This is one of the funniest YouTube videos I have ever seen (excluding a few about dogs and cats).
I promise you, you will not be disappointed. Watch it and forward it to your superintendent or your school board. Remember how I always say that VAM is Junk Science. Here is one of the world’s leading assessment experts, and his message mocks VAM as just plain Junk.
It features the great assessment expert W. James Popham as pitchman for a line of products guaranteed to raise your students’ test scores. Some of them are chewable, some are drinkable and last five hours (he warns that if the effect lasts for longer than five hours, call your physician at once).
Please watch this. You will never think about value-added assessments or rubrics the same way again.
Want to know more about Popham? Read this author bio.He is one funny guy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Interesting lawsuit:
“A Columbus nonprofit is asking the Ohio Supreme Court to order Cincinnati and Springfield public schools to provide student directory information it sought under Ohio’s public records laws.
School Choice Ohio claims that the school districts “manipulated policies and procedures” to deny its record requests by claiming the information was protected from release by the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).
In its filing this week, the group said it seeks the names of parents and students, addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers and students’ grade levels and school buildings to provide information about school-choice scholarships pupils can use to attend private schools.
Most districts provide the information as a matter of public record, School Choice Ohio says. FERPA permits the release of student directory information, its filing states. The school districts disagree.
Ohio’s Sunshine Laws Manual says school districts are allowed to determine what student directory information will – and will not – be released.
The complaint also seeks to recover School Choice Ohio’s attorney fees from the school districts”.
I actually think it’s a great question: should school districts release student contact info to any school for the purpose of soliciting students? Many Ohio charters are commercial entities. How does a charter differ from any other commercial education provider (a tutoring service, ed tech product, etc.) Do schools have to release info so Sylvan Learning can solicit students, for example? That email list would be very valuable to them.
http://www.dispatch.com/content/blogs/your-right-to-know/2014/05/student-directory.html
By law, whether the student information is used to solicit students for charters should not matter. What matters is how directory information has been defined by the districts and how Ohio law addresses open public records.
Since FERPA was enacted in 1974, it has allowed school districts to release student directory information without specific parental consent. FERPA defines what districts may designate as directory information, but districts are not required to designate all of those data elements as directory information. Districts are required to notify parents at least annually what data is designated as directory information and how they can opt-out of directory information sharing generally for their student.
Districts can designate a more restricted set of data as directory information. They could also choose to designate no data at all as directory information. Districts can also choose to have parents opt-in to the sharing of directory information instead of an opt-out.
Whatever is designated as directory information by a district is considered a public record. If a charter operator requested directory information from a school district, the district would have to provide it subject to the requirements of that state’s open records law.
As a practical matter, it is useful to have a restricted set of data designated as directory information. Otherwise, a school would have to obtain parental approval for each specific use of a student name in the media (high school sports), honor rolls lists, and programs for events like concerts, games, and graduation.
Just because FERPA allows a district to designate a student’s mailing or email address as directory data does not obligate the district to adopt that definition. A district is perfectly free to designate only name, grade, degrees, honors, awards, participation in officially recognized activities and sports, and weight and height of members of athletic teams and that would most or all of the routine needs to make student information available. Districts sometimes define more broadly if they want to publish a student directory for families.
Springfield defines directory information as
1. student’s name;
2. student’s address;
3. telephone number(s) (unless designated as “unlisted” on student’s registration forms);
4. student’s date and place of birth;
5. participation in officially recognized activities and sports;
6. student’s achievement awards or honors;
7. student’s weight and height, if a member of an athletic team;
8. dates of attendance (“from and to” dates of enrollment) and
9. date of graduation.
Unless Ohio’s open records law says differently, Springfield is obligated to release student address and telephone number (but not email) upon request unless a parent has opted their child out of directory information.
Cincinnati defines directory information as name, awards, and participation in activities. They cannot release student addresses to the charter operators without specific parent consent.
And in looking at Ohio’s Sunshine Manual, I see there is a state prohibition on providing directory information to a profit-making plan or activity. Not all states have that. School Choice Ohio is probably a non-profit entity, but if it serves commercial for-profit charter operators that will make for an interesting state court case in districts where there is a broad definition of directory information. In the case of Cincinnati, I think their suit has no chance of success unless the district changed their definition of directory information after receiving the School Choice Ohio request.
“NSA-approved” classroom observations . . .
Don’t give them ideas!
coming soon to a school near you
The next thing the fake education reformer will propose will be to put cameras in every public school classroom (not the private sector for profit charters that are riddled with fraud and brutal incompetence) linked to an NSA or FBI super computer that will use a sophisticated program to monitor and grade teachers without the need for human observation or intervention. It will be an automated, assembly line process.
And eventually, there will be robot troops that will march into classroom and execute teachers, who are deemed failures by the computer program, then replace them on the spot with a robot with an operating system from Microsoft. When kids protest or don’t pay attention, the robot will have a built in Taser to shock them into obedience even from across the classroom. Bill Gates will name the teacher robots after himself so every teacher will be called Mr. Gates, by students across the country.
There will also be drones hovering above students when they are outside moving from class to class. Students who are tardy will be Tasered for the first two as a warning, and then shot on the third tardy soon after the tardy bell rings and robots will scrape up their bodies and throw them in a special dumpster that will recycle their bodies into compost sold for a profit to corporate farms. The bill will be sent to the parents who lose their child. If the parents protest or grieve, they will be sent to labor camps where they will be sterilized and re-educated by a Mr. Gates robot.
So far, what the Department for the Standardization, Centralization, Depersonalization, and Regimentation of U.S. Education, formerly the USDE, has called for is using galvanic skin response bracelets and retinal scanners to monitor, continually, students’ affective states while they are doing their worksheets on a screen. The research for those was funded by (what a surprise!) the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It was reported here:
Click to access OET-Draft-Grit-Report-2-17-13.pdf
The report laments the fact that fMRI machines for monitoring students’ brains directly are too large and expensive to get into classrooms.
I WISH that I were making this up. Those of you who haven’t done so, read this report. Chilling. THIS IS WHAT YOUR USDE WANTS TO DO.
Unbelievable. This goes far further than did Orwell’s Telescreens. Far, far further.
And I thought I was half joking—being a smart ass—but it’s no joke. They really do want to use computers to monitor 50 million kids for every second of the day probably even while they are at home.
It isn’t difficult to imagine the next step. A device—from Microsoft or one of its subsidiaries—that’s attached to a child’s skull as early as age three with screws—a device that can’t be removed without risk of death, and that device would also be able to send a shock into areas of the child’s brain to force them to focus and be attentive. No need for robots to police the children or teachers.
The device could also be attached permanently to teacher’s skulls and monitor every thought the teacher makes shocking them when they don’t comply with Common Core standards even in thought. Teachers who resist would have an electrically delivered lobotomy to get rid of those the computer judged incompetent or maybe the device would stop their heart while they were sleeping so there would be no witnesses.
I recently finished listening to a science fiction book about this very same concept where posts were attached to the skull and people could be terminated easily by stopping the heart. It didn’t matter where you were in the world. Death was swift.
They are literally testing, under Gates-funded USDE projects, using real-time technological monitors of children’s affective states to make sure that they being continually appropriately, gritfully compliant.
You can’t get citizens to be used to TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS early enough.
I had to read and reread this report. I could not believe it. Issued of the USDE in the good ole Land of the Free.
I wish I were making this crap up. It’s really, really sickening and disturbed. And the most disturbing part is that these guys don’t see anything at all wrong with doing stuff like this. That shows how far we’ve come.
Who are “School Choice Ohio”, exactly? Is it okay to release names, grade level and physical location of children (building) to any lobbying group, or just “choice” lobbying groups? Why would they be different, more trustworthy, than any other group of unnamed adults?
Re: video
The 5 Hour Pedagogy Pill, turning a teacher into a Socrates super star, was priceless
So good. Thanks. I’ve shared it too.
Here’s the REALLY funny thing about this video.
It is the first absolutely honest marketing piece ever produced in the K-12 testing industry.
Bravo Jim Popham!
Let’s see if Arne Duncan addresses this alarming data:
“In the 2012-13 school year, more than 5,300 dropouts — a quarter of all Ohio dropouts that year — attended one of two online charter schools: the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow or Ohio Virtual Academy. Collectively, these two charter schools have a dropout rate 45 times higher than traditional public schools, and 10 times higher than the state’s eight largest city school districts.
Another 6,829 students — about a third of all Ohio dropouts — attended charter schools designed specifically for dropouts, among them Invictus and Life Skills. Last year, these dropout charter schools enrolled one percent of Ohio’s public school students but accounted for roughly the same number of dropout events as did public district schools, which enrolled 91 percent of Ohio’s students.”
Ohio lawmakers just increased funding to these schools and decreased funding to traditional public schools.
Maybe they were better off in the schools they were in? Ya think?
http://www.ohio.com/news/local/ohio-s-charter-school-dropouts-soar-push-state-in-opposite-direction-of-u-s-1.490893#.U4R6BiYHPTQ.twitter
Chiara Duggan: if the info you provide is correct, every edupreneur and eduapparatchik and edubully should have to answer the following question—
Why have “Ohio lawmakers just increased funding to these schools and decreased funding to traditional public schools”?
If true, this is deeply immoral.
Thank you for your diligence.
😎
“Three bling for the educrats under the sky,
Seven for the edubullies who on teachers throw stones,
Nine for mere teachers doomed to die,
One for the Snark Lord on his dark throne
In the Centres of EduExcellence where the shadows lie.
One BlingRing to rule them all, One BlingRing to find them,
One BlingRing to bring them and in the darkness bind them
In the Board Room of Gates where the shadows lie.”
–Redacted by KrazyTA from various ultrasecret eduinvestor coven meeting recitations of “The Lord of the Blingring,” book DCLXVI of the Blingringelungenlied.
For more on classic Rheeformish songs and spells, see “Prosody of Financial Statements and Other Rheeformish Poetry” in “Grimoires and Other Rheeformish Literature,” Appendix 10 of the Rheeformish Lexicon.
AAAARRRGG!
A series of videos appears next to this satire. Hoping they, too, were satire, I found instead that there’s a whole channel devoted to “Teach Like This”. Not satire. No irony. Not funny.
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcCjuyvEEKnPYsBgoTKcJ7g
Who puts this out? Who is the intended audience? TFA or evaluators? If you don’t know anything about real teaching, is this the “Evaluating Professional Teachers Guide for Dummies’?
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Then I opted for the former.
W. James Popham nailed it, from terminology to tone. It is particularly effective, IMHO, because he used a rapier rather than a broadsword.
“Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.” [Mark Twain]
I urge everyone in favor of a “better education for all” to view this video.
😎
The link for this video may be embedded in a Tweet. I just did it by just copying the link into a Tweet. It’s simple.
Perfect! Does anyone know how to make sure Louis C. K., David Lettermen, Jon Stewart, Colbert and MSNBC see this?
Or perhaps more usefully the President, Arne Duncan, and Congress?
This is a spoof. Common Core infomercial. Hysterical!
Sadly, I think this satire would go over the heads of many administrators. To start, few would know what “tractable” means –a sign of the degradation of education in America.
I fear that you may be right about that, Ponderosa. I have often wished that the founding fathers had built a basic civics test–purely factual recall, mind you–into the requirements for public office. I suspect that most of our Congress would fail it. A group of baboons is called a troop, a flange, or a congress. The last of these is unfair, of course, to baboons.
For a number of years, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, as part of its American Civic Literacy Program, conducted large-scale studies of Americans’ command of “knowledge required for informed citizenship.” According to the 2008-2009 study,
Less than half could name the three branches of government,
Only 21 percent could identify the phrase “government of the people, by the people, for the people” as coming from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
Only 53 percent knew that the power to declare war rested with the Congress.
Only 27 percent knew that the Bill of Rights prohibits establishing an official religion for the United States.
Interestingly, elected officials scored, on average, “five percentage points lower than the general public.”
Of course, the Common Coring of the United States will do NOTHING to redress issues related to lack of knowledge. It’s all abstractly formulated skills, all the time.
I am a fan, btw, of skills instruction conceived of as transmission of concrete procedural knowledge. And of skills instruction that takes place incidentally, which is extraordinarily important, because much of attainment of ability is acquisition, not explicit learning. But we’ve made a horrific mistake in this country by doing an enormous amount of vaguely, abstractly, often wildly inaccurately formulated, generalized EXPLICIT skills instruction of the “today we are going to practice our inferencing skills” variety. The Common Core in ELA, of course, is a LOT more of the same, though David Coleman doesn’t seem to understand that about his own list when he talks about the “instructional shifts” that it is SUPPOSED to represent.
It seems to me that most of us educators are hacks in the sense that we are not well-grounded in what is really KNOWN about education –e.g. the history of education. How many of us are well-versed in the contents of Diane’s great history of American education, Left Back? I daresay most ed school professors don’t even know the history of education very well. The maxim about those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it is so true w/r to educators, sadly. And how many of us are well-versed in the Big Questions about pedagogy, e.g. the Math Wars –both sides; or the traditionalist vs. progressive debate? Or reading. Most teachers think that teaching reading strategies is the way to make good readers, but this is largely false. Most teachers do not understand what reading comprehension really entails (hint: it’s knowledge). The reformers are an affliction, but our profession has big internal weaknesses independent of the reformers’ afflictions. Common Core reflects bad thinking about education. But even if it goes, error (perhaps a bit less invidious) will continue to reign.
When I earned my teaching credential in California in 1975-76, I went through a year-long program where I interned full time in a paid position in a fifth-grade classroom with a master teacher, and took classes later in the day that covered the history of education, and, for instance, the work of Jean Piaget and Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Domains.
That was my sixth year of college because it took me five to earn my BA in journalism. Then six years after going into teaching, I returned to night classes to earn an MFA in writing, and over half of public school teachers in the U.S. have earned masters degrees compared to about a third in the private schools—you know, those private sector charters that are staffed with people out of programs like TFA with a few hours of lecture to get them ready to work in schools that are often run by crooks who cook the books and funnel off taxes into their own bank accounts.
And even after earning my credential, I had to attend classes and workshops annually several times a year that my school district sent us to for thirty years to keep up with the latest cognitive research in addition to changes in curriculum as mandated by the state legislature. Many of those workshops were mandatory and were held after school for two to three hours at a time. The district where I worked had a dedicated satellite campus in one corner of one of the three intermediate schools that was there only to improve the skills of the districts 900 teachers. The classroom held about thirty teachers at a time and they rotated the district’s teachers through the workshops several times a year.
Imagine, that a public school district with a dedicated staff of veteran teachers that did nothing but teach already active teachers better methods to reach their students. That was probably one of the best things administration did in that district, because most of the time, district administration wanted to micromanage everything else often with disastrous results.
In the1990s, thanks to legislation out of Sacramento, I had to go back to night school and earn an additional 30 units so I could continue to teach English because my BA degree was in journalism. I taught all day and then drove to night classes out of the University of Los Angeles often parking at the bottom of a hill with hundreds of steps up to the university’s classrooms. That hill was called heat attack hill by the students who had to climb those stairs.
In fact, once President Reagan and the Walton family launched the relentless war full of endless lies and accusations against public education back in the late 70 or early 80s, teacher training in California was drastically toughened by the legislature until you could only teach a subject if you had a BA in it in addition to taking and earning, I think, 20 college credits every five years that focused on your field or the latest developments in teaching strategies, to renew a credential.
Therefore, as far as California is concerned, I reject your suggestion that “the teaching profession has big internal weaknesses independent of the reformers”. When there is a weakness in a school or a district, it seldom has anything to do with the teachers and everything to do with incompetent administrators who micromanage and bully a district’s teachers and when this happens the problem may usually be traced to an elected school board that is ignorant, foolish, stupid and is dominated by people who believe in the lies from the fake education reformers, and because of this they refuse to trust teachers to do their jobs even though the evidence suggests that’s exactly what public school teachers have been doing across this country in spite of people like Bill Gates, the Waltons, those Hedge Fund billionaires and all the other psychopaths and pathological liars who should be in prison for the suffering they have caused to millions of teachers, children and even parents.
That was my experience.
Most educators are not hacks. For the most part, they are very dedicated. That’s been my experience. But there are a lot of misconceptions.
One of the things that people don’t understand about all this, Ponderosa, is that many skills are NOT explicitly learned. They are acquired incidentally while people are engaged in highly motivating activities that require that those skills be exercised. So, for example, almost none of an adult’s internalized grammar for his or her language and far less than 1 percent of his or her vocabulary is learned via explicit instruction.
By the age of 5, the average English-speaking child has learned the meanings of some 10,000 words, or roughly one new word every two waking hours!!! Similarly, humans are veritable induction and pattern recognition machines. In those first few years, the amount of knowledge gained about the world, mostly via unconscious induction and pattern recognition, is astronomical. ALMOST NONE OF what the child or the adult learns was explicitly taught. And that’s true for both declarative and procedural attainment of knowledge and ability–most of it is acquired, not learned, and a lot of this acquisition is an interplay between the environment and automatic functional mechanisms of the mind. This ESPECIALLY applies to procedures for thinking, which are largely developed unconsciously. People are no more taught THEM EXPLICITLY than they are taught that objects at a distance are bigger than they appear to be based on the amount of the visual field that they take up or that a darkness can indicate depth.
A basic lack of understanding of the crucial distinction between acquisition and learning underlies a LOT of the confusion about learning and teaching. Such lack of understanding completely permeates the Common [sic] Core [sic], for example.
In general, people get better at skills, including thinking skills, when they are engaged not with trying to understand those skills themselves in the abstract but when they are applying those skills to the attainment of world knowledge that they are motivated to attain.
Imagine trying to teach your toddler to walk by explaining to him or her a lot of diagrams of the muscular, skeletal, and sensorimotor system. Well, making abstract skill instruction the FOCUS of our instruction (e.g., Today, class, we are going to practice our inferencing skills) is about as useful, generally.
Now, what people CAN do is get kids engaged in some learning that is rich in content (because that’s what makes learning exciting), knowing that certain skills are going to be exercised, and then nudge that skills acquisition in certain directions by the sorts of tasks set (ones requiring exercise of those skills) and by offering suggestions for heuristics–try this, look at that. Yeah, that’s better, isn’t it?
English teachers, especially, often put the cart before the horse, especially if they are working from some list of abstractly formulated “standards” that they think of as their goal. The purpose of today’s lesson is to teach kids how figurative language can affect tone and mood. So the teacher starts by writing the terms tone and mood and figurative language on the whiteboard and giving examples and definitions of these and blah blah blah, and pretty soon half the period is gone and the kid has yet to experience any literature.
But that’s not how people are built to learn in a way that actually sticks with them. Start with something worth learning. In the course of that, have the kids encounter a tale that is going to blow them away emotionally. Present it in such a way that it does that. Take them down that rabbit hole. And then, when they recover from that experience, talk about it. How are you feeling about this? Why? What are you responding to? And then you can start teasing the thing apart a bit. An perhaps there was a bit of figurative language in that piece that was had a powerful emotional effect, but perhaps not. Always, always, the focus should be not on the skill but on what the author was communicating–on reading and writing as an act of transmission of ideas, experiences, etc., that are the focus. The skills stuff should be INCIDENTAL.
Having done that, occasionally you have the kids stand back from the works they’ve been encountering and generalize about them. But that, too, needs to be an active process, driven by desire to know more about whatever it is that is being studied.
This all abstract skills focus all the time is extraordinarily distorting of the acts of reading and writing. That’s not why we do those things. That’s not what those are about.
In other words, kids will read about snakes because they are interested in snakes, not because they have a burning desire to find out what method of exposition was used in paragraph 23 and to write a technology enhanced evidence-based constructed response to explain that.
Hirsch made a big mistake in signing onto the Common [sic] Core [sic], which is PRIMARILY an abstract skills list of the kind that he knew, well, should not be the FOCUS of our instruction. I think he did so because he was promised that one of the goals of the Common Core would be to get kids to read more substantive texts. But there’s a tension there, in all the Common Core propaganda. When people defend the Core in the abstract, they talk about matters like reading substantive texts and reading them closely. But you turn to the actual activity or exercise, and it’s not about the text at all. It’s focus is the skill from the Coleman bullet list, and the text is INCIDENTAL and COULD JUST AS EASILY BE ANYTHING ELSE.
That’s not what Hirsch wanted. I am sure of that. But that’s what’s happening.
Encouraging kids to read what they want to read and what they find interesting and/or entertaining is what we should be doing instead of forcing teachers to force kids to read “substantive texts” from a list that came from 24 so-called experts writing the Common Core Standards in seclusion behind closed doors with strict security, and then the results, without any field tests, have been forced on public schools across the country by stupid and ignorant politicians who know little to nothing about teaching from the state level down to local school boards.
In fact, most elected school board members are as ignorant about teaching and education as a rock from Mars or beyond.
In addition, I looked at that list of the so-called experts who were hired to write the CCS, and It looked like one teacher, for instance, me, had more teaching experience than the entire group of 24 combined.
That would be the case, Lloyd. A group of total amateurs. Clueless, really. But very, very sure of themselves.
I cannot stand to watch David Colman speak. The smarmy, ignorant, arrogant fool makes me ill.
The fake ed-reformer clowns make me angry! You can’t talk to people like them. You’d have better results talking to a concrete wall and the wall would be more intelligent.
I should not speak so strongly. Here’s the thing that I just cannot forgive: the presumption of this man, that he should think that he as the right to tell every teacher, administrator, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum designer in the country how he or she must do his or her job. I have worked with many hundreds of English teachers, over the years, from schools in many parts of the United States. I have found them, almost to a person, to be extraordinarily dedicated to their work, to be reflective people, continually learning about their jobs, very open to new ideas and to collaboration with those with new ideas, very willing, eager even, to have conversations about better ways of teaching reading, writing, literature, vocabulary, thinking, speaking, listening, research.
But a climate has been created in this country in which these professionals are being treated as the hired help to be ordered around and told what to do, to be scripted. Their practice and ways of working are discounted by people who like Coleman who know almost nothing about those, the astonishingly diverse community of English teachers is lumped together and trashed. Seasoned professionals are spoken to as if they were pimply adolescents just out of school. This is just not acceptable. When David Coleman stands up and tells an audience that we need to start having students read texts closely and read substantive texts, I think, what the hell does he think we have been doing forever? When he starts talking about how we are teaching narrative writing he reveals himself to be just breathtakingly ignorant both of teachers’ practices and of the nature and importance of narrative. Many of those Coleman talks down to were doing close reading of texts with kids when David Coleman was a zygote. And I read his bullet list, and it is so amateurish and misinformed, that it makes his arrogance stand in extraordinarily sharp relief.
It’s time that English teachers took back their profession. It’s time that people started treating English teachers with the respect they deserve, as professionals with ideas and practices that they have carefully honed for decades, as colleagues eager, always to improve but not willing to be ordered about and scripted, and especially not by rank amateurs.
I am fascinated, and always have been, by the teaching of literature and writing and language. I’ve made learning about how to do this my life’s work, and I’ve applied myself assiduously to learning and thinking about these matters for many decades, and I’ve learned a few things over the years.
But I would never dream of putting my colleagues around the country on MY SCRIPT.
Anyone who doesn’t understand why creating an invariant script for all teachers of English to all students should not be allowed anywhere near an education policy making position, much less be entrusted with national authority.
At the end of Don Marquis’s poem “The Old Trouper,” the elderly theater cat turns to Mehetabel, the ally cat of ill repute, and says,
come, my dear
both of our professions
are being ruined
by amateurs
I think of Coleman, and I think of those lines.
many typos in those posts. my apologies for those. this stuff tires me.
From the history of this country, there are several examples that offer a window to the way public school teachers are being treated today. It seems that America’s culture has this thing for witch trials and the persecution of some segment of the people. There always has to be someone to treat as if they are pond scum or am I mistaken and its something to do with being human—this need to find someone to treat like cat vomit.
For instance, slavery and discrimination of people of color. There’s a powerful film out right now that I highly recommend that demonstrates the thinking I’m talking about, and it’s based on a true story that took place in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the UK. The film is called “Belle” and my wife said it is the best film she has ever seen. I think it is one of the best I’ve seen. In fact, I may see it again.
Then there was the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that lasted to the 1940s. If you were to compare the way immigrants were treated on Ellis Island in New York to Angel Island in San Francisco, you would be disgusted; maybe outraged.
Next was the concentration camps in the U.S. where all Japanese Americans were sent during World War II, but the German Americans didn’t have any camps and we fought Germany too.
My last examples was McCarthyism in the 1950s, and many Americans are still Red haters and beaters.
The Deformers have little idea how strong this feeling is among teachers, now, that they are under attack. It’s time for this to end.
Agreed, but in the past, to end U.S. leadership insanity usually takes time and doesn’t end with justice. All we end up doing is voting out the corrupt idiots, who are often doing the bidding of the super rich. And eventually, an election or two later, different idiots are elected who serve these same puppet masters, and we start over.
Bob, your account of how kids learn is totally cogent. Unfortunately, much of what my ed school teachers taught me was not. It was half-baked ideology masquerading as science and craft. Sadly I know few teachers who would be capable of understanding your explanation, or even very interested in trying to understand it. I don’t think teachers are lazy or dumb, but I do think that many of them have been poorly educated or mis-educated. Many have never experienced real intellectual life. They have been brainwashed in ed school and they do not know it.
Lloyd, I know many teachers have masters degrees, but often they’re masters in misinformation as far as I can tell. Ed school professors pull crap out of their butts and call it “best practices”. It’s really just career-advancing “innovation”. We get tons of professional development, but most of it is useless or based on false principles. Many presenters are charlatans who know they can make a buck peddling plausible-sounding, buzzword-filled but unproven ideas. When teachers manage to do good work, it’s despite the “professional development” not because of it. Can you cite one professional development session that made you a better teacher? It’s tragic watching all these earnest, hard-working teachers striving to make the faulty ideas they’re handed work; trying to turn sows’ ears into silk purses. I don’t think we’ll ever stop making grave mistakes until we get a lot more discerning about “professional development”.
Ponderosa, I wrote you a long note, which is below.
“Lloyd, I know many teachers have masters degrees, but often they’re masters in misinformation as far as I can tell.”
And where is your proof as far as you “can tell.”
Ponderosa, whoever you are, that is such wrong headed thinking. Talking about classroom teachers—and not so-called experts selling their time to lecture to teachers on the latest education fads—real teachers don’t earn masters degrees in education because those MA’s only lead to jobs in administration. In California, we have to major in our field to update and keep our teaching credentials.
Real teachers earn masters degrees in their fields: English, history, math, science, etc. When I went back to earn those 30 units to update my credential, there wasn’t one class on the latest fads in teaching. The classes I took focused on language acquisition (how the brain works to acquire language), writing, reading and literature. The most useful class was how to write an Op Ed piece for a newspaper, and I used what I learned in that class to adapt the way I taught kids how to write essays. The teacher for that class was an editor and journalist who worked in the traditional media for several decades and was never a classroom teacher.
In addition, my masters is an MFA in writing and there wasn’t one teaching/education class in that program. I studied 20th century American literature and how to improve my writing skills and what I learned improved how I taught kids to write.
And from thirty years of experience as a public school teacher—and staying connected to teachers who are also friends who are still teaching—your thinking supports the fake eduction reformers and that’s wrong. As for some of the few, so-called education experts running around peddling the latest teaching fads, if left up to the classroom teachers to decide what works, no problem. We aren’t stupid. I came away from many of those seminars and never introduced that crap in my classroom. Sometimes, what we heard was useful but often it wasn’t.
Believe it or not, professional teachers are highly educated and are capable of thinking for themselves. If someone can’t think for themselves, you will usually find them in administration or sitting on an elected school board that refuses to allow teachers to do what they do best: TEACH!
Just finished reading Daisy Christodoulou’s Seven Myths about Education. Every teacher should read this. It reveals how most of us have got the PRINCIPLES of education wrong.
Jim Popham has done quite a fine job as a spoofmaster.
As most here know, he also wrote some extremely high-quality pieces on tests and assessment.
Popham noted more than a decade ago that “the preoccupation with raising test scores has become dominant throughout most parts of the country.” Just as bad, or worse, most teachers and administrators – and the public – know little about tests and testing.
Consider, for example, the SAT and ACT. People buy into them. They think they’re accurate. But that’s myth…or a perpetrated high-stakes hoax if one believes that the makers of those tests have systematically misinformed and misled the public about the quality and value of their products, which they have.
Take the SAT. People think the acronym actually stands for something (it doesn’t). The SAT predicts a very small portion (between 3 and 15 percent) of the variance in freshman-year college grades. And the very best predictor of SAT score – bar none – is family income. The SAT is a norm-referenced test. Each part has a built-in mean of 500 with a standard deviation of 100. Questions are selected to sort test-takers out into a “normal'” distribution, with half falling above the mean, and half below. Guess how that works out?
Too, the College Board, the producer of the SAT, sells “software and consulting services that can be used to set crude wealth and test-score cutoffs, to target or eliminate students before they apply” to college. College admissions officials use such data to award financial aid to those who need it least.
As a practical result, “students are rejected on the basis of income.” The hoax – bought into by most – is “one of the most closely held secrets in admissions.” Colleges will say they are honoring “merit.” The high-scorers on the SAT even get “merit” scholarships. Far too many students, parents, and educators buy and slurp down the nonsense. Sadly, the practice of using the SAT (and the ACT) to exclude low-income students from higher education is “far more prevalent” than the College Board or colleges are willing to admit.
And now the College Board – along with the ACT – has gone all-in on the Common Core. So too have the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, two organizations who have never held dear the concept of promoting the general welfare of the nation. One doesn’t need to be a genius to predict what’s coming.
Educators – and the general public – should have listened to much of what Popham had to say a long time ago.
Now, he’s making funny YouTube videos about testing.
What’s really funny though, is that it’s no laughing matter.
The SAT was originally called the Scholastic Aptitude Test. It was supposed to measure aptitude for college. But, as Democracy points out, it didn’t. It was invalid for the purpose for which it was created.
So, they changed the name to the Scholastic Achievement Test. But it was invalid as a measure of achievement as well.
It did correlate fairly well with g, the so-called “general intelligence factor” measured by intelligence tests, so they then changed the name yet again to the Scholastic Reasoning Test or, simply, the SAT.
But, as Democracy points out, it was never a valid predictor of college success.
Now, here’s the interesting thing about that:
Our Department for the Standardization of Education, formerly the USDE, has given us Son of NCLB, NCLB Fright Night II: The Nightmare Is Nationalized. More crappy standardized testing.
And, of course, that testing HAS NOT BEEN INDEPENDENTLY VALIDATED AT ALL. In other words, the new national tests have NOT BEEN SHOWN TO BE VALID MEASURES OF WHAT THE PURPORT TO BE MEASURING.
So, the SAT is probably the most intensely vetted standardized test in history, and it was COMPLETELY INVALID.
And, it turns out, the GRADES GIVEN BY HIGH-SCHOOL TEACHERS were MUCH BETTER, MUCH MORE VALID predictors of college success.
But our education policy makers have decided that WE NEED TO HAVE THESE INVALID STANDARDIZED TEST MEASURES DETERMINING EVERYTHING because THEY CAN’T TRUST GRADES GIVEN BY TEACHERS, WHICH ARE MORE VALID!!!!!!
No, don’t try to figure this out, for it’s TOTALLY INSANE.
It makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER.
And that ought to be a clue. Why would people so fervently push a policy that makes no sense whatsoever, one for which there is not the slightest shred of evidence that it works and lots of evidence that it doesn’t?
Because the policy is being pushed by some plutocrats with a lot of money and a lot of clout who stand to make billions from the Son of NCLB national standards and testing regime.
Ponderosa:
Ponderosa, I understand your frustration with a lot of what passes for professional development and with a lot of the nonsense peddled by leading education pundits. It’s breathtaking, really, how many of these folks who are major attractions on the education carnival midway are profoundly ignorant and unscientific about the very topics on which they are supposed to be expert. And to the extent that some school district takes one of these charlatans seriously and starts implementing his or her “program,” usually based on a lot of romancing by some educational publishing house, the kids get a raw deal.
Our K-12 educational system is positively crawling with “experts” who know little of the body of knowledge relevant to their field of supposed “expertise.” One of my favorite examples of this sort is the “critical thinking expert,” one of a common breed, one who knows nothing of the cognitive science of decision making and problem solving, of informal and formal logic, of classical and nonclassical logic, of probability, of statistics, of heuristics, of rhetoric, of the psychology of error or of commonplace cognitive biases or of any other relevant fields relevant to thinking well but who has learned a few buzzwords about “inferencing” based on “evidence” and “text-dependent questioning” and “close reading” and comes armed with a Venn diagram to illustrate “comparison.”
A case in point: BOTH the best-selling stand-alone writing program in the country AND the best-selling integrated literature and language arts basal textbook program define induction as reasoning from the specific to the general and deduction as reasoning from the general to the specific. If the authors had not slept through THE FIRST DAY of logic 101, or if they had ever read anything at all on the topic, they would have known that those definitions, while used very, very loosely in common parlance, are just, well, WRONG. And neither of those programs distinguishes induction, deduction, and abduction and the different kinds of thinking involved in each, much less discusses or gives students experience with actual procedures and processes for thinking in these very different modes, and neither even begins to address the ways in which those procedures and processes can go wrong.
Just for kicks, sometime, attend a “critical thinking” workshop at NCTE or IRA and ask the presenter to share with the audience how possibility is related to necessity or to clarify the difference between validity and truth or to explain to you, say, what a null hypothesis is or a counterfactual or quantification or the difference between a property and a relation or the availability heuristic or reductio ad absurdum or dialectic or means-ends analysis. All really fundamental stuff having to do with thinking as a subject of scholarly study—the stuff of the opening days of introductory classes at the undergraduate level–but the chances are very, very good indeed that the “critical thinking expert” won’t have a clue what you are talking about because he or she DOESN’T REALLY KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THINKING that your auto mechanic or cosmetologist doesn’t know and is probably, in fact, much more confused on the subject than either of them is because what he or she does think he or she knows is probably wrong.
So, these “experts” “consult on” textbook programs that take an explicit instruction approach to teaching critical thinking—an approach that starts with definitions and examples—and at the VERY OUTSET get the definitions wrong and provide examples and activities that are a muddled mess. So, the text draws upon misconceptions but, hey, it promulgates those using a completely ineffective pedagogical approach, so the harm is somewhat ameliorated by the program’s very ineffectiveness, though the opportunity cost is enormous.
But all that said, I do not share your bleak appraisal of our nation’s English teachers. I do not think of them with the contempt that I have for many of our edupundits and educonsultants.
They are VICTIMS of top-down imposition of nonsense promulgated by know-nothing educrats and edupundits via textbook companies interested only in what’s hot this marketing season.
What saves the English teachers and their classes is that they care about writing and literature, and they continue to provide opportunities for students to engage, significantly, in both, much to their credit and their students’ benefit—DESPITE THE CRAP THEY ARE FORCED TO DO BY THE BREATHTAKINGLY POORLY EDUCATED EDUCRATS WHO WRITE STANDARDS AND TESTS.
Again, I have found that English teachers, as opposed to those pundits and consultants, are quite willing, eager, to learn. They love learning. That’s why they are doing what they do.
We would be much, much better off if we left them alone to work together, collaboratively, to hone their craft based on the best that scholars and researchers and independent, competing, small curriculum providers put forward for them to examine and reject or adopt and adapt as they see fit based on what they have learned in their practice about their field and about their students, which is often much more than the politicians and plutocrats can imagine.
And the portrait I paint, above, of educonsultancy with regard to critical thinking is similar to that which I would create with regard to the typical level of understanding and knowledge that our educonsultants and edupundits have with regard to writing, literature, vocabulary acquisition, and the learning of the grammar of a language. There is an enormous amount of ignorance at the highest levels with regard to all these fields, that that ignorance is on full display in our new national “standards,” which are a train wreck.
Of course, we are all profoundly ignorant. I am. You are. But when we start MANDATING our ignorant notions, then there’s a problem, for there’s an alternative. And that alternative is to have a continual, ongoing, national discussion about these matters and to put TEACHERS IN CHARGE of their own continual improvement based upon that discussion.
The last thing that we need is a set of ossified, invariant national “standards” drawn up by amateurs based on a heedless and hasty review of the lowest-common-denominator group think of the state “standards: that preceded them.
The last thing that we need is a Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth writing error in stone and treating at error as the new gospel.
And terrorizing those who dissent from the faith.
cx: and treating that error as the new gospel
This is priceless!