Rachel Wolfe made this wonderful 30-minute documentary called “Losing Ourselves.”
Rachel is an intern at The Future Project, an education non-profit focused on bringing passion and purpose to the lives of young people, and a sophomore in Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy. She graduated a year ago from Scarsdale High School.
She writes about her film:
I’ve been reading (and loving) your blog, and I thought you might be interested in a like-minded documentary I created during my junior and senior years of high school. The documentary is called Losing Ourselves and explores how an expectation for perfection and a status-driven definition of success undermines students’ love of learning and creativity and gets in the way of our ability to use high school as an opportunity to figure out what we love and who we are. The last chapter portrays how a fifth grade classroom in which creativity is encouraged and failure is praised creates kids who are intrinsically motivated, incredibly passionate, and terrified to have their creativity educated out of them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane,
The link doesn’t work.
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This looks like the right one:
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Every teacher, parent, administrator, and self-appointed “reformer” should watch this before the school year begins.
Heartbreaking, amazing and gut wrenching.
Dedicated to two teachers who taught Rachel she was good enough. Get kleenex first.
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Kids out there! Get used to it! The questions you are asking in this video are ones you will be asking ALL YOUR LIFE. You will struggle with asserting your own individuality in a society which will try to rob it from you, measure you, put you in a box and market products to you and judge you in every way possible. You will have to learn to balance your time at home and work, deal with problems at work and often do things you don’t want to do in every aspect of your life. Life will give you every lesson you need to learn. Good for the students in this video. They are QUESTIONING. If we find something disturbing about the attitudes of these students, we adults and our society have OURSELVES to blame.
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Diane, I guess the question is whether this “loss of passion” is the result of kids sitting in ineffective teachers’ classrooms or the result of measuring effectiveness itself. From this Gates Foundation MET study, we can see in Table 14 that students in highly effective teachers’ classrooms experience similar gains in enjoyment/engagement (column 5): “Students randomly assigned to more effective teachers reported enjoying class more“. Thus, it seems that what we really need to do is identify the effective teachers, retrain/reassign the ineffective teachers, and hire more high-aptitude candidates to produce more highly effective teachers.
I guess the question is when will these authors who write anecdotes actually provide data to support any of their conjectures. You know, something we like to call “science” that helped the West become the preeminent power in the world since the Middle Ages.
What say you?
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Virginiasgp, the loss of passion is the result of too much standardized testing, not enough time for the JOY of learning, inquiring, discovering.
Too much scripted rote lessons, lacking in passion, produces boredom.
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“Too much scripted rote lessons, lacking in passion, produces boredom.”
The result of GAGA* administrators and teachers who lack the will to refuse to implement those educational malpractices.
*Going Along to Get Along (GAGA): Nefarious practice of most educators who implement the edudeformers agenda even though the educators know that those educational malpractices will cause harm to the students and defile the teaching and learning process. The members of the GAGA gang are destined to be greeted by the Karmic Gods of Retribution** upon their passing from this realm.
**Karmic Gods of Retribution: Those ethereal beings specifically evolved to construct the 21st level in Dante’s Hell. The 21st level signifies the combination of the 4th (greed), 8th (fraud) and 9th (treachery) levels into one mega level reserved especially for the edudeformers and those, who, knowing the negative consequences of the edudeformers agenda, willing implemented it so as to go along to get along. The Karmic Gods of Retribution also personally escort these poor souls, upon their physical death, to the 21st level unless they enlighten themselves, a la one D. Ravitch, to the evil and harm they have caused so many innocent children, and repent and fight against their former fellow deformers. There the edudeformers and GAGAers will lie down on a floor of smashed and broken ipads and ebooks curled in a fetal position alternately sucking their thumbs to the bones while listening to two words-Educational Excellence-repeated without pause for eternity.
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Duane and Diane,
I like to think I can communicate clearly but I may have been mistaken. You see, that research shows that the teachers judged to be most effective on VAMs also are extremely likely to have their kids enjoy their class.
I think your argument is that VAMs only measure “teaching to the test” and kills any enjoyment. The data disagree with that premise.
Simple question. How do you explain the high correlation between teachers who can best raise test scores (as measured by VAMs) and the enjoyment of class found in the random assignment experiment conducted in the MET study?
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I would say the same is true of teachers. Too much testing, scripts, measurement, being held accountable for things over which they have no control, etc. also produces boredom in teachers. It’s one reason so many are leaving. Why does one need to have data to make a decision on anything? What happened to common sense? What about listening to what the INDIVIDUAL says from his or her heart. THAT is more important in some cases than ANY measurement or data.
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dianeravitch: remember that “the plural of data is not anecdotes” only applies to those criticizing self-styled “education reform” and not its proponents. When the rheephorm “data” is wrapped up in shiny numbers and stats derived from [inherently tricky] self-reporting it’s all scientific and objective and worth its weight in gold. Capiche? [*You know, just like the public self-aggrandizing year-after-year ‘anecdotal data’ from Michelle Rhee about her “walk on water” raising of “her” students from the 13th to the 90th percentile, which claim the commenter in question completely obliterated. Rheeal heroes like his are just, so, ephemeral.*
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Oh my, the usual self-referencing rheephorm terms that sport “high.” May I suggest you email the usual suspects and request “more highly effective trolls” for this blog? They almost invariably rate “F” and “highly ineffectual.”
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Mamie Krupczak Allegretti: I literally talked to someone just yesterday, an extremely fine human being whose life story could be a “movie of the week,” that just got out of public education (after years of fine service mostly as a SpecED TA and then as a teacher) after being subjected to demeaning and degrading treatment by rheephorm-minded data-driven admins. Rheeally! And the abuse was done in the most Johnsonally sort of ways too…
I would add that what should be an incredibly interesting job is made innecessarily boring by rheephorm reductionism [test scores are the Holy Grail followed closely by compliance at all costs). Then there is the very real exhaustion that comes with putting in many many hours per week past one’s “official” work schedule—combined with lack of appreciation for (1) all that effort and (2) taking so much precious time away from one’s own family. Not to mention the physical, mental and emotional toll involved in doing a job that, for almost everything that you need to do “for the kids” you get no recognition or credit whatsoever.
An added note for the rheephormistas. He applied at one point to a charter school in the greater LA area [high turnover] and was told by the interviewer that he was an excellent candidate but [among other things] he would have to agree to “volunteer” at least 100 hours per semester for after-school and weekend tutoring, coaching sports, taking students on trips, etc.* Just like the mystical way that rheephormsters play with the meaning of words like “high” he was informed, as he questioned a little further, that the “donation” of unpaid time and labor was a condition of employment. Wow! Who knew after all these years that the draft during the Vietnam War was just “voluntary”!
Numbers. Stats. Definitions. The “thought leaders” of the “new civil rights movement of our time” are all in for double talk & double think & double standards.
And doubling down on whatevers [see NJ Comm. of Ed.]
I can see you were thinking of Ionesco: “It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.”
You wrote: “What happened to common sense?”
But, if I may essay an answer, among the heavyweights of “education reform” it can be said—
There is nothing less common than common sense.
Thank y’all for your comments.
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P.S. *For all you 3D2Mers [data-drivel decision making mania-ers] he told me that the charter school had 30 or more teachers. Let’s go lowball. At 100 hours per semester per teacher, that’s a whole lot of money “voluntarily” saved from “labor costs.” He estimated close to $100,000 “savings” for the school—although apparently that “savings” includes subtracting “value” [!] from the teaching and learning environment because all that “freely given” time and effort [how about adding in time away from family which is priceless or gas which costs money?] made for a whole lotta burn-and-churn. And as he easily found out, that burn-and-churn ate up a lot of admin time because they were constantly having to find subs and replacements. As Arne Duncan might say, “Who’d a thunk?”
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But look at it this way: in such a rheephorm-driven educational setting the students of OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN will never ever in a million years be able to compete with the schools the leading rheephormsters send THEIR OWN CHILDREN to.
See? Not everyone is a loser…
😡
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Diane, you definitely have some characters here with these comments from KrazyTA. But let me point something out to all the opt-out activists.
In my regular line of work, in addition to metrics, we review cost-benefit analyses and our group is responsible for conducting Lean 6 sigma projects. The whole point of a Lean 6 sigma effort is not to focus just on the final score, but to review the process by which the end goal is achieved. It’s the belief that by analyzing the pieces and steps of the whole, the final product will turn out to be great. Now, we must ultimately evaluate ourselves on the final score, but focusing on the final score is not HOW we improve.
The same applies to VAM. I would never suggest that merely focusing on VAMs are the way to improve. The best football teams (Patriots) focus on the “little things” and all the processes that lead up to a great team. However, the Patriots don’t say because they “think they tried hard” that they should get a participation medal. Ultimately, it’s whether they win or lose. Or at least how effective they played relative to the talent that was available.
The fact that great teachers score well on VAM is a symptom of their great teaching. They don’t score well on VAMs because they focused on VAMs. That’s a red herring and you all know it. No teacher or ever principal should “focus” on VAMs. They should review what VAMs tell them about what policies, practices and lesson plans work. Then, they should try to implement those policies, practices and lesson plans. They may even conduct tests to see what’s the best option between differing methods. In the end, they should base their decisions on what the data says. There will be some variability in the data since it’s hard to measure charisma and natural talent (nobody thought Tom Brady’s physical talent would lead to his success). But Google and Facebook get to where they are not because somebody says “I think this layout or shade of blue would work well”. They test it repeatedly (Google reportedly tested dozens of shades of blue to max profits) and use what is proven to work.
But, I must admit, you all have a good rationalization going on about why you simply don’t have to perform in the classroom. I guess it makes you sleep easier at night. I just wish those disadvantaged kids had the same luxury.
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If wishes were wings, horses and VAM could fly.
In rheeality, they do. In reality, no…
Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, RETHINKING VALUE-ADDED MODELS IN EDUCATION: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON TESTS AND ASSESSMENT-BASED ACCOUNTABILITY (2014).
A one-stop answer to every single assertion.
Trust me when I write: reading—it’s good for you.
😎
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I’m planning on using her video in court next time. The arguments of Amrein-Beardsley and Rothstein are pretty humorous. I’d like to place a $10K bet with them based on their theory that VAMs are unreliable. No way they actually put money up to back their premise.
Recall they never dispute that VAMs are measuring effectiveness. They only claim they are not perfect and their is some inaccuracy involved. It all comes down to what actions should be taken when there is an 85% chance a teacher is ineffective. And we all know what side you guys are on. It’s definitely not in defense of the disadvantaged kid in that class.
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A “grossly ineffective” distortion of what Audrey Amrein-Beardsley wrote.
For shame.
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Yes, research from the Gates Foundation. Highly trustworthy.
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THIS, THIS, THIS is something i have been asking teachers about —- how come so many of you don’t appear to have become conscious, to begin to examine the society in which you have been educated and in which you appear to be committed to ‘educating’ children?
and if you are conscious, awake, aware, how come you continue to enable, to do the work of the plutocrats by teaching children the mind-and-soul crushing crap they’re being fed, to turn them into obedient little slave workers and consumers?
“The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.” ~James Baldwin
#COMPLICITY
It’s James Baldwin’s birthday, and i take the liberty of borrowing a FB posting put up by Melissa Katz and pasting Baldwin’s A Talk To Teachers here (please feel free to imagine he is also talking about ALL children being impacted by ed deform):
“A Talk to Teachers”
By James Baldwin
(Delivered October 16, 1963, as “The Negro Child – His Self-Image”; originally published in The Saturday Review, December 21, 1963, reprinted in The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-Fiction 1948-1985, Saint Martins 1985.)
Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately menaced, not by Khrushchev, but from within. To any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible – and particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people – must be prepared to “go for broke.” Or to put it another way, you must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won’t happen.
Since I am talking to schoolteachers and I am not a teacher myself, and in some ways am fairly easily intimidated, I beg you to let me leave that and go back to what I think to be the entire purpose of education in the first place. It would seem to me that when a child is born, if I’m the child’s parent, it is my obligation and my high duty to civilize that child. Man is a social animal. He cannot exist without a society. A society, in turn, depends on certain things which everyone within that society takes for granted. Now the crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society. Thus, for example, the boys and girls who were born during the era of the Third Reich, when educated to the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians. The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it – at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.
Now, if what I have tried to sketch has any validity, it becomes thoroughly clear, at least to me, that any Negro who is born in this country and undergoes the American educational system runs the risk of becoming schizophrenic. On the one hand he is born in the shadow of the stars and stripes and he is assured it represents a nation which has never lost a war. He pledges allegiance to that flag which guarantees “liberty and justice for all.” He is part of a country in which anyone can become president, and so forth. But on the other hand he is also assured by his country and his countrymen that he has never contributed anything to civilization – that his past is nothing more than a record of humiliations gladly endured. He is assumed by the republic that he, his father, his mother, and his ancestors were happy, shiftless, watermelon-eating darkies who loved Mr. Charlie and Miss Ann, that the value he has as a black man is proven by one thing only – his devotion to white people. If you think I am exaggerating, examine the myths which proliferate in this country about Negroes.
All this enters the child’s consciousness much sooner than we as adults would like to think it does. As adults, we are easily fooled because we are so anxious to be fooled. But children are very different. Children, not yet aware that it is dangerous to look too deeply at anything, look at everything, look at each other, and draw their own conclusions. They don’t have the vocabulary to express what they see, and we, their elders, know how to intimidate them very easily and very soon. But a black child, looking at the world around him, though he cannot know quite what to make of it, is aware that there is a reason why his mother works so hard, why his father is always on edge. He is aware that there is some reason why, if he sits down in the front of the bus, his father or mother slaps him and drags him to the back of the bus. He is aware that there is some terrible weight on his parents’ shoulders which menaces him. And it isn’t long – in fact it begins when he is in school – before he discovers the shape of his oppression.
Let us say that the child is seven years old and I am his father, and I decide to take him to the zoo, or to Madison Square Garden, or to the U.N. Building, or to any of the tremendous monuments we find all over New York. We get into a bus and we go from where I live on 131st Street and Seventh Avenue downtown through the park and we get in New York City, which is not Harlem. Now, where the boy lives – even if it is a housing project – is in an undesirable neighborhood. If he lives in one of those housing projects of which everyone in New York is so proud, he has at the front door, if not closer, the pimps, the whores, the junkies – in a word, the danger of life in the ghetto. And the child knows this, though he doesn’t know why.
I still remember my first sight of New York. It was really another city when I was born – where I was born. We looked down over the Park Avenue streetcar tracks. It was Park Avenue, but I didn’t know what Park Avenue meant downtown. The Park Avenue I grew up on, which is still standing, is dark and dirty. No one would dream of opening a Tiffany’s on that Park Avenue, and when you go downtown you discover that you are literally in the white world. It is rich – or at least it looks rich. It is clean – because they collect garbage downtown. There are doormen. People walk about as though they owned where they are – and indeed they do. And it’s a great shock. It’s very hard to relate yourself to this. You don’t know what it means. You know – you know instinctively – that none of this is for you. You know this before you are told. And who is it for and who is paying for it? And why isn’t it for you?
Later on when you become a grocery boy or messenger and you try to enter one of those buildings a man says, “Go to the back door.” Still later, if you happen by some odd chance to have a friend in one of those buildings, the man says, “Where’s your package?” Now this by no means is the core of the matter. What I’m trying to get at is that by the time the Negro child has had, effectively, almost all the doors of opportunity slammed in his face, and there are very few things he can do about it. He can more or less accept it with an absolutely inarticulate and dangerous rage inside – all the more dangerous because it is never expressed. It is precisely those silent people whom white people see every day of their lives – I mean your porter and your maid, who never say anything more than “Yes Sir” and “No, Ma’am.” They will tell you it’s raining if that is what you want to hear, and they will tell you the sun is shining if that is what you want to hear. They really hate you – really hate you because in their eyes (and they’re right) you stand between them and life. I want to come back to that in a moment. It is the most sinister of the facts, I think, which we now face.
There is something else the Negro child can do, to. Every street boy – and I was a street boy, so I know – looking at the society which has produced him, looking at the standards of that society which are not honored by anybody, looking at your churches and the government and the politicians, understand that this structure is operated for someone else’s benefit – not for his. And there’s no reason in it for him. If he is really cunning, really ruthless, really strong – and many of us are – he becomes a kind of criminal. He becomes a kind of criminal because that’s the only way he can live. Harlem and every ghetto in this city – every ghetto in this country – is full of people who live outside the law. They wouldn’t dream of calling a policeman. They wouldn’t, for a moment, listen to any of those professions of which we are so proud on the Fourth of July. They have turned away from this country forever and totally. They live by their wits and really long to see the day when the entire structure comes down.
The point of all this is that black men were brought here as a source of cheap labor. They were indispensable to the economy. In order to justify the fact that men were treated as though they were animals, the white republic had to brainwash itself into believing that they were, indeed, animals and deserved to be treated like animals. Therefor it is almost impossible for any Negro child to discover anything about his actual history. The reason is that this “animal,” once he suspects his own worth, once he starts believing that he is a man, has begun to attack the entire power structure. This is why America has spent such a long time keeping the Negro in his place. What I am trying to suggest to you is that it was not an accident, it was not an act of God, it was not done by well-meaning people muddling into something which they didn’t understand. It was a deliberate policy hammered into place in or4der to make money from black flesh. And now, in 1963, because we have never faced this fact, we are in intolerable trouble.
The Reconstruction, as I read the evidence, was a bargain between the North and South to this effect: “We’ve liberated them from the land – and delivered them to the bosses.” When we left Mississippi to come North we did not come to freedom. We came to the bottom of the labor market, and we are still there. Even the Depression of the 1930’s failed to make a dent in Negroes’ relationship to white workers in the labor unions. Even today, so brainwashed is this republic that people seriously ask in what they suppose to be good faith, “What does the Negro want?” I’ve heard a great many asinine questions in my life, but that is perhaps the most asinine and perhaps the most insulting. But the point here is that people who ask that question, thinking that they ask it in good faith, are really the victims of this conspiracy to make Negroes believe they are less than human.
In order for me to live, I decided very early that some mistake had been made somewhere. I was not a “nigger” even though you called me one. But if I was a “nigger” in your eyes, there was something about you – there was something you needed. I had to realize when I was very young that I was none of those things I was told I was. I was not, for example, happy. I never touched a watermelon for all kinds of reasons that had been invented by white people, and I knew enough about life by this time to understand that whatever you invent, whatever you project, is you! So where we are no is that a whole country of people believe I’m a “nigger,” and I don’t , and the battle’s on! Because if I am not what I’ve been told I am, then it means that you’re not what you thought you were either! And that is the crisis.
It is not really a “Negro revolution” that is upsetting the country. What is upsetting the country is a sense of its own identity. If, for example, one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture, you would be liberating not only Negroes, you’d be liberating white people who know nothing about their own history. And the reason is that if you are compelled to lie about one aspect of anybody’s history, you must lie about it all. If you have to lie about my real role here, if you have to pretend that I hoed all that cotton just because I loved you, then you have done something to yourself. You are mad.
Now let’s go back a minute. I talked earlier about those silent people – the porter and the maid – who, as I said, don’t look up at the sky if you ask them if it is raining, but look into your face. My ancestors and I were very well trained. We understood very early that this was not a Christian nation. It didn’t matter what you said or how often you went to church. My father and my mother and my grandfather and my grandmother knew that Christians didn’t act this way. It was a simple as that. And if that was so there was no point in dealing with white people in terms of their own moral professions, for they were not going to honor them. What one did was to turn away, smiling all the time, and tell white people what they wanted to hear. But people always accuse you of reckless talk when you say this.
All this means that there are in this country tremendous reservoirs of bitterness which have never been able to find an outlet, but may find an outlet soon. It means that well-meaning white liberals place themselves in great danger when they try to deal with Negroes as though they were missionaries. It means, in brief, that a great price is demanded to liberate all those silent people so that they can breathe for the first time and tell you what they think of you. And a price is demanded to liberate all those white children – some of them near forty – who have never grown up, and who never will grow up, because they have no sense of their identity.
What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. It’s astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn’t stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. That’s all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That’s how the country was settled. Not by Gary Cooper. Yet we have a whole race of people, a whole republic, who believe the myths to the point where even today they select political representatives, as far as I can tell, by how closely they resemble Gary Cooper. Now this is dangerously infantile, and it shows in every level of national life. When I was living in Europe, for example, one of the worst revelations to me was the way Americans walked around Europe buying this and buying that and insulting everybody – not even out of malice, just because they didn’t know any better. Well, that is the way they have always treated me. They weren’t cruel; they just didn’t know you were alive. They didn’t know you had any feelings.
What I am trying to suggest here is that in the doing of all this for 100 years or more, it is the American white man who has long since lost his grip on reality. In some peculiar way, having created this myth about Negroes, and the myth about his own history, he created myths about the world so that, for example, he was astounded that some people could prefer Castro, astounded that there are people in the world who don’t go into hiding when they hear the word “Communism,” astounded that Communism is one of the realities of the twentieth century which we will not overcome by pretending that it does not exist. The political level in this country now, on the part of people who should know better, is abysmal.
The Bible says somewhere that where there is no vision the people perish. I don’t think anyone can doubt that in this country today we are menaced – intolerably menaced – by a lack of vision.
It is inconceivable that a sovereign people should continue, as we do so abjectly, to say, “I can’t do anything about it. It’s the government.” The government is the creation of the people. It is responsible to the people. And the people are responsible for it. No American has the right to allow the present government to say, when Negro children are being bombed and hosed and shot and beaten all over the Deep South, that there is nothing we can do about it. There must have been a day in this country’s life when the bombing of the children in Sunday School would have created a public uproar and endangered the life of a Governor Wallace. It happened here and there was no public uproar.
I began by saying that one of the paradoxes of education was that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person. And on the basis of the evidence – the moral and political evidence – one is compelled to say that this is a backward society. Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school, and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker, I would try to teach them – I would try to make them know – that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal. I would try to make each child know that these things are the result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him. I would teach him that if he intends to get to be a man, he must at once decide that his is stronger than this conspiracy and they he must never make his peace with it. And that one of his weapons for refusing to make his peace with it and for destroying it depends on what he decides he is worth. I would teach him that there are currently very few standards in this country which are worth a man’s respect. That it is up to him to change these standards for the sake of the life and the health of the country. I would suggest to him that the popular culture – as represented, for example, on television and in comic books and in movies – is based on fantasies created by very ill people, and he must be aware that these are fantasies that have nothing to do with reality. I would teach him that the press he reads is not as free as it says it is – and that he can do something about that, too. I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger – and that it belongs to him. I would teach him that he doesn’t have to be bound by the expediencies of any given administration, any given policy, any given morality; that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything. I would try to show him that one has not learned anything about Castro when one says, “He is a Communist.” This is a way of his not learning something about Castro, something about Cuba, something, in time, about the world. I would suggest to him that his is living, at the moment, in an enormous province. America is not the world and if America is going to become a nation, she must find a way – and this child must help her to find a way to use the tremendous potential and tremendous energy which this child represents. If this country does not find a way to use that energy, it will be destroyed by that energy.
http://richgibson.com/talktoteachers.htm
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Thanks for posting Baldwin’s words, words so true that with a few name, date and place changes could be written about our society today.
Unfortunately, there might only be a few here who do read and comprehend Baldwin’s words. Some will claim it’s too long. I say horse manure to them!
And I would like to highlight what you, metaminduniversal (Rich Gibson??), have asked:
“and if you are conscious, awake, aware, how come you continue to enable, to do the work of the plutocrats by teaching children the mind-and-soul crushing crap they’re being fed, to turn them into obedient little slave workers and consumers?”
Many here, like both the unthinking, unquestioning “whites and Negroes” to whom Baldwin refers, will provide ample excuses for not challenging those educational malpractices that cause violence and harm to the most innocent in society, the children. Those GAGAers who implement those malpractices should rightly be chastised and condemned for not resisting those unethical and immoral derelictions of negligent duties.
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you might like to listen to this short piece (8 minutes) by Chomsky, on the purpose of public education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVqMAlgAnlo
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i am forced to conclude, not for the first time (i keep hoping it is otherwise and get caught up in that hope for months at a time), that ed reform a la plutocrat will succeed in killing public education in this country, and will restore the resulting privatised, profit-generating version of public ed to conformity with the vision and intention of the ‘founding fathers’ who introduced the Prussian Model to the US…
It seems, judging by the (lack of) response to the presentation of facts and figures as to the real nature of governance in this country, and the rising poverty, and the siphoning off of all cash and resources (including taxpayer dollars funding public education) into plutocrat bank coffers, neither awake and aware parents nor awake and aware teachers can – as either separate groups or together – muster enough courage and commitment and solidarity to do what it takes to STOP IT IN ITS TRACKS AND TAKE IT DOWN….
i don’t understand this….
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Come join the United Opt Out groups around the nation. Get involved with actually making that change happen.
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SUGGESTION….. why dont parents and teachers TOGETHER start talking in their communities and start taking ACTION? teachers bypassing their ineffective union leaders (some of whom have sold out, others too afraid to upset the applecart) and parents bypassing the sold-out PTAs who got money from Gates et all… if each group’s leaderships have gone over to the ‘dark side’ wouldnt it be strategically wise to bypass those leaderships and build a JOINT movement outside of them? i know some of us are trying this in very small ways, but it seems to me that it’s still not happening where parents AND teachers are working together, under ONE umbrella.. i know teachers are concerned about what they have to lose, but please, believe me, you will lose it all anyway, regardless, unless you step up…. and if we come together to fight this, we parents can protect you….
imagine — going into school communities, holding public meetings where teachers and parents both speak to the same issues, both advocate for action, both express the same vision for what good public education looks like, both work together for the sake of our kids…. growing this from the local, to the state, to the national level….. this is the ONLY way we are going to beat the money and organisation of the plutocrats……..
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“. . . why dont parents and teachers TOGETHER start talking in their communities and start taking ACTION?. . . imagine — going into school communities, holding public meetings where teachers and parents both speak to the same issues, both advocate for action, both express the same vision for what good public education looks like, both work together for the sake of our kids…. growing this from the local, to the state, to the national level”
Again look up your state affiliation of United Opt Out and you will see this occurring around the country. Start here:
http://unitedoptout.com/
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Link did not work.
Sent from my iPhone
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A NEW LINK HAS BEEN ADDED. IT WORKED FOR ME.
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Virginiasgp,
🙂 As much as you’d like to think so, charisma, natural talent, intelligence, beauty, joy, etc. cannot be measured. We come up with so many false ways of doing so and think they tell us something. We cannot measure the effectiveness of teachers according to the scales we are attempting to use. This is not an area that can be covered by scientific measurement. You say we can conduct tests to find the best methods. Every classroom is different. Every student is an individual. Every teacher is an individual. As teachers, we often can’t use the same methods with all students or all classes. There are too many variables involved. What do we do then? What scale do we use at this point? You know, a lot of times when I taught literature, I would just throw out the “lesson plans” and speak from my heart. I would tell my students what the book we were studying meant to me and what I was learning from it. Am I “effective” or not? On what scale do you attempt to measure that? What does it mean? And who cares anyway? The obsessive attempt to measure, quantify, label and analyze every single thing by our culture is what is driving the passion out of experiences that should NOT be measured this way in the first place. You say that we should analyze the process and the steps it took to achieve the final goal and the product will turn out to be “great.” What is the product? The students? The teachers? How do you define “great? I don’t know what line of work you’re in, but it seems to be a neat and tidy narrow world where you don’t have to deal with HUMAN emotions, foibles, failures, joy, sadness, depression, etc. as teachers must do every day.
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Mamie, it’s very naive to think that “all teachers are great” and can’t be judged. As for your last line, do coaches have to deal with all those interpersonal issues to have their team perform? We measure coaches, right? Any manager will tell you that the egos of the team always come into play. Who do you assign to a given project? How do you constructively criticize certain employees? You are silly if you think teaching is so unique.
I tried to use that line that “every situation is different” with our ORSE inspectors on my submarine. I told him I could quickly analyze the electrical diagram and figure out how to troubleshoot on the fly. He responded that if I spent time beforehand figuring out not only the most efficient method to troubleshoot but where we were likely to have faults in the circuit, then I would save time. And then he gently reminded me that is very helpful when you are trying to keep your sub from sinking or getting blown up by an enemy sub.
Yes, anomalies will always arise and be handled differently. But policies can be measured. Is it better to shrink class size or give our best teachers more money with larger classes? The data clearly point to the latter even though virtually every teacher on here begs for the former. You are literally suggesting we throw out 500+ years of using science and revert back to pure intuition for all of our decisions. And you actually teach in our public schools! Folks, wrap your head around that one.
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Virginia,
Again, what is your scientific definition of a “great teacher?” How do we “measure” coaches? By the number of wins they have? How do you measure if a human being is a winner or loser in life? In coaching, you can bench players, remove players from the team, you can cut them before they even play. Sorry. Can’t do that in a classroom. Imagine if a coach was FORCED to play his worst players. In school everyone has to participate. Teachers can’t pick and choose to teach the best students. Kids can miss 50% or more of the school year and it still counts towards a teacher’s evaluation. I’ve had kids with the DT’s in class. How do you scientifically measure if my teaching is effective in relationship to this student? I’ve had students who have been in and out of the criminal justice system, return to my class, and if they don’t score well on whatever test is being used to measure ME, I FAIL. There are students who dislike school, their family situation – whatever – who will DELIBERATELY do poorly on a test to undermine a teacher’s evaluation. I’ve had students say they’ve stayed out all night at a concert and they’re still hungover during the test. A teacher I know has had kids come to a STATE test with bloody hands because they’ve been in a fight on the way to school. Also, if you evaluate how a coach did in a particular season, you evaluate the WHOLE season. With VAM, it’s 2 tests – one in the beginning and one at the end of the year. Coaches don’t just have 2 games. And which coaches are you talking about? The ones who make MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year? I wish we would STOP THE SPORTS analogies. They’re preposterous. If I could run my classroom like a coach, it would be great. Kick out all the poor players and my scores would be fantastic. Or, would they??? Let’s say they scored really well on the first test of the year and then scored just as well on the last test. How do you rate me as a teacher then? The VAM models would say the teacher didn’t do anything for this kid. That’s how ABSURD this model is. The scientific method is not a remedy for every human problem. And we are not even using the scientific method in attempting to rate teachers. Teachers want fewer students in class because they relate to them as HUMAN BEINGS, not data points. SOCIAL SCIENCE is NOT hard science. Social science can never get to “truths” in the same way as hard science. You are trying to apply hard science to areas (teaching) which cannot be measured in this way. Example: Some social “scientists” say not to give homework. Homework isn’t tied to academic achievement. Others will say to give homework. While both of these studies will use “scientific” language, they are NOT scientific because you cannot prove their falsehood. They are just counter narratives or counter stories. VAM is another one of these social science structures that seemingly emulates the scientific method but is NOT scientific. The idea of grades came about in the last two hundred years. We haven’t even measured students for that long let alone teachers. The grades that we give students are not given on some scientific basis. It’s a scale that we have made up. The scales we have made up are totally arbitrary. So, when you say that I want to disregard 500 years of science, I say NO. The scientific method should stay in the realms for which it is meant and NOT be applied to areas of human relationship and experience such as teaching.
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To the responder who used the Patriots in her/his(?) analogy. NEWSFLASH: the Patriots cheated so they could win. See any analogies with education reform and standardized testing here???? Sometimes the ends make people crazy and decimate and dishonor the process….
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And to Virginia again,
Have you had a “great teacher?” If so, please show the data which proves this teacher was “great.” Since we’ve never used scientific models or junk science like VAM to evaluate teachers until recently, there have never been any great teachers according to your way of thinking.
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