I heard and saw Leonard Cohen sing at the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn about a year ago. I am embarrassed to say that I didn’t know his music. Now I love it. Enjoy this Christmas version of one of his greatest songs.
Archives for the month of: December, 2014
James Boutin is a National Board Certified teacher in Washington state. He has come to believe that the war on the test-score gap (“the achievement gap”) is misguided. One reason it will never close is that standardized tests always produce achievement gaps, always have a top and a bottom, and the students with the most advantages always cluster at the top.
But Bouton’s insight is that what disaffected and unmotivated students need most is caring, concern, and love.
He writes:
When I started teaching, I had a radically different understanding of public schools and their purpose than I do today. Back then, I believed that great public schools could be the great societal equalizer for otherwise disenfranchised people in our society (I say much more about that in this post). And so, in this post, I’d like to discuss how that view has changed, and why I no longer believe schools can serve that purpose.
I want to start by telling you about a student I once taught. (Here, we’ll call him Guillermo.) Guillermo had long, dark hair that usually covered his face. He was tall and lanky and normally wore black pants and a black jacket to school. When he spoke with you (or, more often, sat while you spoke to him), he would keep his head down. I can’t remember a time that we made eye contact. After a long day at school, he would arrive late to the last period of the day with various colors all over the skin of his arms and hands. His friends had used markers to write their phone numbers, pictures, or messages on him.
Many days, Guillermo slept through class. Although he rarely spoke back to me when I asked him about his life, I had the distinct impression that he wanted to do well in school. To be fair, I believe every student wants to do well in school. But there was something unique about Guillermo’s behavior that made me think that. For one, he was in school virtually every day. I caught him, on multiple occasions, asking other students what he was supposed to be doing when he didn’t think I was looking. He always brought a pencil. And even though he never turned in work, I saw him occasionally writing on paper during work time.
A few years after I had him in class, I learned from our school counselor that the reason he slept in class so often was that his mom had relocated their family about twenty-five miles from our school. She wanted them to have an uninterrupted education, however, so she had them take public transportation from the temporary housing she’d found to our school, which required Guillermo to wake up at 4am to catch the bus. After school, he would hang out with his friends in the courtyard until the bus home arrived (around 5pm). He would return home around 7:30, help out with chores like grocery shopping, and fall asleep around 11 or 12.
Getting to and from school wasn’t the only challenge Guillermo faced, though. His father abandoned his mother and siblings when he was four years old after some years of verbal and physical abuse, and his mom wasn’t able to afford a regular housing situation on her own. Although I didn’t learn about these facts until after he’d left my classroom, it made a lot of sense. Guillermo was a student who had suffered the loss and abuse of a father, and the emotional instability of a mother. On top of that, he struggled with the same challenges that teenagers who don’t face such tremendous trauma deal with on a daily basis: hormonal changes, fitting in at school, and finding an identity.
I’m telling you about Guillermo because it’s so very important that people who don’t work in high-needs schools understand what the lives of the people who attend them are like. Of course, nobody else had Guillermo’s unique situation; but most students living in material poverty experience a high degree of what one might call emotional poverty as well. It’s not just about not having money for food and housing; it’s often about not feeling the love, support, and stability needed for social-emotional health.
The challenges students face range vastly. There are students who live with two parents who are both unable to work due to disability; students who never knew their parents and grew up in the foster system; students who fight their parents’ drug addiction; and students who have been routinely abused since the time they were born.
If I’m not careful at this point, I might be accused of attempting to foster a sense of pity for youth who grow up in poverty and trauma. But our reality is that, in many communities, trauma stemming from abuse and neglect are a way of life.
This reality, when fully grasped, suggests strongly that the primary purpose for school, particularly for tremendously disadvantaged students, should not be preparing them to compete in the marketplace, as I often feel our society believes it to be. Furthermore, the policies advanced in our country that are designed to make students competitive job seekers often do far more harm than good for students like Guillermo.
In one famous study from the 1980’s, psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley found that children of professionals amassed a vocabulary that included 32 million more words than did children raised in poverty by THE AGE OF 4!
When you enter kindergarten at such a profound deficit in the skills and knowledge public schools assess young people for, it can be both difficult and debilitating to find that your teachers, and perhaps some of your peers, consistently judge you to be a failure. Compound that with the reality of what’s going on at home for you with your parents and family, and the real inspiration is that so many students persist in school.
While we might, with extended school days and outstanding teachers, find ways to make up for the deficits of skills and knowledge our culture believes to be important to competition in the marketplace, it is a tremendous task.
What I finally realized, in my ninth year, is that it’s not one that I support. That’s right, I said it, I DO NOT SUPPORT NARROWING THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP – at least not with school alone.
Let me clarify a little. What we mostly mean, as educators and as a society, when we talk about narrowing the achievement gap is finding ways to get students of color to score as well on standardized tests as white students do. As Hart and Risley’s work suggests, skills and knowledge essential to performing well on standardized tests (like vocabulary) are not easily gained, particularly when a student’s social-emotional issues (and perhaps hunger or lack of safety) stop them from focusing in school.
Does public education have a history of doing disservice to poor children of color in our country? Absolutely! Is it because they haven’t closed the achievement gap. Actually, ironically, I would say schools continue to disservice students because they’re so hellbent on closing the achievement gap.
Schools leaders who focus on closing the achievement gap often do things like eliminate art, music, social studies, recess; and, instead, spend lots and lots of time analyzing student performance on math, reading, and writing tests in an effort to improve those skills. Are these skills important? Certainly. But this kind of schooling comes with grave costs.
It’s high time education policy acknowledges that we live in a tremendously unequal and unjust society that creates the problems we see in schools before students ever even arrive there. Students need to feel safe, to feel loved, to eat, to sleep, and to have friends before they can engage in learning. When students don’t feel safe or loved or are hungry, they don’t learn very well, if at all. Because the students who often don’t have their social-emotional needs met in and out of school are the same students who are on the bottom end of the achievement gap, force feeding math and language down their throat becomes terribly inhumane.
Visiting the June Jordan School for Equity in San Francisco last month, I was delighted to hear one of the staff members say, “I’d rather have a student come to us, drop out their sophomore year, and go on to be a good person than graduate with a 4.0 and go on to be an asshole who doesn’t know how to deal with other people.”
Students who have to spend the vast majority of their day doing reading, writing, and math instruction geared toward helping them pass tests lose valuable opportunities to practice myriad other skills and learn vast amounts of other knowledge that are so critical to being human and participating in society. Why don’t we spend more time teaching students about interpersonal communication or nutrition or personal finance in public schools? Why do we still cling to a curriculum that is so outdated and bareboned?
When you put people and animals in environments that do not stimulate them, like solitary confinement, they start to go crazy. It feels like that’s what we’re doing to students with our curriculum.
It forces one to ask questions: Why are we doing this? Why do we support a system of public education? Is it to ensure all of our kids can participate in the economy? And if it is, for whose benefit? For theirs or their employers?
The truth is, making a shitload of money isn’t a universal value. When I asked a handful of my students last month if they were considering going to a four-year university when they graduate in June, all of them looked at me like I was crazy. “Why not?” I asked. “It’d be a phenomenal opportunity.”
“Yeah. Probably. But my family comes first, and they need me here, with them right now” one of them said.
It reminded me that I come from a family and culture that puts great import on individual success. Different people and cultures will define success differently, and our public schools must be a place that accommodate those differences, particularly regarding how we talk to students about their post-secondary life and aspirations.
So what should the purpose of schools be for students like Guillermo and the family he belongs to?
In low-income communities, schools should serve as centers for civic dialogue, healing, and humanity. While learning the basics like math and language should certainly constitute some of what goes on in schools, our primary effort should not be to stress everyone out trying to bring underprivileged students’ math and language skills up to par with their counterparts in affluent communities. Because, the truth is, those skills are not the only skills in life that matter. And so they shouldn’t be the only skills that determine whether you receive a high school diploma.
Rather, schools should spend much more time serving students by identifying their strengths, helping grow them, and using the buy-in that’s created by that work to motivate them when they work in academic areas in which they’re less able.
Ultimately, schools are places we can go to take a glimpse into what our future society will look like. Since that’s the case, it’s imperative that the adults who work in them (and who create policy for them) are guided not by a desire to mold children into the model employee, but rather by love for the child. CHILDREN SHOULD FEEL LOVED IN SCHOOL.
And that’s pretty much when I realized I’d become a radical – when I had that thought in my brain, and I realized I agreed with it. Because there are so many more conventionally minded people who would read this and think that I’m soft, that school is naturally the place where preparation for the marketplace should be front and center, and that individual competition in pursuit of monetary success is the appropriate way to live.
I can only respond by noting that Guillermo desperately needed a school that understood and accommodated for his unique needs. His six-period day packed with notes and homework and math tests did not do that. And we never reached him. He dropped out when he turned sixteen.
Merry Christmas to all!
Whatever you celebrate, whatever your custom, happy holidays!
Affectionately,
Diane
I recently received this email from Tim Farley, an elementary school principal in Néw York:
Here is the link to a blog written in the fall of 2013 by the Head of Schools for Woodland Hill, Susan Kambrich. In this letter turned blog, she writes to her parents of her experience at the annual NYSAIS (New York State Association of Independent Schools) Heads of Schools conference.
Woodland Hill may sound familiar to you and your readers because this is the school that the soon-to-be-former New York State Education Commissioner John King sends his children to. If he were to send his children to public school, his children would attend the Bethlehem Central School District – a highly respected public school in the suburbs of Albany.
In her blog, Susan writes about the featured presenter, Yong Zhao, a highly respected author and professor at the University of Oregon. His message focused on the importance of having an education system that promotes creative and strategic thinking. He posits that the United States has typically produced students who are by-and-large not good test takers, as opposed to students in China. Zhao, according to Susan, also spoke on the importance for the United States to help its students to “develop entrepreneurial qualities such as risk-taking, empathy, confidence, alertness to opportunity…”
Susan continues by writing, “Zhao says that investing in testing will only create good test takers, and test scores are not valid predictors of success. If we invest our resources in tests, we will get good test-takers; if we spend our time celebrating and encouraging our variety of abilities, creativity, and diverse thinking we will better help our students succeed. Testing should be a tool, not the focus.” She concludes with, “Interestingly, he also mentioned that his children went to a Montessori school.”
The reason I bring this blog to your readers’ attention is to highlight the hypocrisy of John King’s personal decisions compared to the decisions he made that affect well over a million students throughout New York state. It appears after reading about Woodland Hill’s philosophy on their web page (www.woodlandhill.org), that they have embraced much of what Zhao says is good for students. Teachers at Woodland Hill have the autonomy to create an individualized education for their students. Furthermore, there is no test-based accountability system at Woodland Hill.
This sounds like an absolutely wonderful school and I have already contacted the school to schedule a tour. I do not begrudge John King for deciding to send his children to Woodland Hill. In fact, I believe all parents should be making these decisions for their children. However, as Commissioner, John King prescribed a very different educational experience for the children whose parents do not have the same opportunities that he has. Many parents can ill-afford the tuition at a school such as Woodland Hill.
Commissioner King has foisting a punitive, highly competitive, rank and sort, test-based accountability school system on all of our children. Mr. King knows all too well the benefits of sending his children to a school like Woodland Hill, but he refuses to allow public school children the same opportunities. This is the epitome of hypocrisy – Common Core, high stakes testing, and data-mining for the masses; an individualized collaborative and creative learning experience for his children.
If Mr. King knows what is best for his kids, shouldn’t he be trying his best as Commissioner to give all New York students the same thing?
Sincerely,
Tim Farley
Education Advocate
Teacher Steven Singer tweeted:
“When I hear the words RIGOR and GRIT, I think I’m about to scrub a toilet, not inspire a child.”
Open the link to see the graphic
Bill Gates convened 1,000 people in Seattle, where he admitted that his big global health challenge has not produced significant gains in the Third World. Educators may recognize parallels to the Gates’ involvement in Common Core, where the foundation looked for a technological fix to complex human, social, and economic problems.
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“When he took the stage this fall to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his signature global health research initiative, Bill Gates used the word “naive” — four times — to describe himself and his charitable foundation.
It was a surprising admission coming from the world’s richest man.
“But the Microsoft co-founder seemed humbled that, despite an investment of $1 billion, none of the projects funded under the Gates Foundation’s “Grand Challenges” banner has yet made a significant contribution to saving lives and improving health in the developing world….
“Not only did he underestimate some of the scientific hurdles, Gates said. He and his team also failed to adequately consider what it would take to implement new technologies in countries where millions of people lack access to basic necessities such as clean water and medical care….
“Among his favorite projects is an effort to eliminate Dengue fever by infecting mosquitoes with bacteria that block disease transmission. Another is a spinoff biotech working on a probiotic to cure cholera.
“But critics say projects like those demonstrate the foundation’s continuing emphasis on technological fixes, rather than on the social and political roots of poverty and disease.
“The main harm is in the opportunity cost,” said Dr. David McCoy, a public-health expert at Queen Mary University, London. “It’s in looking constantly for new solutions, rather than tackling the barriers to existing solutions.”
“The toll of many diseases could be lowered simply by strengthening health systems in developing countries, he said. Instead, programs like Grand Challenges — heavily promoted by the Gates Foundation’s PR machine — divert the global community’s attention from such needs, McCoy argues.”
In their eagerness to prove that public schools are failing, Connecticut’s leaders have agreed to passing marks on Common Core tests that are guaranteed to fail most students.
Wendy Lecker explains that the “cut scores” (or passing marks) were selected with full knowledge that most students would fail.
Outgoing state commissioner Stefan Pryor (soon to be state commissioner in Rhode Island) and his aides:
“……voted to set the SBAC [Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium] cut scores so that only 41 percent of 11th graders will pass in English and 33 percent will pass in math. In elementary and middle school, only 38-44 percent of students will pass in English and only 32-39 percent will pass in math.
“Standardized test passing rates are based on arbitrary and political decisions about how many students decision-makers want to fail. SBAC admits it cannot validate whether its tests measure college readiness until it has data on how current test takers do in college. In fact, SBAC declares that the achievement levels “do not equate directly to expectations for `on-grade’ performance” and test scores should only be used with multiple other sources of information about schools and students.
“Since the vast majority of factors affecting test scores occur outside school, test scores are poor measures of school quality, teacher quality and student performance.
“Yet, with his November vote, Pryor guaranteed that many successful Connecticut students and schools will now arbitrarily be declared failures.”
Since NAEP state testing began in 1992, Connecticut has consistently been one of the top three states in the nation, along with Massachusetts and Néw Jersey. Yet most of its students, teachers, and schools will arbitrarily be stigmatized as “failures,” by design.
Michael Beyer, a principal in Illinois, was invited to participate in a task force on assessments for the State Board of Education. As he put it:
“I pose this question with absolute seriousness. I was invited to participate on a task force for the Illinois State Board of Education to review the assessments currently mandated across the state. I originally assumed this would be a group pulled together to serve as a political charade during our municipal election period. My cynicism proved wrong when, at our first meeting State Senator Lightford herself described the statewide discomfort with PARCC. It was evident this task force will be able to share authentic input on informing the state legislature. This is hopeful.
“What concerns me is how we spoke of education. The rooms, one in Chicago and one in Springfield, meeting concurrently and in real time linked via a webcast, were filled with real stakeholders and experienced educators representing the P-20 spectrum, including parents, teachers, superintendents, deans and principals like myself. There was not a single person representing what has become known as the ‘corporate reform’ agenda.”
Eventually the task force asked, “Who are our masters?” The Federal Department of Education, of course. And the Illinois State Legislature.
Beyer notes:
“The fact is the Illinois State legislature, and I would venture to say every legislature, doesn’t know much of anything about effective education. It was laid bare when it was revealed key lawmakers didn’t know the difference between interim, formative and summative assessments, yet have passed laws mandating high-stakes assessments that have been highly questioned as to their validity.”
And then he had a radical idea: everything was upside-down:
“We need to flip on its head our notion of who controls education. We need a libertarian movement in education. The real reform has to happen in who we perceive our masters to be. Our masters need to be our students and teachers. That is where all decisions need to begin and end. Not at the district, state or federal level…
“We need to stop asking how we serve our masters and recognize that teaching and learning begins with the teacher and the student. We need to scrap all of our systems and begin by asking our students and teachers what they need. This is a radical proposition, but it is also simple and the most effective. Instead of disentangling the ball of yarn and deciding which assessment and curricula vendors will receive our millions of dollars, and billions of dollars nationwide, let’s build a system using backwards design that begins with the classroom and enables teachers to receive the support and professional development they need. We can continue to hold teachers accountable, and we don’t need high-stakes, highly-questionable assessments to do so. Let’s make sure we begin to serve our true masters, which are our students and teachers, not the countless assessments and legislative bodies.”
Bob Shepherd, veteran designer of curriculum, texts, and educational publishing, explains here why the Common Core is wrong to favor informational text over fiction, argument over narrative.
Shepherd writes:
One of the many things that Coleman didn’t know about ELA (one could make a very long list there) is that getting a handle on narrative is essential. He decided unilaterally, for the rest of us, to de-emphasize narrative in favor of argument.
Narrative is arguably the primary means by which we make sense of the world. Let me tell you a story
Not so long ago. . .
the world was completely different.
Anatomically modern humans have existed for about 200,000 years.
But only since the end of the eighteenth century has artificial lighting been widely used. Gas lamps were introduced in European cities about that time, and electric lights came into use only in the twentieth century.
In other words, for most of human history, when night fell, it fell hard. Things got really, really dark. . .
and people gathered under the stars, which they could REALLY see in those days before electric lights. . .
and under those stars, they gathered around fires and told stories.
In every culture around the globe. . .
Storytelling existed LONG before the invention of writing. We know this because the earliest manuscripts that we have in every case record stories that were ancient then.
Where does this storytelling urge among humans come from, and why is it universal?
Contemporary cognitive scientists have learned that storytelling is an essential faculty of the human mind, involved in every aspect of our lives, including our dreams, memories, and beliefs about ourselves and the world.
Storytelling turns out to be the fundamental way in which our brains are organized to make sense of our experience. Only in very recent years have scientists come to understand this. We are ESSENTIALLY storytelling creatures.
If that sounds like an overstatement, attend to what I am about to tell you. It’s amazing, and it will make you rethink a LOT of what you think you know.
When you look out at the world, you have the impression of taking everything in and seeing a continuous field.
But scientists have discovered that in fact, at any given moment, people attend to at most about seven bits of information from their immediate environment. The brain FILLS IN THE REST, based on previously gathered information and beliefs about the world. In short, your brain tells you a STORY about what you are seeing, and that is what you actually “see.”
Again, at any given moment, people attend to at most about seven bits of information from their immediate environment, even though there are literally millions and millions of things that they could be thinking about or attending to. This limitation of our mental processors to seven bits of information at a time is why telephone numbers are typically seven digits long. That’s the most information that people can attend to at any particular moment. So, at any given moment, you are attending to only a few small bits of your environment, and your brain is FILLING IN THE REST, based on previously gathered information, to create a complete picture for you. In short, your brain is continuously telling you a STORY about what you are seeing. The rods and cones at the back of your eye that take in visual information are interrupted by a place where the optic nerve connects to your brain. In other words, there is a blind spot where NO INFORMATION AT ALL IS AVAILABLE, but your brain automatically fills that information in for you. It tells you a story about what’s there.
The same thing happens when you remember something. Your brain only stores PARTS of the VERY FEW THINGS that you attend to in your present moments. Then, when you remember something, it CONFABULATES—it makes up a complete, whole story of what was PROBABLY the case and presents a whole memory to you, with many of the gaps filled in. In other words, memory is very, very, very faulty and based upon the storytelling. (For more on memory as confabulation, see the wonderful work of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus.)
Years ago, I had a dream that I was flying into the island of Cuba on a little prop plane. Through the window, I could see the island below the plane. It looked like a big, white sheet cake, floating in an emerald sea. Next to me on the airplane sat a big, red orangutan with a golf club.
Weird, huh? So why did I have that dream? Well, in the days preceding the dream I had read a newspaper story about Fidel Castro, the leader of Cuba, being ill; I had flown on a small prop plane; I had attended a wedding where there was a big, white sheet cake; I had been to the zoo with my grandson, where we saw an orangutan; and I had played golf with some friends.
The neural circuits in my brain that had recorded these bits and pieces were firing randomly in my sleeping brain, and the part of the brain that does storytelling was working hard, trying to piece these random fragments together into a coherent, unified story.
That’s the most plausible current explanation of why dreams occur. They make use of this storytelling function of the brain.
Who you are—your very SELF—is a story that your brain tells you about yourself and your history and your relations to others—a story with you as the main character. The story you tell yourself about yourself becomes the PERSON you are.
The word person, by the way, comes from persona—the Latin word for a mask worn by an actor in the Roman theatre (which was, in turn, based on Greek theatre).
So, our very idea of ourselves, of our own personal identity, is dependent upon this storytelling capacity of the human brain, which takes place automatically.
In fact, there is a new form of psychotherapy called cognitive narrative therapy that is all about teaching people to tell themselves more life-enhancing, affirmative stories about themselves, about who they are.
Telling yourself the right kinds of stories about yourself and others can unlock your creative potential, improve your relationships, and help you to self create—to be the person you want to be.
So, storytelling is key to being human. It’s one of our essential characteristics. It’s deeply embedded in our brains. It fills every aspect of our lives. Years ago, the historiographer Hayden White, in an essay called “The Literary Text as Historical Artifact,” pointed out that we tell ourselves that we’ve understood historical events once we have imposed a narrative frame upon them.
We make sense of the world via storytelling.
So it’s no wonder that people throughout history have told stories. People are made to construct stories—plausible and engaging accounts of things—the way a stapler is made to staple and a hammer is made to hammer. We are truly Homo vates, man the storyteller.
Storytelling is an essential, or defining characteristic of our species, one of those things that makes a human a human.
But Coleman understood nothing of that, clearly.
Why is anyone taking him at all seriously?
Lloyd Lofthouse comments on a post about the decision by the State Attorney General to divert dedicated public school funds to the building of a new hockey stadium:
Lloyd writes:
More examples of what the corporate reformers bring to the table of teaching children.
1. In Los Angeles, money that was designated by the voters to repair and improve schools, was spend on iPads boosting profits for Apple and software developers.
2. In Michigan, the reformers take money meant to support public schools and built an arena to host ice hockey for a private-sector owned team.
This is an example of what will happen as the fake Pub-Ed reformers get the upper hand in cities and states across the country.
Who do we thank for this mess?
A. Bill Gates
B. the Walton family
C. The Koch brothers.
D. All of the above and a few more
Mike Ilitch, The owner of the Red Wings, has an estimated net worth of $1.7 billion. Who else does he own? Does he own the governor of Michigan? Does he own the majority of the state legislature?
The team value of the Detroit Red Wings is $570 million with annual revenue of $134 million.
Diane Ravitch's blog 