Mamie Krupszak Allegretti reflected on the dilemma of teachers torn between harmful mandates and their professional ethics.
She writes:
“It’s an age-old question, isn’t it? How does one live one’s life according to his or her individual ethics and spiritual life while simultaneously living in relationship to a system, government or institution? The liberal arts, literature, philosophy, history & learning about others who have chosen their own path can help you answer this question for yourself. There are no correct multiple choice answers on computerized tests to help you. It’s a matter of deep inward searching. Joseph Campbell said, “There’s something inside you that knows whether you’re on the beam or off the beam, and if you get off the beam to earn money, you’ve lost your life.” But if you get off the beam to follow the dictates of another whether it be a person or institution, you’ve also lost your life. Just a thought.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And that is precisely why I left after 27 glorious years. It was one of the best decisions of my life.
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I’m off the beam, and every time I get my paycheck, or use my insurance, or even walk into my school, I do think about it – a lot. If I had savings, or if I’d been teaching long enough to retire with insurance and a manageable retirement, I’d be out the door in a heartbeat. But, I’m 60 years old – too old to change careers, too young to reasonably retire. So I go to work each day looking for a way to mediate the harm I feel I’m doing with some kind of balancing good. It’s very hard to do, but my students are great kids who deserve more than they get, and trying to share a piece of knowledge, wisdom, or experience with that may help them down the road is what I hope to accomplish.
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Isn’t it amazing how the kids catch us? They can sense a teacher who cares for them; the system can’t take that away from you.
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TRUE, Charlie Brown. Another reason I QUIT. Refused to be muffled and used.
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In light of the research sociopath, I think that what we are seeing is that these people, who do not possess the ability to EMPATHIZE, are the ones who are the most egregious.
“We are accustomed to think of sociopaths as violent criminals, but in “The Sociopath Next Door”, Harvard psychologist Martha Stout reveals that a shocking 4 percent of ordinary people, one in 25, has an often undetected mental disorder, the chief symptom of which is that that person possesses no conscience. He or she has no ability whatsoever to feel shame, guilt, or remorse.”
https://itunes.apple.com/us/audiobook/sociopath-next-door-unabridged/id359786585
“One in 25 everyday Americans, therefore, is secretly a sociopath. They could be your colleague, your neighbor, even family”. .. (or the principal in your school,or the GOP candidate that wants to send all those immigrants back).”
“And they can do literally anything at all and feel absolutely no guilt. How do we recognize the remorseless?”
“One of their chief characteristics is a kind of glow or charisma that makes sociopaths more charming or interesting than the other people around them. They’re more spontaneous, more intense, more complex, or even sexier than everyone else, making them tricky to identify and leaving us easily seduced.”
“Fundamentally, sociopaths are different because they cannot love. Sociopaths LEARN EARLY TO SHAM EMOTION, but underneath they are INDIFFERENT TO THE SUFFERING OF OTHERS. ”
“They live to dominate and thrill to win.”
“The fact is, we all almost certainly know at least one or more sociopaths already.” (ESPECIALLY IF YOU TEACH.)
Part of the urgency, COMES WHEN “when we suddenly recognize that someone we know, someone we worked for, or were involved with, or voted for, is a sociopath.”
“But what do we do with that knowledge? To arm us against the sociopath, Dr. Stout teaches us to question authority, suspect flattery, and beware the pity play. Above all, she writes, when a sociopath is beckoning, do not join the game. It is the ruthless versus the rest of us,”
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I thought that you were going to go in a very different direction than you did. When you described those behaviors characteristic of sociopaths, you meant them to describe individuals. But what if a group or groups share those same characteristics?
What if a group:
is incapable of empathy?
has no ability whatsoever to feel shame, guilt or remorse?
cannot love and are indifferent to the suffering of others?
lives to dominate and thrill to win?
is out to destroy and undermine public institutions?
puts profit above all other goals and outcomes?
would sacrifice an entire generation of children for an untested and inappropriate social experiment?
is rich and powerful and can in fact do literally anything at all without being held accountable except to accountants?
I’m not a historian, but would suggest that a group can in fact be characterized by those same behaviors as an individual sociopath, and are far more dangerous.
In the face of such “oppression”, though perhaps that is overstating things, the decision facing teachers cannot be reduced to a simple “Should I stay or should I go?” (apologies to The Clash). There is another choice that may be more heroic, and that is to stay to protect those who cannot protect themselves – the children vulnerable to actions by “those groups” indifferent to their suffering. Those teachers who decide to stay will undoubtedly suffer for their decision, but perhaps they can take comfort that their action will help those who most need their protection. In that way they can be true to themselves without feeling that they are serving only their own needs.
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Thank you, GE2LR, for a profound comment.
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I, too, am so sad for the children, and I hope that a strong teacher movement will arise before it is too late.
As to sociopaths in a group… it seems to me that con-artists and charlatans gravitate to certain activities and groups, where they can attain power…. and that educational bureaucracies appear to attract these supreme egotists . Thus, lacking empathy, but perfectly able to fein it, these failed humans rise to the top. There is not a SHRED OF ACCOUNTABILITY for the behavior of the people who run the schools in too many place. LAUSD is a good example.
http://citywatchla.com/8box-left/6666-lausd-and-utla-complicity-kills-collective-bargaining-and-civil-rights-for-la-s-teachers
I post this link often, because I experienced this while at the top of my career. Nothing I say here is conjecture. It is all the way it is.
http://www.perdaily.com/2011/01/lausd-et-al-a-national-scandal-of-enormous-proportions-by-susan-lee-schwartz-part-1.html
Have you gone to my author’s page,w ehe my resume resides?
http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
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sociopack: a group of sociopaths
“The Sociopack”
A sociopath is ostracized
By everyone in group
But sociopack is nostrified
By everyone in loop
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“Should we therefore forgo our self-interest? Of course not. But it [self-interest] must be subordinate to justice, not the other way around. . . . To take advantage of a child’s naivete. . . in order to extract from them something [test scores, personal information] that is contrary to their interests, or intentions, without their knowledge [or consent of parents] or through coercion [state mandated testing], is always and everywhere unjust even if in some places and under certain circumstances it is not illegal. . . . Justice is superior to and more valuable than well-being or efficiency; it cannot be sacrificed to them, not even for the happiness of the greatest number [quoting Rawls]. To what could justice legitimately be sacrificed, since without justice there would be no legitimacy or illegitimacy? And in the name of what, since without justice even humanity, happiness and love could have no absolute value?. . . Without justice, values would be nothing more than (self) interests or motives; they would cease to be values or would become values without worth.”—Comte-Sponville [my additions]
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Duane,
Always nice to see you are up on your French philosophers!
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I contend that all teachers, admin, prospective teachers should read Comte-Sponville’s “A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues”. (the quote is from that book.
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It’s no accident that in a corrupt era of The Privatization of Everything, the liberal arts, philosophy, history, literature, etc. are being attacked and forced out of the classroom, typified by Common Core’s focus on “informational text” (certain to devolve into reading consumer product manualsand the like if allowed to continue) and Marco Rubio’s comment during the last Republican debate that we need more welders and fewer philosophers.
No disrespect whatsoever intended for welders and other tradespeople, but if we had more philosophersin education, instead of bought-and-paid-for technocrats, the misery we all feel and witness might not be so widespread.
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Increasingly, these questions dominate the lives of teachers. Those of us who are old timers with less to lose than our younger colleagues, don’t we have the responsibility to speak out where they can not? For the children. And for those who want more than anything to give the children what they deserve while they are in school with us?
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For so many, myself included, our soul killing job eats away at us everyday. Then the guilt of knowing we are no longer doing what we love, actually providing inspiring teaching to our students, becomes an additional burden that gets bigger everyday. Now to be told we are guilty of not choosing to destroy our lives by standing up for our students is almost unbearable. I have come to this blog to learn the truth about what was happening in education. To be inspired. To have hope. To be judged as unethical here is too much. It is the same as when people state that women who are abused should just leave, that they choose to stay and be abused and are therefore responsible for their situation. Goodbye.
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While every profession contains the good, bad and ugly, there are generally more good folks among the helping professions. In my career I have been fortunate to have worked with many admirable colleagues that have always put students first, and very few that are unworthy of the job. Those that should take a moral inventory are politicians, corporations and complicit administrators that do the bidding of the powers that want to micro-manage teachers.
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I have struggled with what sometimes feels like self righteous pronouncements about what I should do. Have you noticed that there are very few young, low level folks taking an individual stand against the abuses they face in the workplace? It is people who are retired or who have already been forced out who seem to have the most to say about what those in the trenches should do. Someone still needs to fight the good fight from the inside and do their best to protect the kids from the insanity of their elders. The outside world often expects teachers to play a martyr’s role. Who hasn’t heard the praise heaped on someone who devotes their very existence to their students? Is it really necessary for our own profession to demand martyrdom as well?
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I am thankful for this place in Diane Ravitch’s living room to practice supporting the pillars of truly public education and democracy. Do I teach to live or live to teach? I don’t know. But I know I can’t do it without all of you practicing activism on my part.
51.
Like a beautiful flower,
Colourful but scentless,
The well-taught word is fruitless
For one who does not practise.
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AMEN!!!
Beautiful. So many great comments above. I just cannot improve on them.
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I don’t know what I’d do without this website. It’s my go-to whenever I feel low about what’s happening in education.
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I would just like to say that wasn’t my intent to tell anyone how to live an ethical life. Perhaps a better question might be, “How does one be true to oneself and also live in relationship to a system or institution?” It is a question that permeates so much film and literature. Why? I think it is a question we all have to answer for ourselves whether we are teachers or not. It’s part of our human condition. I see so many comments here and elsewhere that, in my opinion, reflect real pain and suffering. So many teachers seem to be in real conflict describing what they are asked to do in their jobs knowing that it is not good for children. I think what really makes it worse is that they are evaluated directly on the outcomes of the “abusive” actions (tests) they are required to carry out. What should a person do when asked to be complicit in a system which is harmful to him/herself and others? I have no answers. I am struggling with these questions myself. I know that in my own case, when feelings of anxiety, depression, fear, powerlessness, shame, guilt, illness and physical pain, etc. come about, they force me to really examine what is going on and if I am living in relation to my center. I can’t hide from myself. Well, I can, but it brings suffering. I understand that just posing these questions can be upsetting to some people because it may bring up issues in their own situations which they are unwilling or unable to deal with. To me, this question seems to be the crux of much of the problem that is going on in education today. Maybe I should just give up all this philosophizing and go to welding school. 🙂
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Thanks, Mamie, I struggled to get the complexity of your comment into a short headline.
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Hello Diane and thank you. I did use the word “ethics” in my original question. I hope I made myself a bit clearer!
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I thank you for bringing it up. Myself, I did not read any judgment into your comment.
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I am having trouble with this issue. I speak up, and I get annoyed at teachers who don’t, and then feel guilty because fear of harassment or job loss is a mighty motivator. I try to do right by my students as best I can, but I know that it is going to take a monumental movement to take this country in a different direction than greed and political corruption.
Thank you for bringing this up, and thanks for those who comment. I feel like I’m going to have to sacrifice myself by taking a stand just because somebody has to, and I’m in a better position to than many. I’d prefer to find another way. I am trying to promote solidarity, but, honestly, I don’t see it happening. Some teachers are competing to be at the top, and more are just plain scared.
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I encountered the war on teachers sixteen years ago, but by then I was a successful and celebrated educator, and they had to go to extraordinary lengths to eradicate my reputation Go to my author’s page at http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
for a look at who I was when they came at me. Remember, in 1998 I had no idea what was afoot.
Today, sixteen years later, I met a teacher who is facing constant harassment. I know several others, and I follow the story of Francesco Portelos, http://www.endteacherabuse.org/Portelos.html http://protectportelos.org/does-workplace-bullying-continues-my-33-hrs-behind-bars/who refused to give up, went through horrific humiliation including a stint in jail, was a sub for a long time, and now was given a position in a school, …so that the principal can make his life miserable.
Who would want to teach if they knew about the EIC https://dianeravitch.net/2015/10/24/the-educational-industrial-complex/
It is scandalous that the union does not end civil rights abuse, but the leaders in too many unions are complicit, http://www.perdaily.com/2011/01/lausd-et-al-a-national-scandal-of-enormous-proportions-by-susan-lee-schwartz-part-1.html
It cost me $25,000 to sue when the gotcha squad nycrubberroomreporter.blogspot.com/2009/03/gotcha-squad-and-new-york-city-rubber.html accused me of outrageous things, and then, back at the school, but not teaching the entire 7th grade with the famous curricula that I wrote, the district sociopath superintendent put out charges of incompetence
nycrubberroomreporter.blogspot.com/2009/03/gotcha-squad-and-new-york-city-rubber.html
Sigh.
If teachers do no band together it is OVER in that school, that district. You should google BATS. Alone you cannot combat what they can do.
nycrubberroomreporter.blogspot.com/2009/03/gotcha-squad-and-new-york-city-rubber.html
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“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Sun Tzu had some things right.
In tough times, you do what you gotta do get by. Teachers can do the best they can and wait, but keep the soul of teaching pure and intact in the face of Reformers’ corruption and greed.
The Great Recession and government bailout transferred a massive amount of power to the wealthy. Republicans control: a majority of state and local governments, Congress, the courts including SCOTUS, all finance and banking, every corporate boardroom, major media outlets, and the military. At some point, people need to wake up and realize that the problem isn’t the black guy in the Whitehouse, the gay couple down the street, a hard working Hispanic family, the underpaid and overworked teaching force, or the poor Appalachian family on food stamps.
After watching Trump’s maniacal meltdown or listening to Carson’s bizarre, ether-like ramblings, it seems clear one party has lost touch with reality. Seeing Sanders poll higher than ever when in the past he was a sideshow, is encouraging. Assuming democracy is still functional, 2016 may produce much needed change in America.
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I’ve been trying to find a thread that what I’m about to reply with might fit best. I’ve chosen this one because my wife and fellow teacher has been struggling with wanting to find some way to fight back. The below letter is what she wrote to her principal. In Washington state we don’t have teacher evaluations tied to standardized tests yet. I say yet because the TPEP (Teacher Principal Evaluation Project) law does have wording that indicates that it is coming. Also we have several legislatures that I’ve personally heard or read that they believe we should tie the eval to the test. All for the sake of getting 40 million dollars from the feds. It is based on Danielson’s framework which is so vague and time consuming that when I asked my evaluator how can I improve the answer was follow the rubric. It doesn’t help one bit for helping one to be a better teacher. Anyway the rest of this reply is what my wife wrote. Enjoy and we welcome comments.
Following is the letter I submitted to my principal/evaluator recently, after I had told him that I am a conscientious objector to the new evaluation process our district has been using for the past 2 years. It is called TPEP (Teacher/Principal Evaluation Project), and our district in Washington chose the Danielson Framework as its basis. Below is Washington OSPI’s description of it.
http://tpep-wa.org/about-tpep/
My husband and I call it the Teacher/Principal Extermination Program for several reasons, some of which are explained in the letter. I acted as a GAGA (Go Along to Get Along) for a while, and even now, people with whom I share what I have done keep thinking that I am fine with getting “dismissed” from my teaching job, but I am not. In part, I really want to find out whether the district will fire a good teacher because she refuses to “jump hoops” that have nothing to do with how well she teaches.
I have already been told that, if I do not relent and participate in the part of the process by which I describe and document “evidence” of my teaching skills through the TPEP system, I will receive a Basic rating this year and next year. At the end of next year, I will be dismissed. . . . another teacher down the drain.
November 2, 2015
Dear ___________:
Because you will be involved in consequences of my decision regarding TPEP and I respect you as an educational leader, I am sharing with you this explanation of the reasons for that decision. I have been informed of some of the possible consequences, and at this point in time, I continue to hold to my decision not to participate in the part of TPEP that involves my input to the associated computer program.
I am willing to allow you, my principal/evaluator, to use your professional judgment to observe, document, and evaluate my teaching performance and skills. I am not willing to spend my personal time clicking on boxes, typing and uploading files into the computerized TPEP system.
My reasons for this are personal, professional, and ethical/moral. My decision is my own. There is no group involved in urging me to do this, in fact, there are several people advising me to do as I am being told by the school district with regard to TPEP.
My personal reasons are these:
1. I want to spend my work time doing a good job at teaching rather than filling out forms and uploading documentation to prove that I am.
2. I already donate many hours of my personal time for teaching-related tasks that cannot be fit within the hours of my workday even with TRI time. I do this on a regular basis, and I increase my donation for tasks related to field trips, designing new units, etc., because the quality of my students’ experience is important to me.
3. I am not willing to sacrifice more of my personal time to TPEP tasks I am asked to do in addition to what I already give to what I believe actually impacts student learning and well-being.
My professional reasons are these:
1. TPEP does not prove I am skillful at teaching. It only gives opportunity to make it appear that I am.
2. The rubric is vague and open to subjective interpretation by both evaluator and evaluated educator. The TPEP system is poorly designed and has been poorly implemented, for example, many of the ratings are based on what students do—their skills and behaviors not mine.
3. TPEP stifles creativity by prescribing lists of what to do and how to do it.
4. I have not seen any documentation showing that this system improves learning. For example, where is the research that shows that explicitly stating the learning target to students improves learning?
My ethical/moral reason is that TPEP is one part of a systemic trend in the United States that is
1. Punitive in intent,
2. Demoralizing for educators,
3. Produced and marketed by companies comprised of people who are not “in the trenches”,
4. Connected to the move toward using test scores to judge educator/school effectiveness, label and punish individuals and schools, and eliminate the public education system. (See Sect. 1-2b, 2f in SUBSTITUTE SENATE BILL 5246)
Click to access 5246-S.pdf
I believe strongly that this trend is hurting some of the most vulnerable people in this country by stressing educators and students. Some of our most vulnerable educators are new teachers. Rather than giving them time to adjust and learn to teach through practice and mentoring, the system requires them to complete all 8 of the TPEP criteria during their first years. This is inhumane, as anyone knows who has taught, since those first years are usually some of the most challenging. Do we want to keep our new teachers, or drive them away by overloading them? It is wrong to add the heavy burden of comprehensive TPEP to their tasks.
In many parts of America, this same trend, orchestrated and allowed by corporations, government agencies, and compliant school administrations has wreaked havoc in the lives of children. Due to the evaluation of teachers and schools as failing, schools have been closed and children sent away from their communities into situations that are not serving their needs. These processes have been set and kept in motion by people who and organizations that seem intent on profiting from and/or controlling what happens in education.
http://magazine.iafor.org/2015/10/14/common-cores-leviathan-bill-gates-and-misadventures-within-american-public-education/
My conviction is that this process of outside interference needs to end. I yearn for the joy of teaching, in which educators are regarded as professionals who are capable of creative and competent work. Then, educators, in a safe and humane working environment, will be free to foster creativity and growth in the lives of students, as well.
Sincerely your colleague,
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This posting and the comments: much food for thought.
My heartfelt thanks to everyone.
😎
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My ethics are exactly why I was a whistle blower about grade changes. A year and a half ago, I was naive. Then, I moved and learned about politics, firsthand.
It’s difficult being away from the kids. I heard one of my kiddos did an end-of-the-year report on my subject and discussed me leaving, after I had resigned- I still wish I could tell him how proud I am of him for having done that.
Good people being forced out of education is a reality. If we don’t fit the agenda, we’re expendable. I saw it happen to my coworkers
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This article in Today’s NY Times is about the acquisition of social competency and I think is a perfect addition to the conversation going on here.
I remember my last tenure, where I was hired to teach English (communication skills, speaking writing,etc) and here I met over 130 13 year old children each year for 8 years. In choosing what stories and writings that we would examine together, I chose those that offered these kids on the edge of adulthood, a view of the human reactions that characterize our lives. I did not preach or attempt to usurp the role of their parents, but I presented the social dilemmas that people face.
IN addition, the weekly letter that the children wrote to me about the books they were reading, also provided a link to me, an adult they respected, and over the year, they spoke to me of their lives and their fears. It was this writing that brought the Pew research. One parent wrote her Master’s thesis on the relationship that her daughter and friends had developed with me, as they wrote these letters.
I am copying and pasting the article here, because it belongs here.
It is a pleasure to read here at this blog.
Susan Lee Schwartz
“Teaching Peace in Elementary School”
By JULIE SCELFONOV. 14, 2015
FOR years, there has been a steady stream of headlines about the soaring mental health needs of college students and their struggles with anxiety and lack of resilience.
Now, a growing number of educators are trying to bolster emotional competency not on college campuses, but where they believe it will have the greatest impact: in elementary schools.
In many communities, elementary teachers, guidance counselors and administrators are embracing what is known as social and emotional learning, or S.E.L., a process through which people become more aware of their feelings and learn to relate more peacefully to others.
Feeling left out? Angry at your mom? Embarrassed to speak out loud during class? Proponents of S.E.L. say these feelings aren’t insignificant issues to be ignored in favor of the three R’s. Unless emotions are properly dealt with, they believe, children won’t be able to reach their full academic potential.
“It’s not just about how you feel, but how are you going to solve a problem, whether it’s an academic problem or a peer problem or a relationship problem with a parent,” said Mark T. Greenberg, a professor of human development and psychology at Pennsylvania State University.
Echoing the concept of “emotional intelligence,” popularized in the 1990s by Daniel Goleman’s best-selling book of the same name, he added, “The ability to get along with others is really the glue of healthy human development.”
Today’s schoolchildren confront not only the inherent difficulty of growing up, but also an increasingly fraught testing environment, a lower tolerance for physical acting out and the pervasive threat of violence. (President Obama last year characterized school shootings as “becoming the norm.”) Poverty and income inequality, too, create onerous emotional conditions for many children.
“The neural pathways in the brain that deal with stress are the same ones that are used for learning,” said Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, a research and teaching center. “Schools are realizing that they have to help kids understand their feelings and manage them effectively.” He added, “We, as a country, want our kids to achieve more academically, but we can’t do this if our kids aren’t emotionally healthy.”
S.E.L., sometimes called character education, embraces not just the golden rule but the idea that everyone experiences a range of positive and negative feelings. It also gives children tools to slow down and think when facing conflicts, and teaches them to foster empathy and show kindness, introducing the concept of shared responsibility for a group’s well-being.
Studies have found that promoting emotional and social skills correlates with improved outcomes in students’ lives. A 2011 analysis of 213 S.E.L. programs involving 270,034 kindergarten through high school students published in the journal Child Development found that the participants demonstrated significantly improved social and emotional skills, attitudes and behavior compared with a control group, as well as an 11-point gain in academic achievement percentiles.
In a recent study, researchers from Penn State and Duke looked at 753 adults who had been evaluated for social competency nearly 20 years earlier while in kindergarten: Scores for sharing, cooperating and helping other children nearly always predicted whether a person graduated from high school on time, earned a college degree, had full-time employment, lived in public housing, received public assistance or had been arrested or held in juvenile detention.
Dr. Greenberg, a co-author of the study, saidhe was surprised by how much social competence outweighed other variables like social class, early academic achievement and family circumstances when it came to predicting outcomes. “That tells us that the skills underlying what we’re testing — getting along with others, making friendships — really are master skills that affect all aspects of life.”
Moreover, positive relationships, emotional competency and resilience have also been widely identified as helping to prevent mental illness.
At P.S. 130 in Brooklyn, where most students qualify for free lunch, a class of third graders recently sat in a circle and brainstormed, for the second day in a row, about steps they could take to prevent an aggressive boy in another class from causing problems during lunch and recess: A 9-year-old girl said she “felt scared” when the boy chased and grabbed her; Leo, an 8-year-old with neon orange sneakers, described, with agitation, how the boy sat down, uninvited, at his table and caused so much commotion that it drew sanctions from a cafeteria aide.
“How does he really bother you?” a girl in a pink sweatshirt asked, seeking clarification, as she’d been taught.
“Because,” Leo responded, his voice swelling with indignation, “it took 10 minutes from recess!”
To advance the science and practice of S.E.L., researchers at Yale established the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning in 1994; under the leadership of Roger P. Weissberg, it moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1996.
Drawing on decades of research, the group set forth what it described as the five goals of S.E.L. for students:
•Self-awareness: The ability to reflect on one’s own feelings and thoughts.
•Self-management (or self-control): The ability to control one’s own thoughts and behavior.
•Social awareness: The ability to empathize with others, recognize social cues and adapt to various situations.
•Relationship skills: The ability to communicate, make friends, manage disagreements, recognize peer pressure and cooperate.
•Responsible decision making: The ability to make healthy choices about one’s own behavior while weighing consequences for others.
Despite the growing demand for S.E.L., some worry that asking teachers to address feelings takes valuable time from academics. Vital subjects like science, history, art and music “are already starved for oxygen,” Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning education policy group in Washington, wrote in an email. “It’s easy to recognize the importance of S.E.L. skills. It’s much harder to identify and implement curricular interventions that have a measurable effect on them. Thus ‘what works’ tends to be defined as ‘what I like’ or ‘what I believe works.’”
Skeptics of using school time to tend to emotions might consider visiting P.S. 130, where the hallway outside a third-grade classroom is decorated with drawings made by students showing their aspirations for the current school year.
One child hopes “to make new friends.” Another wants to “be nice and help.”
And as for Leo, who is frustrated about losing 10 minutes of recess?
Underneath a watercolor self-portrait, in which his body is painted orange, he wrote: “My hope for myself this year is to get better at math.”
If S.E.L. strategies work, he will be better equipped to reach that goal.
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Politicians, Teens and Birth Control
“Here is a story of utter irresponsibility. About 1/3 of all teenage girls in the United States become pregnant….”
Problem – Poverty
Solution – Birth Control
Human Growth/Sex Ed./Birth Control Education as early as possible. Most kids have seen everything and more online before onset of puberty. Presentations should be offered at all public schools on yearly, or bi-yearly basis all the way through high school. Parents can opt out, unless on public assistance.
Click to access fastfacts_3in10.pdf
Great comment section on this post concerning teen pregnancy and birth control. https://www.facebook.com/kristof/posts/10152721770217891
Need to lower the rate unplanned pregnancies to unwed mothers at any age. Otherwise cycle of poverty continues. The challenges presented to the public school system will continue to increase.
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(Intended to be at top of last post)
Speaking of ethics in terms of solutions to poverty, what about birth control education in the schools? Please read comment section in this previous posting. Would love to have more feedback, especially from Dr. Ravitch.
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Are there ethics concerns as to the possibility of surveillance cameras with video and audio in classrooms? They are already on school busses, hallways, cafeteria, office, basically everywhere except inside classroom. This would definitively document discipline problems, arguably the top reason teachers leave the profession. No, students should not be suspended from school. This puts them right back into likely a negative home environment, which leads more discipline problems. But there should be consequences.
With every posting and article on the increase in “discipline problems,” the solution for school administrators is to allow poor behavior to go unpunished. Children engage in off-task “talking,” talking back, talk while teacher is trying to instruct or facilitate group/interactive activities, are out of seat without permission, and worse. (insubordination, horseplay, scuffling, walking out of class, etc.) Many come to school with no intention of learning, only disrupting. Maybe the rare teacher can “reach” some of these, but this is the exception. We cannot all be miracle workers.
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