Peter Greene posts his birthday thoughts, recycling a newspaper column from a few years back, before he became a nationally known blogger.
His advice: Live specifically. Your life is not generic. You are more than a data point. Live that one life that is yours alone.
Mercedes Schneider wonders why Kira Orange-Jones was chosen by TIME as one of the nation’s most influential people. She is executive director of Teach for America in Louisiana.
She is also on the state board of education, where Schneider finds no evidence of her influence.
Schneider concludes that TIME wanted to salute both TFA (its former executive editor was president of the TFA board) and to bolster Néw Orleans’ inflated reputation as a successful experiment in reform by eliminating public education.
Stuart Egan, a teacher of English at West Forsyth High School, wrote an article in the Winston-Salem, N.C., Journal explaining to readers why the reformster narrative about “failing schools” and “bad teachers” is wrong. He did it North Carolina-style, by comparing teaching to farming.
He wrote:
Last August, Business Insider published a report from the Brookings Institute highlighting the 15 cities where poverty is growing fastest in the nation. Greensboro-High Point tied for 10th, Winston-Salem tied for 8th, and Raleigh tied for 3rd with Charlotte.
Earlier this year, The Washington Post published a study by the Southern Education Foundation that found an incredibly high number of students in public schools live in poverty. And in April, the journal Nature Neuroscience published a study that linked poverty to brain structure. All three publications confirm what educators have known for years: Poverty is the biggest obstacle in public education….
North Carolinians know agriculture. We understand that any crop requires an optimum environment to produce the best harvest. Farmers must consider weather, resources, and time to work with the land. Since many factors which affect the harvest are beyond their control, farmers make the best of what they have; they must marry discipline with a craft. Teachers do the same.
But if the environment suffers and resources are limited, then agriculture suffers. Is that the fault of farmers? If variables surrounding the environment of public education are constantly being changed by governing bodies, then are teachers at fault?
Another fallacy with the rotten apple analogy is that the end product (singular test scores) is a total reflection of the teacher. Just like with farming, much is out of the hands of the education system. One in five children in North Carolina lives in poverty and many more have other pressing needs that affect the ability to learn. Some students come to school just to be safe and have a meal. But imagine if students came to school physically, emotionally, and mentally prepared to learn.
In some instances, resources vital to public education are siphoned off to other “factory farms” and for-profit entities. Just this past December, the Winston-Salem Journal reported that Rockingham County schools did not have enough money and were having to rob “Peter to pay Paul” just to keep public schools open and equipped with the basic supplies, even toilet paper. But at the same time, Sen. Phil Berger’s own son was slated to open up Providence Charter High School with taxpayer money in Rockingham County. Luckily, that endeavor never materialized, but the state’s Charter School Advisory Board just recommended that 16-18 new charter schools be financed by taxpayers.
The soil in which the public school system is rooted has been altered so much in the past decade that the orchard where teachers “grow” their crops has been stripped of much of its vitality. Look at the number of standardized tests, curriculum models and teacher evaluation protocols thrown at public schools. And those will change again with Race to the Top money running out.
We are treating the symptoms, not the malady. We are trying to put a shine on the apples by “raising” graduation rates with new grading scales. It is analogous to constructing a new white picket fence around an orchard and thinking that the crop will automatically improve.
But our elected officials can help or at least remove the obstacles for those who can.
The General Assembly can invest more in pre-K programs. They can stop funding for-profit charter and corporate-run virtual schools. They can expand Medicaid so more kids come to school healthy. They can reinstitute the Teaching Fellows program to keep our bright future teachers here in North Carolina. Then they can give decent raises to veteran teachers so they finish their careers here.
This just in from Pittsburgh, where common sense triumphs!
Kathy M. Newman, an English professor and education activist in Pittsburgh, sent this message about yesterday’s school board election:
In Pittsburgh yesterday voters delivered a resounding message that they support the broad platform of education justice for the Pittsburgh Public schools.
This platform includes: Community Schools—schools which provide wrap-around, nutrition and psychological services to needy children during the school day and beyond, restorative justice rather than discipline and punish, more resources for nurses, librarians and counselors, a push back against over-testing, and a district budget that is determined by what students need to succeed rather than austerity, closing schools, and right-sizing. This platform was developed by Great Public Schools Pittsburgh, a coalition of labor organizations, faith based organizations, community organizations, and parent groups, all of whom were involved in grassroots campaign efforts—door-knocking, phone-banking, fundraising, and poll watching, in each of these school board races.
Each of the four school board candidates who ran on this platform won the Democratic primary nomination, and they are all but assured to win in the fall, and to begin serving on the school board in late 2015.
The first winning candidate, Dr. Regina Holley, is from Pittsburgh’s School Board district 2, a district that includes the rapidly developing neighborhoods of East Liberty and Lawrenceville. Holley is a retired African American Pittsburgh Public School principal and teacher with a distinguished record as an educator, has served on the board since 2011. She ran uncontested.
The most hotly contested race was in Pittsburgh’s affluent East End, where a revered long-time school board member, Bill Isler, was stepping down. The education justice movement coalesced around school board candidate Lynda Wrenn, a Pittsburgh Public School parent with 4 children who are attending or who have graduated from Pittsburgh Public schools. Wrenn also holds an MA in education and has served on several district task forces over the last 10 years. Wrenn won by a wide margin against Kirk Burkley, a bankruptcy and real-estate lawyer who promised to be a strong advocate for charter schools and to keep a tight lid on the district’s budget on behalf of tax payers.
In the South Hills area of Pittsburgh a young woman, Moira Kaleida, mother of two and married to a school teacher, won against her opponent, a public school parent, Tracy Link. Moira has been active in Great Public Schools, and will be a strong voice for increasing equity and education justice on the new school board.
On Pittsburgh’s North Side a young African American, Kevin Carter, only 26 years old, defeated his opponents, Rosemary Moriarty, a retired school principal and, Patricia Rogers, a legislative aid and former Juvenile substance abuse supervisor. Carter is the founder and CEO of the Adonai Center for Black Males, a nonprofit that helps at-risk youth move from high school to college or trade school, and from higher education to the workplace. Carter, like each of the other winning school board candidates, ran a grassroots campaign on the platform of equity and education justice.
We are smiling and celebrating today in Pittsburgh! Maybe the education reformers thought that Pittsburgh was so full of Gates money and Broad graduates that we were a “safe city” for them. No longer!!!! The progressives have helped to elect a school board that sees poverty and inequality as the biggest challenges faced by our schools, and who see education justice as the solution!
This is a wake-up call to the “reform” industry. For the past 15-20 years, they have been telling us that the biggest problems in education are low expectations, bad teachers, teachers’ unions, tenure, seniority, and the need for competition and accountability.
The nation’s top teachers, the people who are the best teachers in their states, don’t agree.
According to a survey of the nation’s teachers of the year, the biggest obstacles to student success today are family stress and poverty. We need a new reform movement that focuses on the real problems of our society, not the fake problems that generate profits for the education industry.
Lyndsey Layton reports in the Washington Post:
The greatest barriers to school success for K-12 students have little to do with anything that goes on in the classroom, according to the nation’s top teachers: It is family stress, followed by poverty, and learning and psychological problems.
Those were the factors named in a survey of the 2015 state Teachers of the Year, top educators selected annually in every U.S. state and jurisdictions such as the District of Columbia and Guam.
The survey, to be released Wednesday by the Council of Chief State School Officers and Scholastic Inc., polled the 56 Teachers of the Year, a small but elite group of educators considered among the country’s best, on a range of issues affecting public education.
Asked to identify the greatest barriers to student academic success, the teachers ranked family stress highest, followed by poverty, and learning and psychological problems.
Why don’t Congress and the states listen to the experts?
Gary Rubinstein, teacher of mathematics at Stuyvesant High School, author and blogger, reviews Eureka Math in this post and finds it wanting. He points out that Eureka Math is the program that is considered most closely aligned to the Common Core math standards.
Rubinstein picked several examples of math problems from the Eureka curriculum and found them poorly written or wrong.
Eureka Math will soon be the national curriculum or very close to being one. This is an important post. If you are a math novice, you may find it hard to follow. If you are a math teacher, please speak up and say what you think.
Julian Vasquez Heilig recently delivered the Social Justice Keynote for The California Association of Latino Superintendents and Administrators (CALSA). He posted his remarks on his excellent blog, Cloaking Inequity.
Heilig reviews the racist history of standardized testing and its use to sort people by their socioeconomic status. He refers to court cases brought by civil rights groups in opposition to the use of standardized tests for high-stakes decisions.
Then he proposes an alternative means of assessing school quality, which he calls “local accountability” or “community-based reform,” using multiple measures and reflecting the ideas,, values, and priorities of local communities.
He writes (and says):
“We must press for community-based reforms in the public discourse instead of top-down, privately controlled reforms.
“We can utilize community-based, democratic approaches to student and teacher assessment.
“We must also support stakeholder collaboratives such as community-based charters instead of corporate based charters.
“We must do this because democratic control of public schools drives the health of our democracy!…..
“Community-based reform and policy changes the conversation from educators and local stakeholders as the “problem” by instead re-empowering them as the solution and strengthening the thread that links communities to vibrant, participatory neighborhood public schools.”
The Texas Legislature is so far out of touch with the needs of children and public schools that we can only hope the legislative session ends before any of the proposals for “reform” are enacted. The Texas Observer here gives an excellent overview of what is happening in Austin that might land on the heads of kids and public schools.
Throughout the legislative session, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has painted a dire portrait of hundreds of Texas public schools.
Currently, Patrick remarked during a March press conference, almost 150,000 students languish in nearly 300 failing schools across the state. He vowed to fix the problem.
The measures he championed include red-meat education reform proposals with appealing names: rating schools on an A-F scale; a state-run “opportunity school district” to oversee low-performing schools; a “parent empowerment” bill making it easier to close struggling schools or turn them into charters; expanding online classes (taxpayer funded, but often run by for-profit entities); and “taxpayer savings grants”—private school vouchers, effectively—to help students escape the woeful public system.
Patrick has long fought for many of these, but now that he holds one of the state’s most powerful offices it seemed, going into the session, that his reform agenda would be better positioned than ever before.
The president of Texans for Education Reform, Julie Linn, certainly believes so. She boasted in a January editorial about the potential for success under Patrick’s leadership. “The momentum is in place to make 2015 a banner year for education reform in Texas,” Linn wrote.
Teacher groups and public school advocates have a different take. As they see it, Patrick’s agenda is not a recipe for well-intended reforms but an attack on chronically underfunded public schools.
“There is a concerted, well-funded attempt to dismantle public education,” Rev. Charles Foster Johnson, executive director of the public school advocacy group Pastors for Texas Children, told the Observer in March. Johnson blamed elected officials who aim to “demonize and blame teachers and schools for the social ills and pathologies of our society at large.”
Patrick’s education proposals tap the reform zeitgeist that has increasingly gained political favor, both in Texas and nationally, during the last decade.
Patrick’s education proposals tap the reform zeitgeist that has increasingly gained political favor, both in Texas and nationally, during the last decade. From President Obama to presidential hopefuls Jeb Bush and Sen. Ted Cruz, education reform has created odd bedfellows, obscuring policy fault lines between Democrats and Republicans like perhaps no other issue.
Reform critics, though, point out that test scores have always closely tracked family income rather than school quality. They note how schools with high rates of poverty are more likely to be low-performing if the state uses test scores as the primary measuring stick. “The real problem,” Johnson said, “is that we don’t have the political will to assign those schools the resources they need.”
Regardless of where you stand in the debate, with less than two weeks left in the 84th Legislature we can begin to gauge the success of Patrick’s reform agenda, much of which is being carried by his successor as chair of the Senate Education Committee, Sen. Larry Taylor (R-Friendswood).
Note how politicians like Dan Patrick, now in the powerful position of Lt. Governor, are quick to bash the public schools after having defunded them by billions of dollars. Patrick, a former radio talk show host of the right, loves vouchers. He apparently does not care that sending public money to religious schools does not improve educational opportunity, although it does weaken public schools.
Every proposal under consideration–like the parent trigger–has failed to make a difference anywhere. Every one of them is straight out of the far-right ALEC playbook.
A-F grading of schools, a Jeb Bush invention, is a typical useless reformster proposal. The letter grades reflect the socioeconomic status of the students in the school. Imagine if your child came home from school with a report that had one letter on it; you would be outraged. That is how crazy it is to think that an entire school can be given a letter grade; it is pointless and it does nothing to make schools better. Kids from affluent districts are miraculously in A schools, kids from poverty are in low-rated schools. What is the point of the grading other than to stigmatize schools that enroll poor kids and are typically under-resourced? I guess the point is to label them as failures so they can be privatized or the kids can get vouchers to go to backwoods religious schools where they will have an uncertified teacher and learn creation “science.”
Texans are a hardy bunch. Those who are fighting for public education have a steep uphill climb. But they won’t give up. They launched a bipartisan coalition to block the testing Vampire that was eating public education, and they can work together to save public education for the state’s children. It won’t be easy. But it matters to the future of the state.
As early returns indicated, Bennett Kayer lost his seat on the Los Angeles school board to charter founder Ref Rodriguez and charter supporter Tamar Galatzan lost her seat to retired public school educator Scott Schmerelson. It was a very low turnout election, as usual (sadly). The president of the school board, Dr. Richard Vladovic, was re-elected. The board will remain divided over the continued privatization of the public schools. Los Angeles already has more students in charter schools than any other city. The charter industry had hoped to gain decisive control of the board to continue its expansion.
The battle continues. The billionaires dropped a few million into the L.A. race, principally to defeat Kayser. They succeeded. They probably didn’t count on losing Galatzan, or they would have spent a few million more to shore up that seat.
Early returns show Scott Schmerelson defeating Tamar Galatzan, and Ref Rodriguez defeating Bennett Kayser. Galatzan and Rodriguez are the preferred candidates of the California Charter School Association. Big money came from CCSA and another PAC to defeat Bennett Kayser. It appears that big money won, unless there is a last-minute surge in a low voter turnout.
The big money didn’t pour so much into the Schmerelson-Galatzan race.
We always hope that David can defeat Goliath, and sometimes he does. But not always.
So, the election–if current trends continue–is a wash. Not a victory for the charter industry, not a loss for public education. A wash.
Diane Ravitch's blog 