Susan Ochshorn of the ECE Workshop describes a new article in the Teachers College Record on the absurdity of the Obama-Duncan “cradle-to-career” policies. Jeanne Marie Ioria and Clifton Tanabe present a thesis: “School readiness, a state we so avidly seek, has created a chain (in all senses of the word) between our youngest students and the labor force, reinforcing the idea of children as commodities.”
Now, they say, this market-driven, utilitarian philosophy has moved into the upper grades and higher education, with predictable results:
As a result, this process is tilted away from the more traditional aims of self-actualization, appreciation, and happiness. It is in the ability to check off a box of measurable outcomes, assurance of accountability in education across the levels, evidence that monies supporting public education are well-spent creating people ready to contribute and perpetuate the status quo.
The concept of “readiness” now dominates early childhood education and justifies harmful policies:
Curriculum, standards, teacher education programs, interventions, parent education, assessment, state-funded 4-year-old programs, and privatization are just the beginning of policies and practices created and implemented all in the name of readiness…kindergarten readiness is plagued with a list of academic skills like identifying rhyming words and the alphabet. Companies like LeapFrog offer lists of readiness skills to educate the public as well as products to achieve this readiness. A Kindergarten Readiness App is available for download to your iPhone or iPad, ensuring development of early literacy and math skills.
The authors note that employers say that high school and college graduates are not well prepared for the jobs that are available but when asked about the skills they want, they speak of creativity, critical thinking skills, problem-solving, and other “soft” skills that are currently out of vogue.
Susan Ochshorn says that early childhood education is “ground zero for democracy,” the best time to teach children to engage with others through play and imaginative activities.
Children do not intellectually develop at the same rate. Sorting by birth year works for some children, but hurts many. Sorting by birth year is junk science. Pres. Obama claimed that his administration would be compatible with real science. With regards to education,you could start to be compatible with science for your last year in office, Mr. President. Please start now.
What method do you recommend for sorting?
I’m a parent, not a K.12 educator. I deeply regret having sent my child to a tradional public school and not either a private school that was “ungraded” that is that has students sorted by subject and development level or a Montessori public school. The “ungraded” school has the subject classes with students of different ages but are at the same level developmentally. One child of mine was way above grede level in math and way below grade level in English. The ungraded schools correct the students work and give letter or numerical grades, so they are not “anything goes”.
Harmful is right. This is NUTS! Market driven education! OY. The oligarch wants slaves.
“The authors note that employers say that high school and college graduates are not well prepared for the jobs that are available but when asked about the skills they want, they speak of creativity, critical thinking skills, problem-solving, and other “soft” skills that are currently out of vogue.” Can someone explain how the Common Core standards foster these skills?
I am pretty old and we were forced to read a good deal of Dicken’s works when I went to school. When I read this nonsense I cannot help but reflect on the utilitarian attitudes toward children during that era. Not GOOD!
This was discussed here before:
——–
Just when you thought “reform” couldn’t get worse, couldn’t become more hostile to real education, count on Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to think of something utterly reprehensible.
Valerie Strauss reports on Walker’s assault on his state’s great university system, both by cutting its budget by $300 million and changing its purpose.
She writes:
“Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker submitted a budget proposal that included language that would have changed the century-old mission of the University of Wisconsin system — known as the Wisconsin Idea and embedded in the state code — by removing words that commanded the university to …
“SEARCH FOR TRUTH” and “IMPROVE THE HUMAN CONDITION”
and replacing them with …
“MEET THE STATE’S WORKFORCE NEEDS.”
After loud public criticism, Walker’s staff said the wording was an error.
Reflecting on Walker’s bold but brainless initiative, Arthur Camins wrote this essay on “What Is the Purpose of Education?”
Governor Walker thinks it’s to prepare the workforce. Camins disagrees:
“But it doesn’t have to be either-or. Education should prepare young people for life, work and citizenship.
“Knowledge of the natural and engineered environments and how people live in the world is critical to all three purposes of education. Critical thinking, creativity, interpersonal skills and a sense of social responsibility all influence success in life, work and citizenship. For example, unhappy personal relationships often spill over into the work environment, while a stressful workplace or unemployment negatively impacts family life. Uninformed disengaged citizens lead to poor policy choices that impact life, work and citizenship. To paraphrase the verse in the old song, “You can’t have one without the others.”
Below is an article at Harpers’ about how corporate reform and neoliberalism has has infected universities. If and when these corporate reformers and neo-liberals get their way, higher education’s mission — the mission of all U.S. universities — will be only about churning out the kind and amount of workers required by big business, and nothing else.
http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-arts/
The author, William Deresiewicz, contrasts a certain university’s century old mission statement with its new corporate reform and neoliberal version:
———————
(OLD MISSION STATEMENT)
— “ ‘The paramount obligation of a college is to develop in its students the ability to think clearly and independently, and the ability to live confidently, courageously, and hopefully. ‘ ” —
has been replaced by the vague neoliberal concepts of
(NEW MISSION STATEMENT)
— “leadership” —
— “service” —
— “integrity” —
— “creativity” —
WILLIAM DERESIEWICSZ:
“Let us take a moment to compare these texts.
(ANALYSIS OF OLD MISSION STATEMENT)
“The first thing to observe about the older one is that it is a sentence. It expresses an idea by placing concepts in relation to one another within the kind of structure that we call a syntax. It is, moreover, highly wrought: a parallel structure underscored by repetition, five adverbs balanced two against three.
“A spatial structure, the sentence also suggests a temporal sequence. Thinking clearly, it wants us to recognize, leads to thinking independently. Thinking independently leads to living confidently. Living confidently leads to living courageously. Living courageously leads to living hopefully.
“And the entire chain begins with a college that recognizes it has an obligation to its students, an obligation to develop their abilities to think and live.
“Finally, the sentence is attributed to an individual. It expresses her convictions and ideals. It announces that she is prepared to hold herself accountable for certain responsibilities.
(ANALYSIS OF NEW MISSION STATEMENT)
“The second text is not a sentence. It is four words floating in space, unconnected to one another or to any other concept. Four words — four slogans, really — whose meaning and function are left undefined, open to whatever interpretation the reader cares to project on them.
“Four words, three of which — ‘leadership,’ ‘service,’ and ‘creativity’ — are the loudest buzzwords in contemporary higher education. (‘Integrity’ is presumably intended as a synonym for the more familiar ‘character,’ which for colleges at this point means nothing more than not cheating.)
“The text is not the statement of an individual; it is the emanation of a bureaucracy. In this case, a literally anonymous bureaucracy: no one could tell me when this version of the institution’s mission statement was formulated, or by whom. No one could even tell me who had decided to hang those banners all over campus. The sentence from the founder has also long been mounted on the college walls. The other words had just appeared, as if enunciated by the zeitgeist.
“But the most important thing to note about the second text is what it doesn’t talk about: thinking or learning. In what it both does and doesn’t say, it therefore constitutes an apt reflection of the current state of higher education. College is seldom about thinking or learning anymore. Everyone is running around trying to figure out what it is about. So far, they have come up with buzzwords, mainly those three.”
——————-
William Deresiewicz talks about Scott Walker changing Wisconsin’s state university mission to “to provide the needed members of the workforce.”
He later asks a different university president the most important thing students should learn.
“Leadership.”
He eventually articulates why corporate education reform and neoliberalism — with its promotion of this particular concept “leadership” by the “betters” over the “lessers” — is so troubling.
http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-arts/8/
———-
WILLIAM DERESIEWICSZ:
“The worst thing about ‘leadership,’ the notion that society should be run by highly trained elites, is that it has usurped the place of ‘citizenship,’ the notion that society should be run by everyone together.
“Not coincidentally, citizenship — the creation of an informed populace for the sake of maintaining a free society, a self-governing society — was long the guiding principle of education in the United States. To escape from neoliberal education, we must escape from neoliberalism. If that sounds impossible, bear in mind that neoliberalism itself would have sounded impossible as recently as the 1970s. As late as 1976, the prospect of a Reagan presidency was played for laughs on network television.
“Instead of treating higher education as a commodity, we need to treat it as a right.
“Instead of seeing it in terms of market purposes, we need to see it once again in terms of intellectual and moral purposes.
“That means resurrecting one of the great achievements of postwar American society: high-quality, low- or no-cost mass public higher education. An end to the artificial scarcity of educational resources. An end to the idea that students must compete for the privilege of going to a decent college, and that they then must pay for it.”
The University of North Carolina is apparently doomed to follow this pattern, as covered here earlier this week:
“Margaret Spellings, who will assume the presidency of the University of North Carolina system in March, will begin with a report from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The management consultants are known for their dedication to privatization and profit. They were advisors in the project that led to the elimination of public schools and teachers’ unions inNew Orleans. Spellings served as their education advisor after her stint as Secretary of Education in the administration of George W. Bush. In that administration, she was one of the architects of No Child Left Behind.
“Although Spellings lacks any scholarly credentials (she received a bachelor’s degree at the University of Houston), she should be an effective fundraiser among wealthy conservative benefactors. Since ideological donors often give with strings attached, UNC faculty will have to be wary.”
Indeed they should be wary.
Also, this whole Boston Consulting Group remaking of the UNC system is being paid for “by an anonymous donor.” Yet another example of private big business interests buying control of the public sector of education.
Remember all those vocal citizens worried about what Margaret Spellings would do to University of North Carolina university system? All the protests, and arrests of those disrupting the public meeting where this was decided upon and announced?
This latest news should put them at ease … NOT!
I mean, why bother consulting with, or even informing the taxpaying citizens of North Carolina how — with no accountability or transparency whatsoever — you’re about to revamp and alter the UNC system that their taxes pay for?
Just get an anonymous donor totally unaccountable to those same taxpayers to choose and pay a controversial business group to help do it — the same group (BSG, Boston Consulting Group,) mind you, that among other things, privatized the entire New Orleans public schools system against the will of — and without ever informing — those taxpaying citizens there prior to or during that privatization!
Oh? Are you similarly afraid of the intentions and goals of some anonymous individual or entity who’s funding all this?
Don’t worry, Spellings says, you’ll be happy with what they’re going to do.
Just sit back and trust us:
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article53812025.html
“CHAPEL HILL — A $1.1 million, privately funded study by a management consulting firm will analyze the UNC system’s administrative operation before UNC President-elect Margaret Spellings arrives in North Carolina.
“Boston Consulting Group was hired in December through the UNC Foundation, with money from an anonymous donor. Work got under way in earnest this week, as consultants began interviews with more than 100 people, including UNC Board of Governors members, chancellors, financial officers, faculty leaders, student leaders and legislators.
…
“Spellings, who was U.S. education secretary from 2005 to 2009, said she had worked with Boston Consulting Group before, when the firm conducted an analysis of the U.S. Department of Education.
“Later, after Hurricane Katrina, the BSG firm helped to reinvent the New Orleans schools, which transformed into the Recovery School District, made up entirely of charter schools.”
Reply
Thank you for this great post, Julie. I used to read William Deresiewicsz in The New Republic before it got wrecked by Facebook mogul Chris Hughes. I love his deconstruction of the ubiquitous buzzword “leadership”. My middle school, and many others, have classes called “Leadership” (no such thing existed while I was growing up.) I’ve always been a bit puzzled by this mania for leadership. A few years ago our school, probably jumping on a bandwagon, created a “leadership committee” made up of the principal and a handful of teachers. Instead of ideas getting hashed out in the general faculty meeting, which is messy but democratic, this elite cadre does the thinking and discussing for us, and hands down decisions. I now see the connection with Reid Hastings’, Bill Gates’, Eli Broad’s new vision for our schools: the teachers will be followers; the “experts” will be the leaders. Today’s zeitgeist is one of abandonment of democracy –too messy, too amateur, too raucous, too unpredictable. The algorithm is our new cultural ideal: the elite create a rule and the machines/humans are to follow it with 100% fidelity.
Business has grown more myopic, wanting workers for the jobs today. Education is more strategic and produces citizens for the societies of tomorrow.
Well said. Even if we believe that education is for future employment (which I don’t, although I’ll concede that’s part of it), what employers need (whether they realize it or not) is employees with a vast range of skills, knowledge, interests and ideas to contribute, not robots locked into certain basic skills and facts that have been drilled into them with no room for variation. We need creative problem solvers who can get along with others because we have very little idea what the world will look like in 10 or 20 years.
Corporate America wants to insert their agenda into all aspects of our lives. The government is complicit by incentivizing and giving them free access to our young people. Research, reason and child development are dismissed in the interest of works for the oligarchs. The government should be working to protect young people from unfettered capitalism; instead, they are working as agents of big business.
Greed tends to get in the way of such foresight.
MathVale: much said in few words.
And thanks to everyone else for an informative thread.
😎
Susan is right on with her articles about how we are forgetting that children are people.
As if some of us ever knew!
I do think you have to recognize how hard this “readiness” message is sold to parents. It is everywhere. We are told constantly that our children are “behind”, can’t “compete”, won’t ever get jobs, etc. There’s a panicked fearfulness among parents that is just so hard to resist.
I think it’s out of control in Ohio. My youngest is in 7th grade but I have friends with younger children and it seems to be ratcheted up every year, listening to them.
It almost seems like that nuttiness you read about with “elite” parents, where they go crazy to get their kid into the “right” preschool and then run their whole lives around the goal of getting into the “right” college has been pushed down to include everyone. I’m not sure this ethos or belief system is such a great idea for kids of any income level, let alone insisting all parents adopt it.
Can’t sell a cure without a disease.
When the message is one of fear, I think corporations realize that people are easier to manipulate and control. That is one reason the media keeps sending out alarmist messages to the public. It has worked for the conservatives in the past, but I think, even the Republicans are catching on that this is a ploy.
The economic meltdown of 2008 has left the public feeling uncertain about the future. The actions of Congress have contributed to this feeling, and it may explain why both Trump and Sanders, party outsiders are leading in the polls.
Kindergarten is the new first grade–the headline in and EdWeek article .
What we have are not only standards for “academic learning” but also a slew of proposals for “social-emotional” learning. These are backed by major think tanks who are pushing students into “self-management,” by acquiring “proper” mindsets, enhancing their grit and self control, and planning for the future from kindergarten. Uniting these efforts is a sharp focus on SUCCESS, but with little thought about what that means other than graduating from high school, getting a job, and/or going to college.
Unfortunately this thinking is found in ESSA (Title IV) and in peer-reviewed research packaged with ready-to-use instructional aids and explicit instruction to help students learn social-emotional skills. Here are three recent examples.
1. Mindset theorist and psychologist at Stanford University, Dr. Carol Dweck, has TED talks, a couple of best selling books for business, and a “Brainology” website replete with teaching materials and a full-spectrum “professional development” package for teachers (last check $6000). All are designed to help all students acquire a mindset oriented toward learning, especially through repeated practice and what my generation knew as “the power of positive thinking.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X0mgOOSpLU
2. The (Angela) Duckworth Lab at the University of Pennsylvania is also working on concepts about dispositions or personal attributes that favor academic learning (the key to success) with a sharp focus on two traits that seem to predict academic achievement: grit and self-control. Grit is the tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward very long-term goals. Self-control is the voluntary regulation of impulses in the presence of momentarily gratifying temptations or diversions. Duckworth has revitalized interest in the marshmallow test gauging the ability of children to delay instant gratification, and exercise self-control. (Take the marshmallow now… or wait and you might get two marshmallows). Grit and self control are concepts now embedded in character education programming from the Duckworth Lab. See http://www.characterlab.org or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H14bBuluwB8
3. A third center of activity is the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) in Chicago http://www.casel.org/. CASEL’s work is rooted in sociology, especially Bandura’s demonstrations of learned aggression in young children. In addition to advocacy, CASEL serves as a clearinghouse and evaluator of assessments for social-emotional learning (SEL).
With help from CASEL staff, Illinois has led the way in developing SEL standards, first for pre-school, then 100 additional standards for grades K-12. The standards are for grade spans: K-4, 5-6, 7-8, 9-10, and 11-12. They are organized around three goals and ten “learning strands.” The strands call for each student, K-12 to…”
Identify and manage one’s emotions and behavior;
Recognize personal qualities and external supports (family, peer, community);
Recognize the feelings and perspectives of others;
Recognize individual and group differences (focus on positive qualities);
Use communication and social skills to interact effectively with others;
Demonstrate an ability to prevent, manage, and resolve interpersonal conflicts in constructive ways;
Consider ethical, safety, and social factors in making decisions;
Apply decision-making skills to deal responsibly with daily academic and social situations; and
Contribute to the well-being of one’s school and community.”
I found an astonishing expectation that students in K-4 should be able to “recognize and ACCURATELY label emotions and how they are linked to behavior.” (That sounds to me like a challenging assignment even for a person with a Ph.D in psychiatry or linguistics).
In any case SEL standards reflect a hope that reason and skills in analysis —“skill sets”— can be developed in ways that subdue emotions and impulses, enhance self-control and serve as strategies to reduce bullying, prevent substance abuse and risky behavior, induce empathy for others, teach civic virtues (character education, well disguised), and prepare students to lead a thoroughly planned life… “It is critical for students to be able to establish and monitor their progress toward academic and personal goals.”
There can be no doubt that the values forwarded by these efforts are intended to reinforce a “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” orientation to life and instill a “work ethic” in this generation. From my perspective, these efforts are the direct result of several decades of emphasis on strictly academic and “rigorous” learning and also pressure to reduce everything not “academic” into skill sets, also called “soft skills.” In effect, the focus on “rigor” in academic learning is echoed in this stiff-upper-lip view of social-emotional life, setting aside any place for imaginative play or engagement with the life of feeling and social relationships through poetry, literature, music, dance, theater, play, the ceremonial and celebratory arts.
As I read through the SEL standards I was reminded that, in grade seven, 1947, my English teacher required the whole class to “learn” the same basic message—self-determination, regardless of circumstance—by memorizing and reciting in unison the poem Invictus by William Ernest Hensley. Here it is corny and pompous, and still in memory..
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
Laura H. Chapman: thanks to you and others for an informative thread.
Just one very small point. I do not react to, or feel, that INVICTUS by William Ernest Hensley is “blatantly pompous.”
I understand your point and don’t disagree that, present circumstances being what they are, it can be interpreted that way.
However, that’s not the way I take it—and I don’t relinquish my right to construe, and react to, it in my own way, even if everyone else disagrees with me.
Not meant in any way to detract from your informed comments for which I thank you again.
😎
All of this readiness talk makes me think of the push to include coding as an academic discipline. Watching how tech personnel have been thrown out as each new generation of tech wizards graduate has led me to the conclusion that industry can be incredibly shortsighted. They throw away experience for cheap new hires as if a seasoned professional isn’t capable of learning quite quickly whatever software application is necessary. They recognize the need for all the soft skills that develop over time but ignore the loss of those skills when they opt for “fresh meat.”
In the “olden days” employers were complaining that they were spending all this time training employees who then left for better paying jobs as if this mobility wasn’t encouraged by their own rigidity. How many times were older long time employees surprised to find new hires paid more than they for either similar or less demanding roles? Workers finding employment elsewhere was probably one of the only ways companies were forced to change their compensation packages to pay “market wages,” so to speak. If no one moved, wages stagnated.
In a time of economic downturn, wages stagnate and no one willingly changes employment. Now we have developed artificial stagnation by broadening the worker pool beyond our own borders to countries where people will work for obscenely low wages that perhaps put them one step above subsistence in their own countries. We import workers to take positions for which we have more than enough qualified workers because they will work for far below U.S. standards and send most of their salaries home.
Educating for what employers claim to need is only a way to keep wages low. Produce more engineers, the majority of whom already do not find employment as engineers, and wages stay low. Educating people to be independent critical thinkers who understand the value of a democratic society creates a society that will renew itself and protect against the excesses generated by a small group that has gained too much power. Are we producing educated individuals who are “ready” to reclaim democracy?
Kindergarten is the new first grade: headline in EdWeek.
What we have are not only standards for “academic learning” cradle to career, but also a slew of proposals for “social-emotional learning (SEL). These are backed by major think tanks pushing for students to engage in “self-management” by acquiring proper mindsets, along with grit and self-control, and skills for planning for a future beginning in kindergarten. Uniting these efforts is a sharp focus on SUCCESS, but with little thought about what that means other than other than graduating from high school, getting a job, and/or going to college.
Unfortunately this thinking is found in ESSA Title IV and in peer-reviewed research packaged with ready-to-use instructional aids for explicit instruction intended to ensure that students learn social-emotional skills. Here are three recent examples.
1. Dr. Carol Dweck, psychologist and mindset theorist at Stanford University, has TED talks, several best selling books for business, and a “Brainology” website replete with teaching materials and a full-spectrum “professional development” package for teachers (last check $6000) designed to help all students acquire a mindset oriented toward learning, especially through repeated practice of the right kind and what my generation knew as “the power of positive thinking.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X0mgOOSpLU
2. The (Dr. Angela) Duckworth Lab at the University of Pennsylvania is also working on dispositions or personal attributes that favor academic learning (the key to success) with a sharp focus on two traits that seem to predict academic achievement: grit and self-control. She defines grit as the tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward very long-term goals. Self-control is the voluntary regulation of impulses in the presence of momentarily gratifying temptations or diversions. Duckworth has revitalized interest in the marshmallow test as an indicator of a child’s ability to delay instant gratification and exercise self-control. (Take the marshmallow now… or wait and you might get two marshmallows). Grit and self control are concepts now embedded in character education programming from the Duckworth Lab. See http://www.characterlab.org or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H14bBuluwB8
3. A third center of activity is the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) based in Chicago http://www.casel.org/. CASEL’s work is rooted in sociology, especially Bandura’s demonstrations of learned aggression in young children. In addition to advocacy, CASEL serves as a clearinghouse and evaluator of assessments for social-emotional learning (SEL).
With help from CASEL staff, Illinois has led the way in developing SEL standards, first for pre-school, then 100 additional standards for grades K-12. The standards are for grade spans: K-4, 5-6, 7-8, 9-10, and 11-12. They are organized around three goals and ten “learning strands.” The strands call for each student, K-12 to…”
Identify and manage one’s emotions and behavior;
Recognize personal qualities and external supports (family, peer, community);
Recognize the feelings and perspectives of others;
Recognize individual and group differences (focus on positive qualities);
Use communication and social skills to interact effectively with others;
Demonstrate an ability to prevent, manage, and resolve interpersonal conflicts in constructive ways;
Consider ethical, safety, and social factors in making decisions;
Apply decision-making skills to deal responsibly with daily academic and social situations; and
Contribute to the well-being of one’s school and community.”
I found an astonishing expectation that students in K-4 should be able to “recognize and ACCURATELY label emotions and how they are linked to behavior.” (That sounds to me like a challenging assignment even for a person with a Ph.D in psychiatry or linquistics).
In any case SEL standards reflect a hope that reason and skills in analysis—“skill sets”—can be developed in ways that subdue emotions and impulses, enhance self-control and serve as strategies to reduce bullying, prevent substance abuse and risky behavior, induce empathy for others, teach civic virtues (character education, well disguised), and prepare students to lead a thoroughly planned life… “It is critical for students to be able to establish and monitor their progress toward academic and personal goals.” (A life free of the fortuitous, and unplanned for zigs and zags, ups and downs, left turns, circular paths, everything prescreened and coordinated to be on track, on time, always).
There can be no doubt that the values forwarded by these concepts and strategies are intended to reinforce a “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” orientation to life and instill a “work ethic” in this generation. From my perspective, these efforts are the direct result of several decades of emphasis on strictly academic and “rigorous” learning and also pressure to reduce everything not “academic” into skill sets, also called “soft skills.”
As I read through the SEL standards I was reminded that, in grade seven, 1947, my English teacher required the whole class to “learn” the same basic message—self-determination, regardless of circumstance—by memorizing and reciting in unison the poem Invictus by William Ernest Hensley. Invictus is Latin for “unconquered.” It is has the virtue of being blatantly pompous, free of the trappings and industrial strength language of self-management and decision-making skills.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
If you’d like a lighthearted look at what’s happening in higher Ed., read Julie Schumacher’s brilliant and award-winning novel “Dear Committee Members.” Sometimes the best response is to find a way to laugh in the face of insanity.
The reference to NCLB in the article Diane mentioned was re-enlightening. I had almost forgotten the first set of Bush’s “cluster”: —-Included in the first category were the ability to verbally communicate needs, wants, and thoughts; take turns and share; display enthusiasm and curiosity in approaching new activities; and sit still and pay attention.–
These are some of the psycho-social concerns that early and I want to add older elementary educators develop in a class community. The use of purposely chosen books inspire conversation on empathy, creativity, and put in practice problem solving and critical thinking throughout both the oral and written discourse opportunities provided.