Dr. Michael Hynes, superintendent of the Patchogue-Medford school district in Long Island, New York, recently delivered his “state of the district” remarks.
Dr. Hynes, who is a member of this blog’s honor roll for his visionary leadership, described the changes in the district’s demographics:
From 2002 to 2014, the district’s enrollment has dropped from 8,866 to 7,773. During that time, the district’s white population has dropped from 73 to 53 percent, and the Hispanic or Latino population has risen from 20 percent to 33 percent. Despite these figures, Dr. Hynes said the district has made no major changes in response to the shifting demographics.
Students with disabilities comprise 10 percent of the district’s population. LEP [Limited English Proficient] students comprise 11 percent. Nearly 50 percent of Patchogue-Medford students receive free or reduced meals.
And he detailed some of the changes he is making:
I used to think all kids need to go to college … I [now] believe we need to design opportunities for the kids who are going to college, or to serve in the military, or enter the workforce. And each one of them is just as important as the other….
Dr. Hynes is encouraging educators and parents to “not embrace this test-and-punish deficit model of ranking and sorting kids all the time. It’s about something else that’s much, much different. It’s about teaching for the benefit of all of our students, and the world.” He said the school district’s philosophical shift will address this different mode of thinking moving forward….
The district’s immediate educational shifts will include longer recesses. “For me this is non-negotiable.”
Also, more structured and unstructured play, especially K-2. “I don’t meant have kids come out and bust out the parcheesi sets … But, I know, that play — and you’ve heard this before — if done right, is the highest form of learning. And we have decimated it. It’s been eroded and evaporated. We’re bringing it back, significantly.”
The district has already been piloting yoga and meditation sessions for students. “It’s very hard to learn anything if you are not present and in the moment. I know that if kids are either socially, or emotionally, off-kilter, it’s going to impact the way they go about their business in school. Yoga centers them, allows them to be more present, and they are able to learn much more quickly.”
“We need to bring project-based learning back … It’s a lot of work but it’s so worth it.”
Hynes said everyone who come into contact with students, from teachers and parents to bus drivers and cafeteria workers, need to be better aware of children’s developmental stages. “They need to know, from a developmental standpoint, where these kids are, so we all have a better understanding of what it means to be a kid. I really believe the byproduct is that you will see a higher performance level from our children.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is how it used to be before corporate ed reform!
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Dr. Hynes understands that effective programs educate the whole child. Reflecting on my career, I think we were on a much better course of action in the ’80s and ’90s. Experiential and project learning were embraced by many school districts. Teachers and students worked more cooperatively and less competitively. Many districts adopted project based evaluations for teachers and portfolio assessment for students. Then, along came NCLB, “reform”, and the Big Data bandwagon of test and punish, which derailed any notion of educating the whole child and project based learning.
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when I worked on my teaching credentials, child development and teaching through play were central concepts. Now I see my young children suffering with lack of social al skills and drive for learning. They see learning as drudgery and frustration. Many young children still do not have the small motor hand coordination needed to be successful with all the requirements for writing. Others don’t have the decoding skills required for the more complex reading demands. 3/4 of my students this year could not read the required text. 3/4 of my students are in intervention reading in first grade. They are failures before they are out of the gate. I find this ridiculous. There is something wrong with the expectations, not the children. The expected outcomes far exceeds most of the children’s normal development.
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Particularly when you factor in the poverty of so many students, it is absurd to push down the curriculum as these students also benefit from a whole child approach. I also think many schools are delusional to believe that students are a “success” if they can bark at words. Decoding is part of the puzzle. A much more difficult task is reading for understanding. We often see the “victories” of the early grades diminish as poor students reach the middle grades. Since poor students often lack the experiential and language based demands of deep understandings, their comprehension skills suffer, and they will continue to suffer if we choose to ignore poverty.
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retired teacher– ‘A much more difficult task is reading for understanding.’ And how basic reading comprehension is as a measure of reading ability. Yet Common Core-ELA focuses on ‘skill sets’ tangentially related to reading comprehension at all grade levels. And states including NY & NJ double down by imposing CC-aligned stdzd test like PARCC.
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He should check out Providence’s statistics 😐
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“I used to think all kids need to go to college … I [now] believe we need to design opportunities for the kids who are going to college, or to serve in the military, or enter the workforce. And each one of them is just as important as the other….”
I agree. I’m currently in the process of renovating a very abused house—I’m downsizing from a house almost twice the size—that was built in the early 1970s. Although I’m doing a lot of the work by myself, I have paid for the insulation to be blown into the attic, to replace to old windows with up-to-date energy efficient windows and to have the window shades installed.
Every time I pay a crew to do work I could have done on my own over a much longer period of time, I’ve met workers that did not need a college education. The crews that installed the windows and the shades were both family owned businesses. The company that installed the windows was in its third generation. They were talkative, friendly, and well educated on what’s gong on in the country. The head of the family that installed the shades said windows and their coverings was a big business in the U.S.
I checked the Bureau of Labor Statistics and learned that the employment of installation, maintenance and repair occupation is projected to grow 6 percent and will result in about 365,500 new jobs. If 365.5 k represents a 6% growth, how many Americans work in this sector of industry? Is the answer more than 6,000,000?
The median annual wage for installation maintenance, and repair occupations was $42,110 in May 2014, which was higher than the median annual wage for all occupations of $35,540.
Does it take a college degree paid for with student debt to install new windows, window shades or most if not all other products that fit this industry?
Then there is the fact that the U.S. is ranked 4th or 5th in the world for the most college graduates while there are almost three college graduates for every job that requires a college degree.
Did you know that about 895,600 workers in the U.S. are landscaping and grounds keeping workers earning a median of $25,820 annually. These workers typically perform a variety of tasks, which may include any combination of the following: sod laying, mowing, trimming, planting, watering, fertilizing, digging, raking, sprinkler installation, and installation of mortarless segmental concrete masonry wall units.
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Many states in the northeast where college attendance is the highest are in need of carpenters, electricians, plumbers and welders. My son had a friend in New Jersey whose father earned over a $100,000 per annum as a under water welder, and this was ten years ago. His job was mostly to keep all the New York City bridges from crumbling.
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I know someone whose father, an electrician, used every trick in the book to force his son to go to college and stay until he earned a PhD. Once the son did as the father demanded, the son went to work as an electrician and told his father, I did what you wanted me to do and now I’m going to do what I want and that was to be an electrician like you.
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You pointed out one of the most important factors today in developing trade careers: families. The days of being able to learn a trade through the union are nearly gone. And vo-tech is gone from hisch; in rural upstate NY you may have to travel many miles for BOCES, & state has been cutting aid to BOCES regularly.
My brothers learned housebuilding skills from our Dad (there was little union presence rurally, & vo-tech facilities began disappearing from our high school in the ’70’s.). One of the best ‘handyman’ services in our suburban-NJ area (waiting list 6mos+) consists of a Dad & his 2 degreed engr sons who joined the fam bz. The most successful roofer in the region is a family biz– but roofing is labor-intensive, so his only non-immigrant workers are close friends of his son…
My 60-y.o. brother warned me 20 yrs ago that there was already a generation-&-a-half missing from the bldg trades due to so many more kids college-bound than used to be. He said the results in rural areas were the poorly-qualified & shysters; in urban areas jobs were being filled by immigrants.
I can attest to this just from my experience as a central-NJ homeowner w/boiler. Our excellent boiler installation/ repair outfit has now-retired Latin-American supv’s, replaced w/next-gen Latino immigrants, all amply qualified & presumably earning a decent middle-class income. Only very recently have I seen a couple of locals learning from them.
The boiler experience was echoed earlier– updating our 1st house, in Brooklyn, in the ’80’s. We were so fortunate to find aged Italian craftsmen for carpentry & plaster work. I have never found steps re-built nor doors hung so well since. Once in NJ I found an aged Italian mason to repair our brick stoop: it is still sound 20 yrs later.
I think this problem began in the boomer era. Back then, the mantra of always ‘doing better than your parents’ was a given, & that was translated to college & white-collar work for the children of the pink-&-blue-collars. There was a real cultural divide between college-bound & the trades: the former were considered liberal & innovative, the latter backwards & reactionary. That divide became a chasm with the Viet Nam draft: college students got deferrals (which could be stretched many yrs by adv degrees), tradesmen were sent to war.
Today the govt-industrial complex still calls for ‘college for everyone’– & worse, STEM for everyone– echoing the weak-kneed ‘free-market’ govt response to globalism, since the ’80’s: that the middle & upper-middle-class US job-market has room only for hi-techies (the rest doomed to min-wage jobs in service to the high-earners.). But the sector left out– trade jobs which can neither be automated nor outsourced– exists & needs to be supported with training programs.
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It is a fundamental noble class in higher education in the past that dignity and power is in the hand of educated people. Yes, educated people create or design defensive, economic and legal strategies to survive and to conquer invaders.
However, today, there are more snobbish and few of noble class in CORRUPTED higher education. This is shown in today NONSENSICAL educational reform policy.
Hope is always in people’s heart and mind so that we will unite to fight peacefully for American Public Education in unified OPT OUT MOVEMENT IN 2016 until all business tycoons completely STOP LEECHING or LOOTING public education reserve fund.
Back2basic
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I have 4 children. 2 have attended college and are doing very well. I have an honors 8th grader who pushes herself to excel and is a well rounded young lady. She is very I loved at home and in school and church. My 3rd grader is in special Ed and does it like school. He struggles We need to let our teachers teach the best way for all the students and not be told it’s one way for all. Hands on learning and play is beneficial to all
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You are so right, Helen Marie. Two of my three sons were SpEd. This stymied me at first. I was an older parent from a rural background: my sons would have been considered completely on the [wide] ‘normal’ spectrum in those days of smaller elementary classes, & a town w/ 2 jr hi’s & 1 hi sch, encompassing every type of kid one can imagine… in a day when it was expected that maybe 25% would go to college, & there were plentiful ed options for the non-college-bound.
But we raised our kids in an upper-echelon NJ district– ‘segregated’ schools if you will, where the preponderance of students came from professional families– many of these kids’ parents [25 yrs ago] were bureaucrats in then-govt-regulated industries like insurance, MaBell, etc. My sense was this segregation resulted in a cookie-cutter, assembly-line approach to education.
Luckily we had teacher-friends in the district, plus a therapist who had availed herself of 4 different district models for her 4 kids (incl SpEd). All assured us: you’re paying hi taxes, take advantage of the ‘special’ (non-cookie-cutter) options available. Our kids did very well. The one who was not SpEd was able to enroll in the ‘alternative’ school-w/in a school for unconventional kids. The SpEd ones got tiny self-contained hs classes that allowed them the 1-on-1 they needed. All 3 made it to colleges that suited them.
What worries me today: I see budget- cuts for SpEd everywhere. A tell-tale hallmark: admins prey on parents’ reluctance to acknowledge their kids as being ‘different’, needing non-cookie-cutter ed– & exhort them to [cheaply] ‘mainstream’ their kids (where they will get far less out of curriculum, whether they have co-teacher aide or not). And– regardless of the district characteristics (diverse like my ’50’s-’60’s rural district, or SES-segregated like so many today)– the stdzd approach which has infiltrated pubschs across the country dictates a [cheap] cookie-cutter approach. Which means there is far more need for non-cookie-cutter approaches like SpEd– colliding w/a nationwide movement to cut state ed budgets (& targeting especially SpEd budgets.)
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