Thanks to reader Susan Schwartz for sharing this video about the day that Mary Poppins quit because her wages were too low.
Archives for the month of: September, 2015
You are surely familiar with Sheri Lederman. She is a fourth-grade teacher in Great Neck, Long Island, New York, whose “growth” scores dropped inexplicably from 14 of 20 to only 1 of 20 in a single year, causing her to be labeled “ineffective” on that measure. The score was assigned by a computer, which compared the growth of students in her class to avatar students in other parts of the state. The assumption is that children are inanimate objects that can be shaped and compelled to increase their standardized test scores. The computer is, in this case, at odds with Sheri’s principal, superintendent, parents, and former students.
Sheri’s husband Bruce Lederman is a lawyer. They decided not to accept this slap in the face to a teacher who had served with distinction for nearly 20 years. Bruce sued and the case was recently heard in state supreme court in Albany.
Here is a video about the case. Meet Sheri and Bruce, who are fighting for teachers across the state and the nation. The best part is the clip where Governor Andrew Cuomo declares his unqualified faith in using test scores to judge teachers and his belief that students will get a better education (or higher test scores) if teachers compete in a market.
This case is of national significance. It is a powerful weapon in the battle to restore humanity to teachers’ workplace.
The New York Times has a lovely article about where to find the art that portrays working people. I tend to think (wrongly) that the art of and about working people is from the 1930s, Socialist Realism. But much of the art described here is centuries old. People have always worked, but the great painters tended to paint royalty or mythical scenes or portraiture or still life, but not so much the people building and sowing and making.
One thing that occurs as you view the art of labor is how much of this kind of work–in factories and fields–has disappeared, either because it has been mechanized or outsourced. A factory that once employed 1,000 workers has either been transformed into a sleek production line run by robots and overseen by a handful of people. Or shipped to China or Mexico, where labor is cheaper.
Another thought is that unions arose to combat terrible working conditions and give working people a voice, so they were not treated as disposable by the bosses.
In the 1930s, the owners of capital hated unions. They have always hated unions. They don’t want to share power. They hate them still and do not lose an opportunity to reduce them and wherever possible, eliminate them.
TO READERS: I AM REPOSTING THIS GREAT PIECE BECAUSE I FORGOT THE LINK IN THE ORIGINAL!
Peter Rothberg, associate editor of The Nation, collected his ten top songs about working people. This is an appropriate way to begin Labor Day. Each song is accompanied by a video.
Enjoy!
Rest from your labors.
PS: I CAN’T BELIEVE I FORGOT THE LINK!
Steven Singer, a teacher in Pennsylvania, went with a group of colleagues to meet with Rep. Dan Miller of New Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Miller had been a history teacher; his aide had been a teacher.
“We crowded together in his tiny district office to talk about how standardized testing is destroying public schools.
“Which brings me to the second strangest thing – Rep. Miller didn’t just agree with us, he did so knowledgeably.”
But why, the teachers wondered, does the state continue to mandate harmful policies?
“Republicans have dominated state education policy for years. They still do. But in Miller we have someone who actually has a say in one of the most critical areas in the state. And he knows what he’s talking about, takes time to meet with real live educators and sympathizes with our cause.
“Which brings me to perhaps the strangest aspect of the whole meeting – Miller’s analysis why more isn’t being done to combat the testing industry.
“The groundswell isn’t there,” he said. “You’re still the fringe.”
Singer asks: where is the middle? Is there a mainstream? Or is it just the lunatic fringe that mandates harmful pixies and the lunatic cringe trying to restore common sense? Is there a middle?
In 1975, New York City’s government teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. The city’s leaders appealed to the Gerald Ford administration for financial help. President Ford said no.
The New York Daily News published a headline on its front page that was immediately iconic:
FORD TO NYC: DROP DEAD
Today the same newspaper published an editorial with the same sentiment, this time directed at the parents of the 220,000 children who refused the state tests.
The editorial argues that the parents have been manipulated by the teachers’ union, which is not only false but implies that the parents are dupes.
The editorial claims that the state must stand by the Common Core standards, which (they say) were “developed over many years by the nation’s top education experts.” Would the editorial board please tell us how many years they consider “many,” like two? Would the editors please name the nation’s “top educational experts?” David Coleman of McKinsey? Jason Zimba of Bennington College? Representatives of the College Board and ACT? Are these our “nation’s top educational experts”? Who says so?
The editorial argues that the state must support Governor Cuomo’s demand that 50% of teachers’ evaluation be tied to student test scores, ignoring the research and experience showing that this policy has no basis in research or real life.
Has the editorial board read the statement of the American Statistical Association, which found that teachers affect 1-14% of the variation in student scores, while the family and home have a far greater effect?
Is the editorial board aware of the legal battle of Sheri Lederman, an exemplary fourth-grade teacher in Great Neck who was rated “ineffective” on student growth? Sheri received accolades from her superintendent, her principal, parents, and former students. Should respected and successful teachers like Sheri be fired and replaced by new and inexperienced teachers? Why?
The editorial piously says:
“Kids in struggling schools have for years been plagued by low expectations and too many lower-performing teachers.”
So the editorial wants readers to believe that the Common Core tests that failed 96% of English language learners, 94% of children with disabilities, and more than 80% of Black and Hispanic children are in their best interests. Never mind that the same tests, with their absurdly unrealistic passing marks, widened the achievement gaps among groups. Why does the editorial board think that students in “struggling schools” will fare better academically if most of them fail the Common Core tests year after year? How will repeated failure create higher expectations? More likely, it will produce among the children a sense of despair and low self-worth.
It may be comforting to the editors of the Daily News to think that their arch-enemy–the teachers’ union–is pulling the strings, but the reality is that parents across the state are fed up with the excessive emphasis on testing. They know it robs their children of the arts, science, history, even physical education and recess.
The union doesn’t tell them that their children are cheated by the obsessive focus on testing. Parents see it with their own eyes. And parents across America agree with parents in Néw York. A recent Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll reported that 67% of public school parents and 64% of the public nationwide think there is too much emphasis on standardized tests in school.
So who should we listen to about education? The politicians or public school parents? The politicians or statistical experts?
This is a battle that the Daily News and Governor Cuomo can’t win. If they keep fighting and demeaning parents, next spring there will be 400,000 students who refuse the tests. They will refuse not because their parents are dupes of the union, but because their parents are defending the best interests of their children.
Lloyd Lofthouse, a frequent contributor to the blog, offers advice about how to teach reading:
“By the time I was eight years old, I was an avid reader. The grade school I was attending didn’t have a library but the county had a library bus visit the school every week, and I’d check out the maximum number of books.
“Eventually, I was old enough to ride my bike the few miles to the town’s library and check out books. I haunted that library.
“The high school I attended had a well stocked library where I worked as a student assistant for four years with that one hour a day counted for credit toward HS graduation. The librarian even graded her student library assistants. It was the only HS class where I earned my only A’s in HS.
“In my academic classes, I sat in the back and spent more time reading the books I was checking out of the HS library than I was doing the school work or paying attention to most of my teachers.
“By the time I barely graduated from high school with a 0.95 GPA, I must have read a few thousand books. I was a horrible test taker and usually failed the tests. School work had never been important to me because I didn’t plan to go to college. That would change when I was fighting in Vietnam and a sniper came within a fraction of an inch of blowing off the left side of my head. I felt the bullet caress my ear. I thought if I’d gone to college as my mother had wanted, I wouldn’t have been there. There were several other very close calls from other snipers, rockets, mortars and grenades.
“I was 23 when I was honorably discharged from the Marines and applied to go to college on the GI Bill. The community college gave me a literary test to see what English class to put me in. They had several levels of what’s known as Bone Head English for readers who were not reading at the literacy level necessary for doing college work.
“I passed that literacy test at the highest literacy level and never took a Bone Head English class in College even with my lousy 0.95 GPA out of HS. Imagine what that GPA would have been without those A’s from the librarian.
“If we want children to read at a high literacy level, those same children should be reading every day from books they enjoy—not some crap from a David Coleman or Pearson list.
“For instance, when I was teaching 7th grade in the early 1980s, one mother came to me concerned for her daughter who was a student in the English class I taught. The mother told me that her daughter was reading five levels below grade level. She wanted to know what could be done so her daughter would catch up.
“I said, “Turn off the TV at home, and have your daughter read for at least one hour or more every night at home seven days week, 365 days a year. The more she reads books that she enjoys, the faster her literacy level will grow.” I told her to use the local county library because it was free.
“That mother was skeptical. She even said as much but she promised to do what I suggested—and she did.
“A year later, after the next standardized test to determine reading levels, the mother wrote a letter to the district commending me for my advice because her daughter had jumped five years catching up to her grade level in literacy. That letter went into my file that the district kept of me as a teacher.
“I taught about 6,000 children over 30 years and suggested this to other parents, but this one mother was the only mother who did what I suggested about turning off the TV and replacing that time with reading books.”
This comment came from a reader. Watch the video. It is not quite two minutes.
Diane–There is a very powerful video being sent around Facebook involving a mother rabbit rescuing her young from a black snake intent on taking their young lives. I believe this video, viewed by millions online, captures the essence of our public teachers fight against the evils of vulgar/divisive corporate deforms currently in favor by the political and monied classes.
Please watch the video, digest it, and then consider sharing it on your blog. It’s heroic on several levels. I believe this simple video has the power to help us better-frame the current public v. corporate narrative in powerful ways, as well as raise teacher/parent morale. *** Thanks for all the hard work you do – it does matter and is making a difference!
Best Regards,
Charlie Follis
Wendy Lecker, civil rights attorney, notes that the release of Common Core test scores proved the adage that the tests measure family income.
“Decades of testing evidence show that the only stable correlation that exists, whether it is the CMTs or the SATs and likely the SBACs, is between test scores and wealth. Researchers such as Sean Reardon at Stanford note that wealthy parents not only can provide basic stability, nutrition and health care for their children, but also tutoring and enrichment that gives affluent children an edge over poorer children.
“The wealth advantage extends beyond test scores. Two studies, by St. Louis Federal Reserve and by the Boston Federal Reserve, demonstrate that family wealth is a determining factor in life success. The St. Louis report, published in August, revealed a racial wealth gap among college graduates. A college degree does not protect African-Americans and Latinos from economic crises as it does for whites and Asians. Employment discrimination figures into the disparity, but a major role is played by family wealth. Without a safety net of family assets, graduates of color must make more risky loan and other financial decisions. Last year’s Boston Fed study noted that wealthy high school drop-outs stay in the top economic rung as often as poor college graduates remain in the bottom economic rung. As a Washington Post article put it, rich kids who do everything wrong are better off than poor kids who do everything right. These reports, coupled with the fact that most job openings in the United States are for low-skilled workers, expose the uncomfortable truth that education is not the great equalizer.”
Instead of providing poor kids with smaller classes and other supports, we spend billions on testing.
“Education reformers deflect attention from the supports poor kids need and tell us that all kids have to do is develop some “grit” to succeed. In his best-selling book, “How Children Succeed,” Paul Tough claims there is “no antipoverty tool we can provide for disadvantaged young people that will be more valuable than the character strengths” like grit. Connecticut policy makers are trying to develop tests to measure the degree of “grit” our kids have. We are even told that if students have enough “grit” to get high test scores, our economy will be more competitive….
“Robber-baron education reformers such as Gates fight to protect their wealth to pass on their success to their children. For other people’s children their message is clear, as teacher/blogger Joe Bower remarked: “Let ’em eat grit.””
Reader Susan Schwartz sent this fabulous video to me.
Filmed by wildlife photographer Dylan Winter, it shows the “murmurations” of starlings.
“At dusk on a winter evening in southern England a flock of 200,000 European starlings congregate to soar in breathtaking formations before roosting for the night. These incredible displays of aerial precision and biological engineering are captured in this memorable sequence from FLIGHT: THE GENIUS OF BIRDS.”
Watch and enjoy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 