. Learn how to organize and mobilize educators around public education, gain confidence in leading conversations about public education policy, and leave with tools to help you organize your building! We are proud to have life-long teacher activist and educator Lois Weiner, author of “The Future of our Schools” and “Preparing Teachers for Urban Schools,” as our keynote speaker! In addition to turning school workers into activists, we will celebrate Organize 2020′s official recognition as a caucus of the NCAE! Please register for this event at http://www.organize2020.com/2014-03-08-registration/
Workers meeting
We have said that America’s unions will live or die based on what happens in the South. Fortunately, national and international unions seem ready to rise to the challenge.
Come share your ideas and find out why now is the time to organize the South at a special event at Duke University on February 17, 2014.
What: Panel discussion on how a workers’ movement in the South can change the nation
When: Wednesday, February 17, 2014 at 7:00 PM
Where: Duke University Center for Documentary Studies, 1317 W. Pettigrew St., Durham, NC 27705
RSVP: http://bit.ly/otsduke
Panelists will discuss the recent AFL-CIO’s resolution calling for a southern organizing strategy, the region’s labor history, current organizing campaigns, and the political influence of the South on the nation.
This event is sponsored by CLASS Center at Duke, NC State AFL-CIO, Student Action with Farmworkers, and LAWCHA. For more information, contact MaryBe McMillan at 919-833-6678 or marybe@aflcionc.org.
This will end up being a double post since the first one is awaiting moderation. I had accidentally included the links.
Nice to see you here Melanie. (we are usually on FB together)
I know of two action events in NC. One is on March 8 and one just occurred one Feb 17. I am not sure what happened but it gives me hope that the idea of unions is being discussed in NC.
Organize 2020
On Saturday, March 8th, from 10-4pm (lunch provided), join educators from across our state in the Koury Auditorium, 601 High Point Rd, on the Jamestown Campus of Guilford Technical Community College (GTCC) in Jamestown, NC. Learn how to organize and mobilize educators around public education, gain confidence in leading conversations about public education policy, and leave with tools to help you organize your building! We are proud to have life-long teacher activist and educator Lois Weiner, author of “The Future of our Schools” and “Preparing Teachers for Urban Schools,” as our keynote speaker! In addition to turning school workers into activists, we will celebrate Organize 2020′s official recognition as a caucus of the NCAE! Please register for this event at http://www.organize2020.com/2014-03-08-registration/
Workers meeting
We have said that America’s unions will live or die based on what happens in the South. Fortunately, national and international unions seem ready to rise to the challenge.
Come share your ideas and find out why now is the time to organize the South at a special event at Duke University on February 17, 2014.
What: Panel discussion on how a workers’ movement in the South can change the nation
When: Wednesday, February 17, 2014 at 7:00 PM
Where: Duke University Center for Documentary Studies, 1317 W. Pettigrew St., Durham, NC 27705
Panelists will discuss the recent AFL-CIO’s resolution calling for a southern organizing strategy, the region’s labor history, current organizing campaigns, and the political influence of the South on the nation.
This event is sponsored by CLASS Center at Duke, NC State AFL-CIO, Student Action with Farmworkers, and LAWCHA.
It’s against NC law for teachers to be a part of a union.
I have an additional accountability question. Is there any accountability for those who promulgate the reformation of public education? Is there accountability for the Duncans, Rhees, and Gates…and those public officials (including presidents) who have established everything with so much pride and energy?
The only accountability they have is to their stockholders.
What accountability was there when Honduras and Guatemala were run by United Fruit?
Same question.
We have become a banana republic without the bananas but with lots of other commodities instead,
including our children.
I did a documentary on the schools of Guatemala. The US sent plenty of money there for education, it just never got there. It’s like all of the funding from our government, it just never gets there. I think especially with Special Education, where we label kids just to get our share and they are labeled for life with InBloom, even in the early years. The unions love it because it creates more teachers.
Union meetings are not the way to go.
You have been sold out.
Start attending parent meetings.
There are many parents who do not care b/c they are using school as a babysitting service! The empathy and apathy in some NC counties is non-existent!
In 1918, the British evolutionist, Benjamin Kidd, wrote about schooling’s purpose was to “impose upon the young the ideal of subordination”.
Should anyone visit a 2nd grade class, there you will see the last vestiges of the free human spirit. Age 7 is the year, developmentally, when children are capable of receiving direct instruction, though some may take longer.
Advocates explaining the issues and problems surround the new Common Core Curriculum, such as Diane Ravitch, have done a remarkable study of the recent moves by the Gates Foundation to open the field of Education to the market place of high tech vendors and publishers. There may be a need to as examine these developments in the context of the origins of public education. One of the leading authorities is John Taylor Gatto with his “Underground History of American Education”.
“We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
said President Woodrow Wilson to businessmen just 100 years ago.
If we are to move with this paradigm for education, we need to wonder what are the plans and market place for future workers, which would eventually be educated and tested with a new technology, which would eliminate the idea of relationship, both in the classroom, as well as with parental involvement and organization. Education may soon no longer be labeled a “social science”.
When President Wilson spoke, we had a country needing manpower for the industrial giants that ruled the economy of the time, similar to the Gates Foundation of today, as well as a “civilizing” agent for the masses of immigrants entering the country.
John Taylor Gatto’s interesting theory is that these new residents would rise up to challenge the monopolies in place, as young people entered industry and advanced quickly in its ranks. This is why children would be diverted to mandatory schooling for twelve years. It was another reason why children were removed from the factories under the banner of child protection laws. At the same time, children as young as five years, had harnesses strapped to their bodies to pull lorries of coal from the mines, according to Gatto.
In 1917, there was established an “Education Trust”, not unlike the economic entities that exist today, which consisted of those associated with Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago and the National Education Association.
Gatto writes:
“At first, the primary target was the tradition of independent livelihoods in America. Unless Yankee entrepreneurialism could be extinguished, at least among the common population, the immense capital investments that mass production industry required for equipment weren’t conceivably justifiable. Students were to learn to think of themselves as employees, competing for the favor of management. Not as Franklin or Edison had once regarded themselves, as self determined, free agents.
As we move into the 21st Century, we need to examine the justifiable reasons for introducing the latest technology and the effects that it will have on the mostly unemployed economy, most industry and mid level employment move off shore. Educational historian, Diane Ravitch writes in a recent Washington Post article, “Everything You Need To Know About Common Core”:
” As Secretary [Federal Department of Education] Duncan’s Chief of Staff wrote at the time, the Common Core was intended to create a national market for book publishers, technology companies, testing corporations and other vendors.”
As in the early 20th century, whose anniversary we celebrate now with the First World, large corporations and the teachers unions have once again come together to redesign the lives of children with uncertain consequences and with the standardized Common Core Curriculum, turning schools into “testing mills”, and the violation of children’s privacy and personal information.
Ahead of us we have two directions. We can return to the wonder of the 2nd grader and move to develop our lost generation of entrepreneurs, or sacrifice them and their personalities to alienation by the vendors, that will isolate them from caring instructors, parents and each other in an economy with no future.
There was once a saying before the rise of schooling:
“Show me the 7 year old, and I will show you the man (woman)”
Superb, Joseph!!!
Great read Joseph..
Inspiring .
Hope the Money Craving CEO’$ will read your post.
NOT
This is precisely how to create children who hate learning and will never be real readers.
With every lesson we teach, with every test we give, there is a “hidden curriculum” in the sense that it is hidden from clueless administrators and educrats and, alas, even to some teachers. But it certainly isn’t hidden to the kids. That’s ALL that they see and learn. We are teaching them to hate learning. Extrinsic motivators don’t work with cognitive tasks.
I agree Robert
“Successes of the CC$$ and Race to Nowhere Land”
Have taught children to Hate to Go to School and to Hate Learning…
Have created… via Test Mills.. Teachers who Hate Teaching.(as it does not exist)
Have.. and still are …using the children of the USA as Guinea Pigs for the Billionaires who know zilch about education.
Ratings..last time I looked.at the Train Wrecks, Dunkin’ Duncan’s Entourage was number ONE.
What a great video!
Thanks, Joseph. I think that this video goes a LONG WAY toward explaining what’s wrong with the basic underlying theory that the Education Deformers are working from. I am very pleased that you see why the video is so important, but I knew from other comments by you on this blog that you would understand its significance.
Heart breaking, Heart Wrenching, Powerful, and all of the other thoughs that the two Roberts on this board so eloquently express each and everyday.
Jana, Joanne. Lolfty, Joseph, artsegal, and others, I have so learned from these posts.
America’s Child
Just a look at the Faces
Of the Children in the Race
It’s so easy to observe
A Scene of Colossal Disgrace..
I live in America..
I dreamed of the chance
To experience all firsthand
Not just do a “Testing Dance”
I hear about the sands..
And the Sea to Shining Sea..
I am tested on the passage
But I sense not ..of its glee
If I could stop a moment…
and Touch.. and… Feel the Sand..
Then maybe I can learn..
To value the Freedom in our Land
I do not ask for riches
I do not ask for more
I know what this Race is all about
A Test and my Perfect Score
Who cares about my life???
I often wonder as I test
I raced so long .. it was no fun
I failed …though.. I raced my best
heart wrenching
I am so totally in awe of your ability to put my feelings into words. I am not a young teacher and, therefore, will be retiring soon. If this were not the case, I would move to another state even if it meant recertification. My heart is with you and all the other third grade teachers who have been stripped of their autonomy and love of teaching.
A third grade teacher I know says the hardships in the classroom come as follows:
Worst is TRC progress monitoring (Dibels progress monitoring is fine). Second is passages crammed into one semester and not used formatively. Will be useful but not current way used. Third was cut score used to determine passage rate of reading eog. I do not mind mclass as a benchmark. I think it is useful.
“I have even seen schools that forced the best and brightest kids to mentor pair with the lowest ones. Disgusting.”
Gee, B, if you were to take tennis lessons, would you not want your instructor to be a master at what she does so that you can learn from the best?
Or is that too equitable for you?
Some pairing of low/high students in peer learning is a researched best practice.
I assume you are a teacher and have been teaching for over 15 years or so?
Certainly, I can see if the low student is acutely impaired with severe disabilities, in which case, the pairing would be for exposure and experience for both students, one that teaches about diversity and awareness of others. Certainly, if the kids with IEPs are so emotionally disturbed and violent, then I can see no pairing or little to no inclusion, but rather, a self contained model.
But if not those conditions, inclusion is the best model based on research, not on poltiical correctness. Maybe that’s far too tolerant for you, as you do describe such a modality as “disgusting” . . . . .
Given your limited thinking on the model of pairing high and low, I hope never to collaborate with you on a project, as I know which position and status I would have, and I’d have to spoon feed you everything.
That’s disgusting . . . . .
Hmm…… Brightest kids…. lowest ones………..”disgusting”……..
In what sense?
Peer tutoring is a wonderful experience. Children learn best from other children. In my experience I have found that the “lowest ones” were more emotionally mature than their counterpart and learning resulted on many levels. Teaching others is also a way to look at the problem in a new way by organizing your ideas and with speech. This was the way education existed before the public school. Children were not isolated and alienated and “disgusted”.
Disgusting in the sense that a teacher or school is using the intellectual and time resources of gifted children to help bring up the lowest kids and the gifted kids and their parents suffer for it.
Anyone that has been in a classroom knows that the majority of all so-called ‘differentiation’ points downward not upward.
http://neatoday.org/2013/09/18/are-we-failing-gifted-students/
“Gee, B, if you were to take tennis lessons, would you not want your instructor to be a master at what she does so that you can learn from the best?”
yes, I would expect the instructor to be a master, not a peer. Thanks for making my point
I am sure you can put a retarded kid in a gifted class and he will be quite happy, but put a gifted kid in a retarded class and I think you can see the problem. Water doesn’t flow uphill.
A Google executive (http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/20/google-executive-gpa-test-scores-worthless-for-hiring/) recently explained GPA is no longer seen as a true indicator of potential job performance. Instead of looking to recruit employees who have excelled in a very narrow skill set in college, they prefer to look at the candidate’s ;leadership skills, resourcefulness and ability to adapt to unforeseen circumstances, ability to work with others and think outside the box. By pairing gifted students with “retarded” kids (I hate that word as much as the “n-word” BTW) you are developing leadership skills, a sense of empathy and the ability to teach what they learned which ultimately enhances their own learning. I hardly see it as slowing down those who are gifted.
And my 2nd graders teacher…all she does seem to care about it the testing. She doesn’t give credit for the fact that my daughter has gone from reading at 1.5 level at the beginning of the school year to now reading at 2.9 level AR books because she isn’t reading them fast enough. She gets sick very easily and has had bronchitis, chicken pox and the flu this school year, all documented by her physician, so she has missed a lot of school days. And yet, still has brought her reading level up significantly in spite of time missed due to illnesses. When I try to talk to her teacher all I get is well, “the testing says this or this testing says that”. Why would she just focus on teaching her and all of the success my child has had already? Is the testing really more important than the child?
Lori Dowell, Mecklenburg County, NC
I agree- she should be praising your daughter’s amazing progress. And I applaud you and your daughter. But due to the legislature your daughter will not pass 3rd grade unless she passes the test (or completes a portfolio of tests, or whatever stuff your school district arranges). Read to Achieve is the an amazingly successful attempt at ruining public education, making teachers act insanely and harming small children. I am spending a lot of time convincing administrators, parents and teachers to resist the urge to believe the tests. But since the state is carrying a large stick to punish administrators, teachers, parents and students; it is hard to ignore. I suggest joining Mecklenberg ACTS http://www.mecklenburgacts.org/
I just want you to know there is some sanity in Mecklenberg
North Carolina’s teachers would teach to the child if they could because that is what they are trained to do as certified teachers. But, the accountability tests force them to look at the numbers, because that is how they will be judged.
I taught in North Carolina before accountability testing arrived and saw how the teacher’s worked together, all focused on meeting the needs of the children, like what you are looking for. But the main focus changed the year the accountability test arrived in 1995. It pitted the teachers against each other, mostly over which one was not going to get the learning disabled kids. Since the score matters more than the kid, the kids you get will mostly determine your score.
Fortunately, I moved to a place where the they never picked the schools never adopted the accountability test and remained focused on the child. Before No Child Left Behind, the Canadian and US schools ranked about the same. US rankings started dropping the year accountability test arrived. Meanwhile, Canada rose to 3rd in the 2009 PISA rankings.
From what I have seen, the teacher quality between North Carolina and British Columbia where I live now, is about the same. Both have well-educated, heart-filled teachers working as hard as they can. The accountability test is the biggest difference.
It is so nice to go to a parent conference in BC and it all be about meeting the needs of the child. The multitudes of parent conferences I attended as a teacher in NC focused mostly on passing the tests. Many kids were told that they would be a failure if they did not try harder. Most of them did not try harder and probably left school feeling like a failure, or hating school in general, thus defeating the whole idea about education in the first place. Focusing on the tests, tears students down. Focusing on the child, builds students up.
If you want a better education for your children, ditch North Carolina’s new education reform, and start copying what British Columbia is doing. Here are BC latest PISA scores, look at pp. 19, 35, and 36. http://www.cmec.ca/Publications/Lists/Publications/Attachments/318/PISA2012_CanadianReport_EN_Web.pdf Take a look at how BC is reforming it educational system. http://www.bcedplan.ca/
Best wishes, I really wish that North Carolina teachers were allowed to teach to the children as well. They would do a great job, if they were allowed to drop the accountability tests.
Maybe Americans who hate or don’t like the testing should all migrate to British Columbia.
If a hundred million or more Americans all started moving at once, that would make the corrupt and bought politicians all the way to the White House sit up and notice.
With all those parents and children moving, Canada would need teachers and all the real teachers in the US could apply for the jobs.
Then the US would lose all that income from taxes. LOL
With that huge national debt and annual interest payment, maybe that would lead to another financial collapse and help bankrupt all the robber baron billionaires.
We can dream.
A mass migration to Canada is not practical, but it’s numbers can be used to show what really works. The two systems are nearly identical with the same sort of problems. The biggest difference is that they teach to the child instead of to a test. The US could drop the accountability test with one legislation. The teachers would start teaching to the children again (because that is what they were trained to do) and test scores would start rising again.
The problem is getting the public to pick out the truth for what it is. They are purposefully misdirected by a multitude of special interest groups and for a variety of different reasons. I am hoping to pick them out one by one and find their weaknesses. You seem to have identified some of them already. Do you want to compare notes?
The most obvious threat to democracy and an educated public are the Ayn Rand Objectivists. Her views are essentially expressed by ALEC today. This group now seems to include the establishment which seem to includes politicians (Republican and Democrat), corporations, and the mainstream media.
The GOP itself offers a threat because they have been able to effectively shut down the reasoning part of our democracy with a 40 year hate-campaign, better known as the “Southern Strategy.” http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/phillips-southern.pdf They figured out that people don’t vote with their reason if you know how to push their ethnic hatred buttons. It can even be done without using the racial words themselves. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_8E3ENrKrQ
How do you reason with people who have been programmed to hate for 40 years? While we were busy educating the children to reason, FOX news was busy educating the adults to hate. Is it possible to reason with someone like this? http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/02/19/cnns_wolf_blitzer_takes_on_ted_nugent_for_using_term_subhuman_mongrel_to_attack_obama.html
The third threat to our reasoned-based democracy/educated public that I have identified are the American Theologist. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/books/review/19brink.html?pagewanted=all I was listening to them on the radio when I was back in the south over Christmas. They fear human reason itself. Show after show was emphasising again and again, “God did not intend for us to be able to rely upon our own reason to solve our own problems. God wants us to let go of our own reason and trust in him. I am a Christian myself, but I believe our reason is a gift, not a curse.
These are the three individual threats that I have been able to identify so far. What have you found? So much of it is a brain game. They intentionally stress the brain with some ridiculous accusation which then naturally causes the human brain to temporarily shut down its reasoning process. How do you reason with someone programmed to hate? You can’t fight back because it just strengthens the hate. But you can’t remain quiet or ignored either.
1995
David, Your 2nd paragraph
“I taught in North Carolina before accountability testing arrived and saw how the teacher’s worked together, all focused on meeting the needs of the children, like what you are looking for.
But the main focus changed the year the accountability test arrived in 1995.
It pitted the teachers against each other, mostly over which one was not going to get the learning disabled kids.
Since the score matters more than the kid, the kids you get will mostly determine your score.”
This is exactly what has happened and you have described the Core of this devastating decline in the teaching profession in the state of NC.
The Queen of Education on the Hill sweet talks her way around the Problem. If you talk to the Queen, you will see that she can spin her way out of ever answering one question directly…It is called “Beating around the Bush”….
NC has totally lost sight of the fact that we are dealing with Human Beings and “One Size does not fit All”
The CC$$ was supposed to be a fix for the No Child Left Behind”
They are both total disasters and teachers do pit against teachers.
All of the children …have been ……..not just Left Behind but Thrown under the Bus and Tossed aside for Political Gain and $$$$$
neanderthal100, We are at the end game of a multi-decade war against public education started by an economist, Milton Friedman. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpcp63OoRSs
He got his ideas from the founder of Objectivism, Ayn Rand. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKd0ToQD00o
Listen to this guy from the Ayn Rand Institute speaking about public education. Compare his suggestions to what is happening to the education system in state after state.http://arc-tv.com/the-separation-of-school-and-state/
Let’s listen to what Ayn Rand said again, to see what is at stake. http://youtu.be/HKd0ToQD00o?t=4m12s
My daughter had seen the ocean and sea shells. Yet every standardized test she too showed that she had not been exposed to the world. A teacher could make a test as difficult as they wanted and my daughter would do well. Give her a standardized test and she do terrible. It’s wrong to base student, teacher or school performance on a test.
i represent those sentiments… the state just needs to hire good teachers and get out of the way!
The state already has plenty of good teachers. They just need to get out of the way before those teachers migrate to Virginia and South Carolina. If the state truly cared, they would see what this legislation is doing to the students. 3rd graders should not break down in tears or become ill because of these passages and tests.
I have a 3rd grader,who is 8 years old! She is totally stressed daily at school! When going on vacation she was scared to miss school due to missing portfolios! She was tested and has had problems with reading comphension, something I find comes in time, age, practice! However with that being said, I put her in tutorIng 4 hours a week, besides being pulled out of class a couple times a week for help! She is not doing good on her portfolios but is an AB honor roll student. So she has been pushed and pushed, what happens at the end of the year if she doesn’t pass, oh sorry you tried soo hard but to bad you have to do it again. I’m truly disgusted with the CC$$, what it’s doing to our teachers, students and parents like myself that happen to care about what’s going on in their children’s lives!
So very true. I am a teacher in NC also and I love teaching, but they are quickly pushing me into thinking of a new career. Testing, testing,testing, assessments, assessments, assessments. That is what are jobs are now. Children have little time to have fun and be kids.
Certified Teachers in NC are now Ceritifed Testers..
These schools are in a mess and the people on the hill have formed a consortium of the 10 highest paid superintendents who have decided to keep the CC$$ for another 7 years.
They shoud throw this curriculum out
Here is a curriculum that was supposed to spiral from K-12..
and they threw it in the schools all at one time.
.They know this was incorrect.
The implementation of the CC$$ consisted of teaching the teachers to read the CODES..JARGON ….and TESTS….That is all….
Since it appears that Queen Bee and the Elected Officials have totally failed this state, I would say they asked for help from these supers who do not understand one ounce of curriculum….but live in Giant Polticial Tanks…
Misery loves company…so now we will be able to blame the Supers for the decision that is going to continue to destroy education in this state.
See for yourself ..Google.. StoptheCommonCoreNC
I think just about all of the states have a StooptheCommonCore site.
I left the profession on January 29th after 23 years of award winning lessons. I love teaching children, just hate my job and the psychological attrition of the soul required to maintain that job.
Parents, if you are expecting the school to make YOUR one child a success. The school/teacher can succeed with the group, but if you think you can send an illiterate and unpleasant child to today’s public schools and get a success in return, you are sadly mistaken.
Ge
Now that you are among the “Out of the Claws of this Political Mad-Core-Goants”….You will be able to help the cause…Google StoptheCommonCoreNC.
Forget all of our methods classes in college. Forget developmental learning. Forget that children are not all the same. Every word above is true. I too am a third grade teacher. Or perhaps I should say I am now a third grade test administrator.
Education is no longer recognizable. There is very little time for teaching. We can no longer encourage children to think through issues and come to conclusions. They must have only the conclusion that is on the test(s). Students are now afraid to take any risks which is what all our great thinkers and innovators do. They are afraid it won’t be the correct choice on the test.
I have been a student, a parent and a teacher. This is a situation in which no one thrives. Not even the lucky students that test we’ll and naturally. There is no time to challenge them to be lifelong learners, only test passers. Once they get to real life, and must perform at a job, sadly they will learn that no one gets paid to pass tests. We are raising a generation of students that hate school and we are giving them very little in the way of skills to navigate life.
And finally, I have to say, I don’t know who is writing these so called tests but I can tell you they don’t seem as if they have been in a classroom for a while. I have taught third grade for 20 years. These measures are not developmentally appropriate . The only purpose I can see is to separate the fortunate from the unfortunate. I can’t wait to see how sad our drop out rate is when these kids have learned that they are not successful because a test said so. We know from research that boys, especially African American boys, will quit trying if they see no way to succeed. Shamefully, we are setting ourselves up for a disaster. Why wont anyone listen to the educators? Why have politicians begun running our schools, our curriculum, and our future? The people voting to enact these absurd tests haven’t been in a classroom in a very long time. How does that give them the knowledge to impact our future in such a drastic way?
I won’t quit. Someone has to be there for these kids. But the state of North Carolina is not helping their students and have demoralized their educators. Every day I go to see those smiling faces and everyday I have hope that things will change before it’s to late. You can be sure I will do my research when I vote and I encourage others to do so as well.
Jennifer
I have seen teachers who had to quit ..or die early..
Your comment is Right in the Bulls Eye.. and you used your name.
You are a courageous teacher.
It is not just the African American Boys that will quit..they all will. I have taught all and seen the same.
The High School Students of today know only one game in school.
That is the test-taking game…They know it well.
The High School Students in NC can recite the instructions to any test given in NC.. I heard them discussing it in the hall one day. It was hilarious.. Hey Joe..Let’s go take our etc etc …
If the teacher reads the directions and makes the slightest mistake…the students will call them out on it..
A parent told me that she asked her child about one of the many many many many tests and the child said that they were told they were not allowed to discuss the tests with anyone….
How laughable….
They never get to see exactly what they missed on the test.
They leave thinking that if they say anything to anyone, it will mean they will immediately fail..
Parents..take your children to DPI Headquarters and demand to see what your child missed on these tests…not just some general complex wordy standard that makes no sense.. You can ask to see your child’s data…
StoptheCommonCoreNC has up to date for NC.
They have StoptheCommonCore in almost every state..
Dr Ravitch ‘s blog has info from every state and it is so very helpful to know that you are not alone in this Battle…
Tell it, sister!
I agree……….you too sister..!! LOL
“Tell it Like it is”
1966 song written by George Davis and Lee Diamond, originally recorded by Aaron Neville
Please quit. Please stop harming children. Do your homework. Read Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto. Cut out the middle man and work directly with the parents in a private school, home school group, online school or start your own one room school house. You’ll have better working conditions, more job satisfaction and more success as a real teacher.
Laura,
Hahahaha! I left a private school to teach “where I felt I was needed by children who deserve good teachers.” I love each of my students and I see potential in each one. Sadly, I may have better working conditions, more satisfaction, and more success. That does not change the fact that children deserve good teachers. All children. Not just private school kids. All kids!
How can I help them if I just leave them?
Jennifer – I am proud of you for staying for the children and fighting the good fight. If we all leave then the privatizers and deformers win. You are a hero trying to work around the rules that are trying to make you a tester rather than a teacher. And there are many others of you out there, but they are too busy, scared or overwhelmed to post and use their names. All of us with children in the public schools are indebted to you.
Move to hawaii to teach. It is more expensive to live here but you will get a livable wage for you and your children with the teachers salary here and there isnt that much testing here yet either. You could always try for one of the really good private schools too. They charge parents like 10-20k a year im sure those teachers make a lot
I am also a third grade teacher. I have $28000 in student loans.i went too threes loan Web sites and shipped for a reduction in payment and according too threes loan companys policies based on my income of s beginning year teacher i do not any payment at this time.so how long do you thing the loan companies will lend money for a degree in education when by the companies own standards i do not earn enough money to repay the loan. The love of my students can not pay the bills.I’m not sure how long i can afford to be teacher.
I am so sorry that you are going through this, but I firmly believe that all this nonsense is by design. Young brains are not designed to grasp the intricacies of algebra before they make sense of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, yet the new curriculum has us teaching some of it at the primary level. This at a time when parents are so thin on time from working that they have little time to work with their kids on their homework. No longer is there time to have fun learning math or applying/practicing your skills in math races on teams like I did in the fifties. Now the math is so oddly presented that parents have no idea what the kids are attempting to do, and too often, there are no longer any books so that the parents can sit down and figure out what in the world they are talking about.
Are the curriculum planners at the state and federal level this incompetent? I believe that they are working to make a big gap between the general population and the class they are trying to build of the elite, a new nobility. These were around in the seventies when I took a couple of social work classes in college: we were told that we would be making decisions to remove children from their parents, because most parents really didn’t know how to raise children properly. (Like the foster homes did???!!!!) It was mind-boggling.
So parents are going to have to spend serious time teaching their own children (lots of good home-schooling texts and tools out today) even if they remain in public school. Teachers, you are going to have to encourage parents to teach kids at home and give them some basic fun materials to work with (I know, you are overwhelmed now)–use some of the materials that you used to use and send it home. Even if only 1/4 of the kids get the advantage of it, that’s 5-7 more that are educated than would have been.
Final thought: pray for God to awaken this country and its leaders in a great revival so that people can be saved and see what is going on.
Beautiful Post!
I just read that sitting at a desk or at a computer for too long will make you sick.
These children need to be playing, exercising, and learning their basic skills and need to have fun while they are learning!!!
They need art, music, vocational, READING & READING Extra-curricular..etc..etc..
So much has been stolen from this generation.
They hate going to school. they cry. they stress, they sit and sit and sit…
I see this as blatant child abuse and Social Services needs to step in and save these children!
These children are being robbed of a childhood rich in activities that grow the body and the mind,.
Reading about it and watching it makes me sick.
The best-written, most-articulate, most- accurate article that I have ever read concerning schools today! In fact, I’m making a printed copy of this to reread at times when I (just retired after a wonderful 45-year career as a teacher of young children) feel the inner longing to be back in the classroom.
I know where you are coming from Anne…but back in the classroom today is not enjoyable and enlightening.
It is like listening to Dictators day in and day out demanding High Test Scores.
Teachers are Testers.
Retired teachers can help by voicing their opinions on all of these Educational Blogs and the StoptheCommonCore Blogs in the different States.
Diane’s blog is the best.
Keep reading and you will see. Very intelligent experienced educators and some use their real names.
Of Course, you know why some of us do not use our real names…
When I learned the entire USA is in the same boat with this CC$$ debacle, I felt better and I attempt to keep abreast of the protests all over the USA
I had no idea what I did not know until I started reading Diane’s blog.
Reblogged this on bombayjewess and commented:
Sad state of education…
Well said!!! I teach ELA at the high school level, and have even more experience with students who simply choose to not do their work, think, participate, engage, or produce. I email parents, send letters home, and call. Nothing works, and then I am reprimanded because students are failing. My site just field tested the SBAC, and it reaffirmed that I’m teaching the right curriculum and skills: synthesizing data from multiple sources, MLA format, correct syntax, college level vocabulary, punctuation etc. Unfortunately, if kids choose to check out, and their parents don’t push their kids or get involved, I don’t know what else to do. I foresee a good number of people leaving the field of education. I also see fewer people entering the field.
We moved here from Michigan 6 years ago, were told our 3rd grader would not be subject to EOG grades and then was tested on “Read to Achieve” and did not pass and now must spend 6 weeks in summer school. We left Michigan with her scoring well into 4th grade reading levels on daily testing, and we come here and are scored on a test that we were told would not count against her and our poor daughter that is trying to get used to new school, new friends, new home, has to miss out on most of her summer because of this ridiculous law.
I meant 6 weeks ago, not 6 years ago. My mistake.
What can we do as parents to make a change
Reblogged this on Mirymom's Blog and commented:
Very thoughtful piece. I hope it makes some difference for teachers in NC. We need teachers like this. Let’s make it possible for her to keep her job without sacrificing her own family’s well being.