Launa Hall, a third grade teacher in northern Virginia, is writing a book of essays about education. This one appeared in the Washington Post.
She writes:
My third-graders tumbled into the classroom, and one child I’d especially been watching for — I need to protect her privacy, so I’ll call her Janie — immediately noticed the two poster-size charts I’d hung low on the wall. Still wearing her jacket, she let her backpack drop to the floor and raised one finger to touch her name on the math achievement chart. Slowly, she traced the row of dots representing her scores for each state standard on the latest practice test. Red, red, yellow, red, green, red, red. Janie is a child capable of much drama, but that morning she just lowered her gaze to the floor and shuffled to her chair.
In our test-mired public schools, those charts are known as data walls, and before I caved in and made some for my Northern Virginia classroom last spring, they’d been proliferating in schools across the country — an outgrowth of “data-driven instruction” and the scramble for test scores at all costs. Making data public, say advocates such as Boston Plan for Excellence, instills a “healthy competitive culture.” But that’s not what I saw in my classroom.
She put up the data walls with reluctance, and the more she saw of them, the more convinced she became that they served to humiliate children.
I regretted those data walls immediately. Even an adult faced with a row of red dots after her name for all her peers to see would have to dig deep into her hard-won sense of self to put into context what those red dots meant in her life and what she would do about them. An 8-year-old just feels shame….
It also turns out that posting students’ names on data walls without parental consent may violate privacy laws. At the time, neither I nor my colleagues at the school knew that, and judging from the pictures on Pinterest, we were hardly alone. The Education Department encourages teachers to swap out names for numbers or some other code. And sure, that would be more palatable and consistent with the letter, if not the intent, of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. But it would be every bit as dispiriting. My third-graders would have figured out in 30 seconds who was who, coded or not.
The data walls made it harder for me to reach and teach my students, driving a wedge into relationships I’d worked hard to establish. I knew Janie to be an extremely bright child — with lots of stresses in her life. She and I had been working as a team in small group sessions and in extra practice after school. But the morning I hung the data walls, she became Child X with lots of red dots, and I became Teacher X with a chart.
Why does official policy these days aim to hurt children as a way of motivating them? What kind of motivation grows from shame?
The Scarlet letter syndrome.
How can one condemn “data walls” and not condemn the “grading” of students*, the ranking and sorting and separating of children according to standardized test scores???
They are of the same illogical, invalid, unjust, unethical and immoral educational malpractice mother-that of labeling, numerizing and monetizing other humans.
Will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?
*Is grading students so culturally embedded that it is impossible to break free from that monstrosity of mental masturbation????
*Is grading students so culturally embedded that it is impossible to break free from that monstrosity of mental masturbation????
Realistically and unfortunately yes.
I would propose the following
K to 5: No grades just report card comments
6 to 8: Letter grades only
9 to 12: Number grades in math and science only; letter grades in all other subjective subjects. GPA could still be calculated like colleges.
To the degree that students are labeled, sorted and ranked according to the numerical mirages known as scores derived from standardized tests (most especially of the high-stakes variety), supposedly in the interests of allowing (among other things) direct comparisons between pupil X in a “high-performing” NYC HS with pupil Y in a “low-performing” HS in rural Alaska—
Then the results will conform with that old worst management practice: “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”
Stack rank shaming brought to scale by rheephormsters whose mission in life is to comfort the comfortable (few) and afflict the afflicted (many)—making sure the vast majority understand their lowly station in life from the earliest possible age.
Thank you both for your comments.
😎
P.S. (few) = THEIR OWN CHILDREN. (many) = OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN.
P.P.S. Perhaps I will be accused of living up to my moniker, but in the interests of truth in advertising, couldn’t we start referring to the heavyweights of corporate education reform as “the new civil blight movement of our time”?
Just sayin’…
I think it is wrong to use test scores as part of any grading system. Tests should be teacher made and used to help the teacher be more effeive in the classroom. Learning is much more complicated than a test score.
But grades that represent the work a child did to learn is something else altogether. For instance, why should a child who completed every assignment for an entire semester end up with the same thing that as a child that did little or nothing. That will breed resentment and anger, and raise this question: why should I work so hard when he hardly worked at all but got the same praise/comment I did?
If done properly, grades reflect the effort a child makes to learn and teaches children that you get paid for the work you do. In addition. teachers should plan lessons that children can learn from even when they fail to do all the work right. It is the effort that should lead to a grade and not only right answers.
Should we pay two workers doing the same job for the same agency or company the same wages each week when one worker put in 60 hours and the other 10?
Lloyd,
What you are describing is the usage of grades as a punishment/reward/payment and that is part of the problem of “grading” students. And that is part of the culturally ingrained, almost impossible to break mode of thinking to which I refer.
I am not talking about that at all. I am talking about assessing a student’s learning in conjunction with the student and his/her parents or guardians, not as a means of supposedly assessing the merit of the student’s learning but as a description of that learning. Big difference.
Yes, I know it’s a Quixotic Quest to attempt to break the stranglehold of such culturally ingrained discourse/habits, but when those habits and discourse is based on onto-epistemological falsehoods, invalidities and outright unjust malpractices, well. . . let’s just say someone has to be Don Alonso. (When I lose enough weight I might even look like a Quixote-ha ha).
I don’t think of grades as a punishment system since I do not think I used them that way when I was a teacher. To me, we earn what we work for and that applies to learning, but tests are different. We should not judge children or adults on the results of a test and punish them by making the ranking and scores public. In fact, we shouldn’t punish children or adults at all by embarrassing them publicly. What happens when workers don’t work —- most of the time they get fired unless they are the boss’s brother, wife, or child, etc.
Instead, when I was teaching, I thought of grades as a reward for those who worked to learn just like a worker who works hard in his or her job gets paid for that work, and those who didn’t work earned poor grades because they didn’t work hard enough to earn better grades.
I’m not going to change my mind.
Duane: yes, germaine, but only because this data-wall posted practice scores for stdzd tests. I’ve no doubt that in a school where this principled author ‘caved’ to peer-pressure on this account, there are many more “gaga’s” who use data-walls to stack-rank kids on everything from projects to quizzes.
Let’s don’t sidetrack the discussion into a worthy but separate debate on grading vs other forms of assessment.
The article leaves me appalled at a public-school environment which somehow pressures even a thoughtful teacher into deciding it’s OK to display in the classroom a list of grades in descending order, with identifying info– embellished w/red & green dots, no less– for EIGHT-YEAR-OLDS! We do not even know from the article whether the teacher, after thinking things over (& writing this) promptly scrapped it & never did it again, she doesn’t say. We are also left wondering exactly who in the school’s hierarchy thought this was a great idea (to whom the author belatedly succumbed– I doubt if it was the ‘Boston Plan for Excellence’).
Nothing remotely resembling a data wall existed in my [1/2-C ago] K-12 experience. Hardly needed: competition is wired in, esp in early grades. Phys & social prowess were worked out on the playground & on walks (or bus rides) to & from school. Everyone w/an ounce of observation knew from in-class dynamics the hierarchy from smart to slow. In middle school the hard-workers & innately-intelligent ran neck & neck; by hs we knew how to distinguish them.
I remember hurried college post-exam consultations of lists posted outside professors’ offices. Students were ID’s by the sequential number published on each exam booklet. If you forgot to note it down, you had to wait for report card.
And as many noted in the comment thread to this article, there is no parallel in the biz world for a ‘data-wall’: should annual personnel-reviews be revealed (much less publicly stack-ranked), lawsuits based on revelation of private info would ensue.
Here’s hoping parents whose kids have been subjected to this outrage SUE.
bethree5,
Definitely agree with your last statement.
But I see grades as the same problem as these data walls. They are meant to sort and separate, to reward and punish. For me that is a sad sick philosophy from which to start a legitimate assessment of student learning.
Take care,
Duane
We need a peaceful, intellectually rigorous revolution that replaces this whole fake data worship with something humane — Oh, like maybe the idea that we actually care how people feel, and so on.
But I suggest we keep the fronts clear.
Invalidity of the data, testing, etc.
Actively ranking and sorting; students selected, programmed differently, etc.
Public shaming of any kind.
Not so incidentally, the teacher version of “Actively ranking and sorting” would include firing and merit pay systems.
PS I don’t see Wilson enough!
LYA!
(like your attitude)(about Wilson)
“Let’s don’t sidetrack the discussion into a worthy but separate debate on grading vs other forms of assessment.”
Grading has exactly the same problems as the data wall: it evaluates students’ work with data and it ends up ranking the students.
The original motivation for grading is that it’s much simpler than trying to describe a student’s work in words.
Grades, as any other forms of numerical data, are unfair and inaccurate descriptions of work done in school.
In inducing, say, math anxiety, I think a data wall is not much worse than a grade C in math.
This should be done with our lousy “so-called” leaders. Bet lots of others want to do the same.
Shaming seems so contrary to what we as teachers and coaches have learned about motivating children. Perhaps listening to the non-experts on how we are to practice our profession is more dangerous than we want to believe. So many “reforms” are contrary to what we know about human development so I was not surprised when I saw the term “precarious manhood” when I read this report. What if those data walls set in motion ticking time bombs? http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/08/health/psychology-mass-shootings/
It’s an interesting link (what little I could read of it– kept re-loading) & confirms what I’ve observed as a Mom to three young men. My main thought in reading Diane’s posted article has been that boys are particularly wired for competition from a very young age. The last thing they need at age 8 is a data-wall comparing scores, which would exacerbate already-high sensitivity to hierarchy. In my observation, boys in 2nd grade (age 7) are already practicing Darwinian exercises, trying to find the area in which they excel. Many are finding that sports is not their thing, and are working to excel in drawing/fine arts, music, video-gamesmanship, math/ computers, or just general Jeopardy-like fact accrual in every field.
My mother was a wise woman. She used to tell me: what every kid, as he/she matures, is to find their place among their peers. I suspect your link is pointing to the fact that those young men– who by virtue of testosterone are most vulnerable to the need to find a place in the hierarchy of their peer group– and who find no place– form a group which is more easily seduced into anti-social action.
Any teacher that puts up and keep up a data wall that results in the shaming young children should be ashamed of their compliance. When asked to, I refused with no blowback thanks to an understanding principal who gets it. And if you don’t have an understanding principal it is the teacher’s job to help them ‘get it’. Does anyone fear that they will be dismissed for refusing to shame their students?
Thank you for pointing out the responsibility of teachers to protect their students, even if it means taking on the principal. Kudos to you!
Amazing that the education system has come full circle. When I started teaching we used to put spelling tests on the walls. We were advised that this hurt child’s spirit so why is it ok now. Testing results should be between teacher and families. Not teacher and world. Definitely violation of privacy rights because you can not speak to someone other than the parents about their child.
It’s not only soul crushing bad practice; it is most definitely a violation of privacy.
Yet another example of supposed professional educators not having the foresight and awareness to keep the identity of students ‘masked’ when posted publicly in a classroom. If a teacher wants to share a student’s status with the student, they can do so privately. If they feel the need to post such “progress or results” more publicly, they should at least have enough common sense to mask the identity of the students associated with the data. If anything, such a “wall” should identify the needs of these students to the “Professionals/Educators” and demonstrate to these adults the need for more intensive or appropriate methods of instruction for such students, as well as identify those children they are leaving behind academically and also illustrates to them a need to help them keep up with their peers!
Students – peers – will know exactly who is who even with the names ‘masked’. If you need to appease the admin with a data wall, come up with something like number of books read, or days in attendance – something very benign and take your time in keeping it updated. OR stand your ground and do not do data walls.
This is just as stupid as putting your classroom library in baskets because students like it that way. in the Intermediate and Upper grades: Wrong ! Besides, I would end up spending a fortune in baskets as well as run out of room as to placing those baskets in the designated area for the classroom library.
I don’t even show grades on student work that is posted. The grade is hidden.
It is illogical to “mask” a child’s identity on a data wall. If you are going to keep track of the data quietly, why would you put it on a WALL?!
Either the purpose of the data wall is to shame the students, or the data should be tracked on a spreadsheet that administrators can have access to if that is the point.
If the data goes on a WALL, the only purpose I can see for it is to shame the student, period.
I’m not the one that posted it on the classroom wall @ NYC public school parent… Besides the fact that one should know enough about the intent of FERPA in education to realize that one should attempt to have it be unidentifiable if publicly posted….
@M, that wasn’t really addressed to you.
I am just pointing out that if something is called a data WALL, by definition the point is to post it on a WALL – publicly!
I could imagine if it was important for a teacher to track data and share it with administrators, it would be posted on a data SPREADSHEET and called “a data spreadsheet”.
But someone – most likely a reformer who believes in shaming children — invented the term “data wall”. The data goes on a WALL. In public. Where students can see it.
If I am missing some other reason to track data on a wall, then I wish someone would enlighten me. Because it is nonsense to say “well we aren’t using children’s names”. If using children’s names wasn’t the point, why does the data need to be on a wall in the first place?
Maybe it’s actually more for the educators as a reminder that the methodology/IEE they are using to instruct those struggling children is not helping those students who are not making progress and therefore should be an alarm for them to reach out for some other more intensive instructional alternatives as a way to help them and maybe avoid falling farther behind and continuing to struggle with trying to learn the same materials using the instructional method that’s been provided to them over a specific period of time?
Maybe it’s actually more for the educators as a reminder that the methodology/methodologies they are using to instruct is not working for those struggling children who are not making progress and therefore possibly should be an alarm for them to reach out to other educators for some other more intensive instructional alternatives as a way to help them and maybe avoid allowing them to continue falling farther behind and having to continue to needlessly struggle to learn the same materials using the failed instructional method that’s obviously been provided to them over a specific period of time? The children already know it’s not working, yet the adults seem to be ignoring that. Maybe this would remind them about that minor detail!
NYC Parent – No names, just numbers.
If you don’t think that everyone in the class know who #2 and #15 are you are fooling yourself.
Not only does everyone know who those poor children are, but they are probably targeting them as well. I have heard anecdotally of teachers who reward the class with extra recess, free time, snacks, etc. if a certain percentage of the class meets a specified goal. I would hate to be that kid whose lack of progress denies the class their reward.
Again, who is this tool for?
There is absolutely no good justification for it being for the teacher. A teacher can use a spreadsheet to track this information — then she doesn’t even have to use numbers to “hide” a name! If the administration truly believes that it is important, it would mandate a check on the spreadsheet every day.
The only reason to put it on a public wall is to let other people — not just the teacher — see it. Since this is a school and the people who will see it will be children, the only rationale for putting the information on the wall is for the children’s benefit.
If this was an office filled with adults, any kind of tracking of information on a public WALL would obviously be for the benefit of the people in the office to see. Some offices want that information for all to see. Some want to keep in private for just the boss to look at on spreadsheets.
If a school has a philosophy of requiring a teacher to put her students’ data on a WALL in the classroom, it is for the students to see. Any other reasoning needs to fit the logic test. And so far no one has offered any logical reason for why that information would need to be on a WALL. It’s on a wall so it can be SEEN! Since teachers can see it on a spreadsheet, it is intended to be seen by the children. The people who believe in data walls should just own it instead of tying themselves into knots pretending that there can be any other reason for putting that data on a WALL. They want the children — even if they are 5 — to understand that some kids are better than others. It is a “feature” of their educational philosophy. Those people believe that if 5 year olds understand that some kids are better than others due to their academic success, that will make the ones who are less successful “strive” to be more successful. No real teaching necessary — just the motivation of the wall.
And in charter schools, of course, the kids not motivated are unworthy and thus the humiliation has the added advantage of making sure they understand how unworthy they are, in the hopes it causes them to act out and leave.
Cheryl– could you explain what you mean about putting your classroom library in baskets? I don’t understand. Thanks.
NYC Parent
Believe it or not the idiots who spawned this nonsense thought that the data wall would actually motivate students to do their best by creating a colorfully competitive display of their achievements and progress. This particular idea typifies the ignorance of a top-down system where the top has spent little to no time teaching in a classroom.
Yes, true, it could be buried away in a spreadsheet on a computer never to see the light of day!!!!
Yet, posted on a wall that they too are looking at daily, the teacher also has to look at it and see that there are children sitting there, day in and day out in that classroom with that teacher while not making progress, while struggling and losing self-esteem day after day and struggling to learn, with or without a “data wall” to remind the student(s) about their struggles.
But, maybe just maybe, if the teacher looks at it daily and sees the “data”, it should then provide the teacher with the impetus to SEE what they are doing to teach ALL of their students is not actually effective for those students who are falling behind and struggling to learn in their classroom, and therefore the teacher should then start looking at other instructional methods and services to help them close the gaps they are having, rather than to continue to ignore their struggles while they fall farther and farther behind academically!!!
M – I’m sorry but that is nonsense.
If you or someone else really believe that the teachers would ignore a spreadsheet, then you require them to print out and initial the spreadsheet every day. Or require them to briefly summarize any movement on the spreadsheet. Here is how easy it is: Teacher types in: “Sally R. moved from below standards to above standards. Jody S. moved down”.
I find it pretty frightening that you don’t have the creativity or imagination to think of any other way to do what you claim the wall is for other than making sure each student’s progress is posted publicly on a wall for all to see (even if identified by a number). Are you a teacher? Are you an experienced teacher and you are telling me that your experience is that if you don’t publicly chart the progress of each student on a wall for all of them to see (but using numbers), you will ignore their progress? You can’t figure out a way that insures that the youngest children aren’t humiliated? Or is the humiliation and embarrassment the main point of the wall? Do you think the kids notice when a number goes from “crappy student” to “mediocre student” they wonder which kid it is? But hey, you can’t think of any other way for a teacher to notice how her students are progressing, so any humiliation of the kids is just a fun side-effect for you?
Or are you one of those reformers overpaid to come up with ideas that no one but a ninny would think would not humiliate children? Yes, those children may know they are struggling, but you think it will help for their humiliation to be public? And to you, that humiliation is necessary because you can’t imagine that a teacher can address their learning needs with anything other than humiliation. I mean, without the ability to humiliate those kids, the teacher may forget about them!! Apparently you are part of a school system where teachers think humiliation is necessary. What is your background?
M –
In your classroom, do the parents look at the wall and try to match the numbers with the kids? Do they try to guess which number is their own kid? What fun! Or are you a parent who delights in guessing which number belongs to your own child and of course, her friends?
The data walls are a terrible idea but one that is going to be found in no excuses schools. Here’s my response to a teacher in Chicago who was lauded for hers. http://www.stonepooch.com/ablog/proxy-love/
One more failed idea brought to us in a top-down era where those who make policy are completely detached and utterly ignorant of every day life in the classroom. Classrooms filled with the full range of humanity, at ages known for extreme developmental variation – and an impossible to grasp ‘group dynamic’. In a normal world, this lack of experience should disqualify them from being anywhere near a public school and its children.
It is so very simple. Top down started in the nineties. Education like heath care was going to be a market. The only difference was that the voice of the physician could not be completely eliminated from he equation, because the patient would die.
In our profession, if the kids don’t learn, then the teacher can be blamed…end of story.
The human brain requires certain conditions to learn. Pedagogues learn about the methods that promote acquisition of skills, just like doctors learn the methods that promote physical heath and healing.
Businessmen run the schools. They are not interested in learning, and know little about the emerging intelligence of a child… and they do not care about anything except the bottom line. When the legislatures take over the failing schools, there are no educators on board. Thus public money is sent to operators of ‘schools’, willy nilly, and the fraud is rampant.
But with almost sixteen thousand districts, in 52 states, and a media that is in the pockets of the very people who oversee the destruction of public education, the speed at which public education is tanking is speeding up.
No one i meet, no one I speak to, knows how the tenured, most experienced teacher-practioners were eliminated, in the nineties. NO ethnic minority in modern days, has suffered the civil rights abuse that teachers did.
http://www.perdaily.com/2011/01/lausd-et-al-a-national-scandal-of-enormous-proportions-by-susan-lee-schwartz-part-1.html
In NYC the ‘got’ thousands of teachers, ruining their lives and ending illustrious careers.
nycrubberroomreporter.blogspot.com/2009/03/gotcha-squad-and-new-york-city-rubber.html
NYC, once had a fabulous , free public school system that only needed funding… so they robbed it of money, and took out the professionals and this happened
The utter lawlessness that went on for a decade BEFORE VAM showed the puppet-masters that teachers had no allies… not the unions, not the media, and the public was clueless…still is.
Look at what they have done to Francesco Portelos
http://protectportelos.org/does-workplace-bullying-continues-my-33-hrs-behind-barso
and his story is here at NAPTA, , a site put up a decade ago to chronicle the abuse
http://www.endteacherabuse.org/Portelos.html
North Bellmore NY Teacher Dania Hall Tells of Retaliation, Termination, and Wanting to be a Music Teacher in the NY School System
http://www.parentadvocates.org/nicecontent/dsp_printable.cfm?articleID=7128
and at the NAPTA site http://endteacherabuse.org/
where hundreds of teachers told their tale to no avail
http://endteacherabuse.org/Hall.html
At the extreme is what Lorna Stremcha faced it in Montana.
nycrubberroomreporter.blogspot.com/2013/10/lorna-stremcha-and-her-rubber-room.html
She fought the abuse, http://blog.ebosswatch.com/2013/05/one-womans-legal-fight-against-workplace-bullying/
but many of us did not go to court because the powerful school administrations delayed and made it too expensive.
They made her life a living hell.
But it didn’t stop… and the principal, lawless as such failed human beings are when there is not a shred of accountability went farther…set her up to be assaulted.
http://www.greatfallstribune.com/story/life/my-montana/2016/03/18/educator-recounts-harassment-school/81896206/
Read her book.” Bravery, Bullies and Blowhards”
Look at what they have done to Francesco Portelos
http://protectportelos.org/does-workplace-bullying-continues-my-33-hrs-behind-barso
and his story is here at NAPTA, , a site put up a decade ago to chronicle the abuse
http://www.endteacherabuse.org/Portelos.html
You all, today, are suffering because to this day, the public has no idea what occurred even though there are books that detail the crime, as this one
http://www.whitechalkcrime.com
If they did this to doctors they would face the music when the hospitals crashed.
So, they created their controlled, manipulated market for health insurance instead… and screwed the public.
The real NATIONAL STANDARDS __.the one that disappeared despite the millions Pew poured into proving that they were valid in every classroom where learning occurred among the 20,00 studied for the Harvard research PROVED THAT FOR LEARNING TO OCCUR 4 PRINCIPLES WERE IN PLAY.
Clear Expectations was first.
Second was REWARDS FOR ACHIEVEMENT… and in my room, when I was th eNYC chohor for this research, THEY TOLD ME, (AFTER STUDYING MY PRACTICE) 2 YEARS) that the REWARDS I OFFERED for good work, were the key.
I posted all the writing that met the clear rubric, copied the letters that showed progress & hard work, and put them in folders for visitors. I wrote long commentary on the weekly letters of students whose letters met the rubric, and who shoed genuine effort.
“What did she write to you,” kids would ask of students?
MY responses were like candy for the kids… see words that made them work twice as hard, and it is ALL about work… the practice of writing.
But what do I know… after all even when I was the NY STATE ENGLISH COUNCIL’S “Educator of Excellence,” in 1998, I was charged with incompetence, sent to a rubber room ,my room was dismantled, by 1000 book library distributed to other teachers, and all data based research trashed!
Luckily, I have copies at home, plus the volumes of the real PERFORMANCE STANDARDS PUBLISHED AFTER THE RESEARCH ENDED… which no one seems to be interested in seeing..
Y’all talk about what works, as if discovering it for the first time.!
I talk about my work… or no one would know.
I think data is a good thing- but not data walls of individual students… I can see individual data folders, where students progress their own progress towards individual goals- but this competitive, demoralizing method… is just wrong
You are correct, which is why some posters who seem to think the data wall is for the teachers are full of it. It is for the KIDS! That is why it is a WALL! The kids need to see that some are more worthy than others.
I can’t believe anyone on here actually is ninny enough to think a public data wall is about the teachers. It is a teaching method designed by reformers who believe that if the students know that their academic performance is far below that of their peers, the student will become motivated to learn the algebra that heretofore he had struggled with. All it takes it a little humiliation which is far, far cheaper than the price of an experienced teacher. That’s why reformers love it.
wow! I definitely don’t agree with posting on the wall- especially bc of confidentiality reasons- even if it’s anonymous it’s ridiculous. Public humiliation never works, has the opposite effect (pretty sure there’s research on that…) I think this goes hand in hand with the GRIT movement- if the student just tries harder than they can overcome all their socioeconomic barriers, trauma, and god knows what else and be successful (at standardized assessments). Luckily that is beginning to be derailed and the whole wall posting of data has never been supported by dept of ed research recommendations (at least in their written reports). they do support and have evidence for suport of individualized approaches (like data folders) but not on a competitive basis.
NYS Public Parent — “all it takes is a little public humiliation which is far far cheaper than the price of an experienced teacher. That’s why reformers love it.” I recognize that your post is sarcastic, yet surely there is no data to show that public humiliation results in better performance in any milieu (let alone K-12 achievement). In fact I’m sure I’ve read the opposite on this very forum. Sure, we’ve observed public humiliation on video [Success Charter Schhols in NYC, by an ‘experienced’ charter teacher]. But hopefullly our mission is to publicize educational gains via positive reinforcement.
bethree5,
If it wasn’t clear, I wasn’t be sarcastic. I was stating what the reformers believe. Humiliation is a teaching method that they believe gets results from students.
But I certainly did not intend for you to think that there was any evidence that it works! It doesn’t. It’s cruel and the only reason reformers have grabbed onto it is because charter schools that specialize in humiliating the heck out of students to get them to leave have been pretending this “secret sauce” is a teaching method. Stupid public schools pressured by the likes of Arne Duncan and Bill Gates who keep rewarding the charter schools who use them. Arne and Bill would be appalled if their 5 year olds were subject to their educational abilities being charted in the classroom. But for public school kids — the more humiliation the merrier.
Can you imagine the fun the parents have during visiting day trying to match up the kids with the numbers?
Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads and commented:
A “competitive culture” for elmentary school students? Really???
There is nothing “healthy” about this.
Nor for middle school students, and frankly, nor for high school students, either.
The emphasis for all students should be learning, and helping those who have difficulties with learning. In my ideal educational world, I would get rid of grades and have students compile portfolios of their work.
In an ideal world. That’s not going to happen.
If we keep emphasizing “competition” in lower and lower grades, we shouldn’t be surprised when we produce more and more amoral hedge fund sharks, CEO’s, financiers, and the new Martin Shkrelis, who see the accumulation of wealth as the way to “win,” and legality and the good of society be damned.
Yes, Zorba! I am a portfolio advocate. This past year I witnessed the effect of receiving letter grades for the first time, in sixth grade. My daughter and her peers (girls) were obsessed with grades rather than learning. If they got anything less than an A+, they were devastated. An A or A- didn’t cut it. Some of them cried. It did a number on their self-esteem and they become very competitive. It was heartbreaking. I am really concerned about their future school careers. It’s only going to get worse.
We are thisclose to dusting off the dunce cap … and carving out some corner of ridicule for children.
This is the forever baffling question: Who thought this a good idea? Who insisted that this sort of humiliation would foster “competition”? And who determined that learning would be best served with a side of rivalry? And who allowed this to seep out of some dank basement dressed in merit?
Anyone who thinks children are unaware of such categorizing is a disconnected fool. They understand everything. But why the need to make a child’s progress such town-hall material?
I’m actually stunned by the cruelty and stupidity of this … and further shocked that whoever thought this a learning impetus didn’t also recommend that teachers act as town crier so as to inform the world beyond the classroom that there are failures among us … and they are seven years old!
How did we so easily cede such devastating power to such a collection of fraud-asses? How is it parents and teachers allowed their schools to become near boot-camps … with the same indignities and humiliations and shame the military uses to construct a reactive fighting force?
Never once does any dark know-it-all step forward and avow this as solid education … and say, “I’m the genius!”. Never. And there’s no shortage of these pedagogical clowns.
Look how they’ve turned recess … PLAY! … into an embarrassing discussion. Some ask pensively if teachers actually improve their craft as the years go by … as though education stands at complete odds with every other profession on the planet. They’re also the wizards who insist that homework become a family affair .. and that summer is suddenly the most dreadful happening in the lives of American children.
These dolts are a menace. And we treat them to mighty ridicule.
Why? Why? Why? And why do we allow these twitting idiots never called on the carpet? Why do we suffer the hot air of non-educators … and allow their egos to expand to dangerous levels? Why do we permit politicians … the lowest of all life-forms when it comes to educational savvy … to set policies they don’t even understand … and from which they almost always excuse their own children? How come?
Few professions suffer such abuse without a fight. It seems teachers and parents and schools leaders are the ones in need of a boot-camp moment … to toughen their resolve and to steel their courage. And to run these academic frauds straight out of every classroom. There’s a moral moment on the way … and it had better arrive quickly.
Educational castration is what one witnesses as an empire collapses. Beware the rubble.
Denis Ian
dark know-it-alls
fraud-asses
menacing dolts
twitting idiots
disconnected fools
pedagogical clowns
Best edu-faker descriptions ever!
Excellent comment, Denis!!
And Rager, what do the edufakers all have in common?
They form one big education mental masturbation circle jerk. They are the ones truly in need of educational castration.
“It seems teachers and parents and schools leaders are the ones in need of a boot-camp moment … to toughen their resolve and to steel their courage. And to run these academic frauds straight out of every classroom.”
What you hint at in the teachers and supposed school leaders, the adminimals (I leave the parents out because they have a valid excuse of being ignorant from listening to those supposed education professionals) is that they are weak willed, lily-livered GAGAGGers-Go Along to Get Along Good Germans whose being knows nothing other than frightened self preservation. While many scoff at my descriptions and condemnations of those teachers and adminimals, that description is accurate and, unfortunately, overwhelmingly prevalent.
Realizing personal expediency through implementing educational malpractices over promoting a just education for the children is the GAGAGGers modus operandi.
Watch out for Denis Ian folks he uses the idea of “childhood innocence” to argue that teachers should not teach tolerance of others’ idea in classrooms. In addition he blamed African-American children for their the system failing them. Just saying. Watch out for the bad walk disguised in good talk.
I so agree with everything Denis Ian has to say here– despite the lone voice of Krap Sinclair (whose argument I cannot corroborate on google). Of his post I would highlight, “how did we so easily cede such devastating power to such a collection of fraud-asses”?
We dif it one school district at a time, one superintendent at a time, one principal at a time, & from there one gaga teacherat a time.
The only way out of this mess is ground-up, one teacher at a time.
bethree5: Here is a link to a recent posting of Denis Ian’s:
His write-up is about an idea to have social studies teachers launch lessons, in history and civics classes mind you, (where they should be launched) that will allow students to have conversations about “tolerance, civil rights, and equity.” He opposes this idea of allowing students to explicitly focus on such topics, and talking through them, by claiming we should “let kids be kids,” by which it seems (which he hints at in postings that he deleted on the FB link included above),means we should just let Disney and Barbie at them, i.e. he uncritically buys into the myth of childhood innocence (which, when draped in language of “protecting children from the big bad word,” hides the fact that such a myth is a part of an ideology to take political and existential agency away from citizens, which is the basic structure of oppression throughout history: make myths seem eternal and natural).
The issue is, if you don’t teach tolerance of other’s ideas (which in the end is the root of Freedom), your teaching them to listen to the loudest megaphone and the most robust salute. Because, as mentioned, they won’t be Free. To have Freedom, you must have at least two valid, legitimate options/opinions. You already have one, yours. You brain and all its neural activity automatically puts forth an point of view, it does this automatically, that’s not Freedom. To have choice/freedom you need to listen to other ideas then flex your freedom by choosing. If you don’t tolerate the presence of other ideas, the very things that make choice possible, then you don’t tolerate freedom. Tolerance doesn’t come naturally (e.g. the tribalism that resulted in the Holocaust). If we don’t teach students to tolerate the ideas of other (at the very least!), then we are producing students that will not tolerate Freedom, and that is an existential threat to our way of life.
These discussions were had on Denis Ian’s timeline; they were stronger, more consistent stances than his, and he became rude and snarky (probably due to embarrassment). Apparently Denis Ian did not appreciate the stronger arguments and deleted dozens and dozens of comments, leaving only those that applauded him or backed his ideas, even when those remaining posts made reference to the now deleted posts (if you check the provided link’s comments you’ll see two persons, a Zap Vaga and a Ls Blater, who are refereed to directly, but their comments are missing, they were deleted).
NOTE: is Denis Ians reads this he may simply delete all comments on the provided link or the FB posting itself. So, if there is no page when you click the link, that’s probably what happened.
Some of the upper grade teachers in my school use data walls, with obvious principal encouragement and approval.
I can’t stomach them myself. Kids are smart and know their place in the academic hierarchy. It is demoralizing and discouraging for children to constantly be told they are not measuring up to some arbitrary standard.
The [United Nations] General Assembly
Proclaims this Declaration of the Rights of the Child to the end that he may have a happy childhood and enjoy for his own good and for the good of society the rights and freedoms herein set forth, and calls upon parents, upon men and women as individuals, and upon voluntary organizations, local authorities and national Governments to recognize these rights and strive for their observance by legislative and other measures progressively taken in accordance with the following principles:
Principle 1
The child shall enjoy all the rights set forth in this Declaration. Every child, without any exception whatsoever, shall be entitled to these rights, without distinction or discrimination on account of race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status, whether of himself or of his family.
Principle 2
The child shall enjoy special protection, and shall be given opportunities and facilities, by law and by other means, to enable him to develop physically, mentally, morally, spiritually and socially in a healthy and normal manner and in conditions of freedom and dignity. In the enactment of laws for this purpose, the best interests of the child shall be the paramount consideration.
Principle 3
The child shall be entitled from his birth to a name and a nationality.
Principle 4
The child shall enjoy the benefits of social security. He shall be entitled to grow and develop in health; to this end, special care and protection shall be provided both to him and to his mother, including adequate pre-natal and post-natal care. The child shall have the right to adequate nutrition, housing, recreation and medical services.
Principle 5
The child who is physically, mentally or socially handicapped shall be given the special treatment, education and care required by his particular condition.
Principle 6
The child, for the full and harmonious development of his personality, needs love and understanding. He shall, wherever possible, grow up in the care and under the responsibility of his parents, and, in any case, in an atmosphere of affection and of moral and material security; a child of tender years shall not, save in exceptional circumstances, be separated from his mother. Society and the public authorities shall have the duty to extend particular care to children without a family and to those without adequate means of support. Payment of State and other assistance towards the maintenance of children of large families is desirable.
Principle 7
The child is entitled to receive education, which shall be free and compulsory, at least in the elementary stages. He shall be given an education which will promote his general culture and enable him, on a basis of equal opportunity, to develop his abilities, his individual judgement, and his sense of moral and social responsibility, and to become a useful member of society.
The best interests of the child shall be the guiding principle of those responsible for his education and guidance; that responsibility lies in the first place with his parents.
The child shall have full opportunity for play and recreation, which should be directed to the same purposes as education; society and the public authorities shall endeavour to promote the enjoyment of this right.
Principle 8
The child shall in all circumstances be among the first to receive protection and relief.
Principle 9
The child shall be protected against all forms of neglect, cruelty and exploitation. He shall not be the subject of traffic, in any form.
The child shall not be admitted to employment before an appropriate minimum age; he shall in no case becaused or permitted to engage in any occupation or employment which would prejudice his health or education, or interfere with his physical, mental or moral development.
Principle 10
The child shall be protected from practices which may foster racial, religious and any other form of discrimination. He shall be brought up in a spirit of understanding, tolerance, friendship among peoples, peace and universal brotherhood, and in full consciousness that his energy and talents should be devoted to the service of his fellow men.
–http://www.cirp.org/library/ethics/UN-declaration/
Thanks for that citation, Ed!
The data walls are a feature of the drive for ” accountability,” and the belief that every single kid and teacher needs to be competitive to survive. Schools are operating on Darwinian “survival of the fittest” ideas, not survival of the “best nurtured.”
Look at the Boston Plan for Excellence. It is just one of many attracting money from private foundations intent on “revitalizing” urban centers, but with a sharp focus on school improvement based exclusively on test scores in ELA, math, less attention to science and last in line history.
The Boston Plan for Excellence is a program that attracts local as well as national foundation support.
Here is a current list of funders: Bank of America Charitable Foundation, Inc., Barr Foundation, Boston Foundation, Boston Scientific, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation (https://www.schusterman.org/), Edvestors, Fidelity Foundation, FThree Foundation, Harold Whitworth Pierce Charitable Trust, Hestia Fund, Liberty Mutual Foundation, Inc., Linde Family Foundation, Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Massachusetts Service Alliance, National Center for Teacher Residencies, New Visions for Public Schools, Perpetual Trust for Charitable Giving, Richard and Susan Smith Family Foundation, Sanofi Genzyme, Shapiro/Fleishman Fund, Shethar Foundation, Shippy Foundation, Spencer Foundation, State Street Foundation, Inc., W. Clement and Jessie V. Stone Foundation,
Now ADD The Gates Foundation money sent to the Boston Plan for Excellence:
2003: to support urban high school reform in the Boston Public School District Amount: $1,619,000
2005: to support a portfolio of excellent high schools in Boston Amount: $7,913,604
2007: Purpose: to support a business planning engagement for the Boston Teacher Residency Program, an alternative teacher and certification program in Boston Amount: $341,000
And notice these easy-to-find grants to the Boston Plan for Excellence from the Obama Administration
2010: $4.8 million, Investing in Innovation (i3) grant to prepare, develop, and support teachers who will drive significant student achievement gains in Boston’s underperforming “turnaround” schools.
2014: $10,000,000 USDE Teacher Quality Partnership Grant Program.
2010: $15,024,128 USDE Teacher Quality Partnership Grant Program.
The doctrine of data-driven instruction is deeply flawed. The highly detailed data walls first appeared under NCLB, literally to shame teachers who were required to administer state tests, and to put schools within a district into competition.
For a sense of the visual bombardment and pre-emptive status of data walls in many classrooms–and teachers’ efforts to make them less offensive, try this:
Search Google images for “data walls kindergarten.”
Then look again at “data walls grade 3”
Notice the intermingling of data walls and “SMART goal” forms for students.
Kindergarten
Grade 3
http://www.edutopia.org/sites/default/files/styles/responsive_1240px/public/cover_media/stw-humboldt-studata.jpg?itok=K1v2Eood×tamp=1428449249
Just a reminder of what a “SMART” goal is:
SMART = Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, and Time-related. Or is it Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound? Or is it Stategic, Motivating, Acton-oriented, Results-based and Timely? Or is it . . . ?
I’ll go with my definition Shitty Management Attitude Regarding Toilers.
Kindergarten data wall
Is this photo of the Kindergarten data wall from The Lakeside School or from the Chicago Lab School? It must be from one of those admirable schools because if they don’t have data walls, Arne and Bill would be furious and speaking out to demand one.
I believe it is Sidwell Friends
The Boston Plan for Excrement, as it is colloquially known in Boston, has strutted these nonsensical ideas for decades now, and teachers and students have suffered for their interference.
About 15 years ago, Boston teachers began to be required to post their daily objectives on the board or a wall in their classroom. (This mandate ignored itinerant teachers without a classroom of their own.) The data walls are a more recent addition. When pushback came from the ranks that it was a foolish waste of time (and not contractually required!), both were added to a checklist for walk-through observations (kind of like drive-by shootings). If a classroom lacked either or both items, the teacher was penalized on observation.
One year, all of the classes I taught were Spanish for Native Speakers. I posted my objectives in Spanish, because, ostensibly, the rationale was that students needed to know what they were expected to learn. I was chastised by one evaluator for doing so, because she neither read nor spoke Spanish, yet she was supposed to evaluate my teaching competency.
Made no sense, any more than data walls do. These are tools of compliance and control, used by those not versed in sound educational practices to punish teachers and students alike.
The Marzano rubric expects a teacher to reference the posted learning objective three times during a lesson. They are nothing more than the epitome of wasteful redundancy. And nothing more than white noise to students. So while my students are in a lab making mass measurements using a triple beam balance I have to stop three times to tell them that they are supposed to be learning how to make mass measurements using a triple beam balance. Jeeesh. Only a true EDUFAKER could buy into such nonsense. Which is why I do not post learning objectives.
I wonder how many of those edu reformers and administrators who love this application of Darwinian “survival of the fittest” support the teaching of biological evolution and natural selection in their district elementary, middle, and high schools – without the weaselly false equivalence requirements of teaching the “controversy” and mentioning other theories?
Just a question from a science teacher…
Hey Laura, you will love this essay on FALSE EQUIVALENCIES: BOTH SIDES NOW?…
It is about the trend to BALANCE TRUTH with opposing ‘theories’ and opinions, as the media is doing, but it is the same ‘spirit’ philosophy of misleading ignorant people from the truth.
The Arrogance of ignorance is an essay which appeared at OPED today
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Arrogance-of-Ignorance-by-Sylvain-Lamoureux-Arrogance_Ignorance_Living_Questions-160718-202.html
“I wonder how many of those edu reformers and administrators who love this application of Darwinian “survival of the fittest” support the teaching of biological evolution and natural selection in their district elementary, middle, and high schools – without the weaselly false equivalence requirements of teaching the “controversy” and mentioning other theories?”
They (the free marketers) love to quote Darwin to justify their way of doing things. But they make a mistake in the very beginning when they think, “fittest” for Darwin meant “the strongest, the best athlete.” In fact, fittest for Darwin meant “best fit to the local environment”.
Here is what Darwin says about which species survive best:
“In however complex a manner this feeling may have originated, as it is one of high importance to all those animals which aid and defend one another, it will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.”
In the above, sympathetic means altruistic, caring.
Susan, the NYTimes Paul Krugman posted a column today bemoaning the false equivalences the mainstream media use to appear unbiased and fair.
Except FoxNews of course, because everybody knows they actually are fair and balanced – they advertise that daily! 😜
Rockhound
I wonder how many reformsters visit the Creation Museum in Kentucky and believe what they see in the Noah’s Ark exhibit?
Belief in data walls is just as absurd.
In Ohio: a SMART goal is
Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Results-oriented or relevant, and Time-bound.
On the data-walls for classrooms, notice the investment in sticky notes. Then there is the data-dashboard for teachers–all color coded green, yellow, red–with other graphic clues for “getting there,” “got it,” laping ahead…
Then there are the trajectory charts pre-test to post-test and year-to-year. If they do not look like an aircraft lifting off, you are in trouble. In fact, experts associated with Metametrics hope to set growth velocity standards. They describe their theoretical mapping of “aspirational trajectories toward graduation targets” in reading skills as analogous to “modifying the height, velocity, or acceleration respectively of a projectile launched in the physical world.” They seek greater precision in setting targets and cut scores for grade-to-grade progress in meeting the CCSS.
Source: Williamson, G. L., Fitzgerald, J., & Stenner, A. J. (2013). The Common Core State Standards’ quantitative text complexity trajectory figuring out how much complexity is enough. Educational Researcher, 42(2), 59-69.
This is one of the crueler uses of data for test prep. I heard someone say we shouldn’t be doing all this test prep in the first place. He said, “Don’t try to tell us the best way to educate a child is to spend too much of a year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles in a standardized test. We know that’s not true.” That was said by then Senator Barack Obama in 2008.
So much for what a politician says, eh!?!
Can anyone imagine if the SAT scores of the entire junior class at Lakeside School or The Chicago Lab School or Sidwell Friends were placed on a data wall (no names, just numbers) so that every student in the school would see the spread of SAT scores and have a ball guessing which student got the low one and which student got the high score?
Somehow I feel certain that Bill and Arne and President Obama would be appalled if that was done to their children. But I would pay good money to hear them explain to us why it would make their children’s private schools far better if that data was out for all the students to see. I wish a reporter would ask them.
LYA!
(Like your attitude!)
NYC public school parent: Actually results of all education data should be kept unidentifable but available to the PUBLIC for all taxpayers to know how well EACH & EVERY STUDENT is doing!
If it were, then there would be some accountability.
TRANSPARENCY is what is needed to ensure effective programatic change is made and that schools are providing an effective education that ensures ALL students reach their academic potential!
Nobody is being held accountable for what masqueades as a proper education in the majority of the public (and private) schools. If it were, the quality of education would not be continuing to erode away as it has for easily the last 3 decades!
M,
Are you saying you don’t think anyone has a right to privacy of any kind?
M,
Thank you for acknowledging in your last sentence that the quality of education has eroded during the testing, accountability, transparency era opened by a Nation at Risk. After thirty years of this failed ideology (and the veiled privatization agenda at its heels), now we have public schools at risk. I would point out that standardized tests not being designed or ever able to accurately describe the educations of individual or small groups of students or teachers was a big reason for the failure of “reform” policies and actions to reform education. (Oooh, it feels good to use the words ‘education’ and ‘reform’ together properly!) And so as for your idea of a huge, public, testing data wall, I say nuts. I also say the LA Times tried something like that and found out that the judicial system frowns on such foolishness. And finally, I say not only is the subject an issue of validity and an issue of cruelty to children, Lloyd is right that it’s an issue of privacy.
M – who decides what a student’s academic potential is? Are you saying every student has the same academic potential, and their success is entirely dependent on what teachers they have? That would certainly have to be your belief if you think a data wall tells you whether a child is meeting his or her potential or not.
You haven’t yet explained to me who you are. Are you a teacher who delights in making sure the children’s progress is tracked (by number, of course) so that they and their parents can have fun speculating on who is associated with each number? Are you a parent who demands her child’s school posts data walls so you can figure out (by the number of students above or below standards) whether your child’s teacher is a loser or a winner? Because you have no ability to judge from your own child’s progress unless you can see every other child’s progress?
The data wall is nonsense because it depends on the same “judgements” by teachers that you don’t trust anyway. So your pretense that posting the data publicly is about the teacher falls apart. If you trust the teacher’s data, then it doesn’t matter whether it is on the wall or on a spreadsheet. But if you adore schools that humiliate children as a feature (because that pushes them out), then the data wall serves a very unique purpose.
You can’t come up with a single reason for a public wall with students’ results. Just admit it is to humiliate the students because you believe that motivates them. Or you know it makes them leave. Admit it already instead of this nonsense of pretending that if the data isn’t posted on the wall for every child to see, it is tantamount to throwing away spreadsheets and ignoring data altogether.
Well Lloyd, if it’s supported by taxes, there should be transparency as to what the results are regarding how that money is being spent, and if it’s spent wisely. In the case of public schools, the taxpayers should know if even one child is being left behind and not reaching proficiency. Currently, that is not the case. Hence yet another way that failing schools can remain under the radar for decades! It’s not fair that large schools are held accountable and the smaller schools are allowed to fail for decades.That does nothing but feed a loop of generational poverty and illiteracy. It is also a waste of hard earned tax dollars if there are significant educational failures (such in teaching students to become proficient in foundational literacy & numeracy skills that persist for generations! Especially when the single feeder elementary school which is a Title 1 school feeds the single MS/HS which miraculously isn’t considered to be a Title 1 school? How does that happen? These students are not being remediated. (Answer: It happens only because they lowered the bar for the MS/HS students, through manipulations of the pass scores for the end of year assessments! The testing is actually more accurate for the elementary classes than for the middle and high school classes!)
M, you already revealed the problem with your arguing that the data wall is important! You blew it. You spent an inordinate amount of time coming up with cockamamie reasons why it was important to post data publicly for all students to see in every classroom (with the hilarious pretense that identifying the 2nd graders in the class of 25 or 30 using numbers made it okay). You were desperate to justify it and looked like a complete fool because you kept insisting that the only way that a teacher could not ignore the information was to put it where the students could see it clearly every day! And of course, their parents could see it whenever they were in the classroom! Oh joy!
Unfortunately, it is reformers like you that are ignorant enough to believe that a school that gets rid of its lowest learners is a “success” while a school that keeps all its students and tries to teach them — even if it is a difficult task — is a “failure”. And it’s revealing because if you want to run a school that rids itself of the low performers, then the data wall is the MOST IMPORTANT tool in your repertoire! Humiliation and embarrassment does far more to rid yourself of those kids than suspending them (which is looked at askance these days).
I find it interesting that the KIPP schools with the lowest attrition rates have the lowest academic performance. And the KIPP schools with the highest attrition rates have the highest academic performances. Think about it. It is contrary to everything that holds true with public schools — parents STAY at the good ones. But at charter schools, parents LEAVE the good ones. And that is due to what you love the most — DATA WALLS!!!! What every teacher you admire uses to make sure the failing students understand their failure in the hopes that they will leave.
You say that anything paid for by taxes should be transparent. What about publicly funded, private sector charter schools that are opaque and operate under a secrecy shield that they have spend millions of dollars to lobby for and get for decades?
Taxes pay for the CIA’s covert operations all over the world. Do we make the CIA transparent too in everything the agency does?
Taxes pay for US Special Forces teams that operate in 130 countries annually and often that country doesn’t even know they are there. Should all of those operations be transparent too?
Donald Trump refuses to share his tax returns with the public — a first for a presidential candidate. What do you say about that?
The DIA is funded with taxes.
Homeland Security is funded by taxes.
The United States Constitution says:
he right to privacy often means the right to personal autonomy, or the right to choose whether or not to engage in certain acts or have certain experiences. Several amendments to the U.S. Constitution have been used in varying degrees of success in determining a right to personal autonomy:
The First Amendment protects the privacy of beliefs
The Third Amendment protects the privacy of the home against the use of it for housing soldiers
The Fourth Amendment protects privacy against unreasonable searches
The Fifth Amendment protects against self-incrimination, which in turn protects the privacy of personal information
The Ninth Amendment says that the “enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people.” This has been interpreted as justification for broadly reading the Bill of Rights to protect privacy in ways not specifically provided in the first eight amendments.
A person has the right to determine what sort of information about them is collected and how that information is used. In the marketplace, the FTC enforces this right through laws intended to prevent deceptive practices and unfair competition.
The Privacy Act of 1974 prevents unauthorized disclosure of personal information held by the federal government. A person has the right to review their own personal information, ask for corrections and be informed of any disclosures.
http://www.livescience.com/37398-right-to-privacy.html
M is either engaging in very subtle satire or has a very incomplete understanding of pupil rights, data privacy issues, and how schools are designated for Title I funding.
Extremely subtle if if was meant as satire.
I find those Randian politicians and sages of free markets are the ones most sheltered from the effects of competition. Stop with the cozy, gerrymandered legislators or trust fund man-babies telling the rest of us we need to work harder, smarter, or some other Just World cliché.
When businesses start posting employee compensation on a data wall, then I’ll listen. But still say it is a bad idea. Overlooked is the data wall as a cause of bullying. Posted too high and you are ostracized or a target, or the high scores see it as justification for bullying low scores. Master race mentality in our schools. What’s next?
ValeMath: For starters…. http://seethroughny.net
I have never put up a data wall in my classroom despite teaching English Il. I think it is wrong for many reasons. It is publicly sharing private information, and it is humiliating for students who struggle. Fortunately, I have had principals who support me. Data walls are just wrong and I am morally opposed to them. I still had “data talks” with students, but I met with each student individually and make it voluntary. Most of my high school students wanted to see their data, but I made it as positive and encouraging as I could. This took some time, as I had 187 students. Bottom line: I don’t like these tests one tiny bit, but my students rewarded me with a high pass rate. I teach in a Title I school. Data walls are wrong. Standardized testing is taking away from teaching time. It has taken on a life of its own that has nothing to do with education.
ValeMath: http://seethroughny.net/teacher_pay
Does this link to NYS teacher pay mean you see equivalence in posting the grade data of every student in NYS?
There are rules that are different for children and adults. Privacy issues too. When I became a teacher I knowingly accepted the loss of privacy regarding my salary information because I worked for a public school district. That was my choice, an informed choice.
8 year olds can’t and shouldn’t make that choice, nor should their parents in pursuit of some idea of transparency benefiting the taxpayers.
No, it’s just wrong. Very wrong. Totally wrong. Justifiably wrong. Morally, ethically, and logically wrong.
Rockhound:
It was in regards to ValeMath’s comment
(“Vale Math July 17, 2016 at 11:45 pm)
Specifically making a statement about posting salaries publicly:
(“When businesses start posting employee compensation on a data wall,then I’ll listen.”)…
which they are doing in nys…. so hence the link that was posted :
Data walls, like other rheephorm magic bullets, are not primarily meant for the teachers or students or parents except as blunt instruments of reward and punishment. They are primarily meant to impress/mollify managers/supervisors that do periodic drivebys.
Well explained by W. Edwards Deming. Two excerpts from THE ESSENTIAL DEMING: LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLES FROM THE FATHER OF QUALITY (2014, Joyce N. Orsini, ed.).
1) “Somebody once described good management as management by walking around. Well, it helps to walk around a bit, but you do not learn about the real problems that way. When you are just wandering around, everything looks rosy.” [p. 171]
2) “Management by walking around is hardly ever effective either. The reason is that someone in management, walking around, has little idea about what questions to ask, and usually does not pause long enough at any spot to get the right answer.” [p. 18]
Of course, rheephormistas go bad management practices one “better.” They think the “hard data” on the wall answers any and all questions, so what need to pause and ask—or even come up with—any questions?
😎
MathVale: Oops, apparently it’s under the PAYROLLS tab and you have to drill down to get the teachers payrolls to show up…
Lloyd: Most of those examples you listed are not funded by local taxes. Those were examples of federal taxes and predominantly for the military industrial complex. I was referring to local tax dollars. Paryoneents at a minimum should be able to find out how well or poorly their school is doing and how it stands in relation to other schools in the county and state. You all will never agree that teachers should have to be held accountable for the fact that thousands of children get passed through and never learn how to read and write with proficiency, and you will continue to blame the child and their demographics rather than provide them with the proper instruction and services they are entitled to receive to become literate adults, despite their demographics and their learning differences, especially in regards to those with average and above average cognitive abilities to benefit if they were provided the proper instructional methods in the public school classrooms!
M, I really want to call you a toad, a minion, a puppet, a fool,a fart, an ignoramus, a BS artist, a pile of crap, and a con man but I won’t do that.
Grades and/or test scores only show what a child remembers from what was taught and what learning was retained for the time the test was taken, but those grades and test scores do not reveal the quality of teaching in any classroom, because all children are not equal in the way they learn and some are not engaged in the learning process, and poverty is the main reason why the largest ratio of students do not learn what they are taught in every country where the PISA has been tested.
For an open minded person without an agenda, there is a Stanford Report from January 15, 2013.
This Stanford Report found that “There is an achievement gap between more and less disadvantaged students in every country; surprisingly, that gap is smaller in the United States than in similar post-industrial countries, and not much larger than in the very highest scoring countries.
“Achievement of U.S. disadvantaged students has been rising rapidly over time, while achievement of disadvantaged students in countries to which the United States is frequently unfavorably compared – Canada, Finland and Korea, for example – has been falling rapidly.”
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/january/test-scores-ranking-011513.html
And teaching is much more than just a scripted lesson on a computer screen and/or a teacher lecturing in front of a large group of students who eagerly soak up what the teacher says like a sponge and then never forgets anything they heard and they understand every word said. That is total BS only ignorant idiots would believe and of course frauds who are doing all they can to mislead as many easy to fool people as possible.
A teacher uses everything they learned as professionals to teach students but the students still have to do more than just sit there and listen and fill bubbles on useless tests.
What students learn, how students learn, does not show the quality of teaching taking place.
The only way to discover the quality of teaching would be to put a camera in every classroom and have a live feed to the Internet for every teacher in the country so anyone could log on at any time and see what was going on, and I doubt if that will happen even if Bill Gates wanted to make it happen. The logistics to set up such a Big Brother system and the cost would be enormous.
Teaching is one element of education. What students do to learn is another element. Students who do not make the effort to learn do not learn as much as students that do. Then there are so many other elements. For instance, parents have a roll in learning that is even more important than a child’s teacher.
Since the corporate public education take-over movement uses the International PISA test average as justification for most if not all of the damage and suffering they have caused, then they should watch this video from the OECD about the PISA test and discover what it’s purpose was really for — it wasn’t created so Bill Gates, the Waltons or the Koch brothers could subvert the republic and destroy its participatory democracy by doing away with the community based, democratic, transparent, non-profit public schools.
I really do think we are coming closer to that time when the people bring out their pitchforks and start to boil oil. The psycho billionaires and their minions should stop before it comes to that, but history teaches us the power hungry psychos never do. Instead, they are willing to risk destroying civilization itself.
Regarding: NYC public school parent July 17, 2016 at 11:29 pm message:
Where did I write anything about a KIPP school????
For your information, any school that is not effective should have their license pulled!
Along with any teacher and school administrator that refuses to work with parents (who have proven that they know what their children’s learning struggles are as well as how to help them achieve and reach a significantly higher proficiency level after leaving (rather being pushed out of) the public school (and forced to obtain it privately) when they were supposed to provide it under federal IDEA and 504 mandates.
You are really reaching this time NYC public school parent – and making remarks that have nothing to do with anything I posted! You are really confused about my responses!
I NEVER said I loved “data walls”!!!! Please tell me which posts from me here stated I loved data walls???!!!! I believe I started out by saying that the person that did so, didn’t have a clue as to the fact that it was totally out of compliance with the intent of FERPA as well as the teacher was totally clueless that the least she could have done was to make it unidentifiable if she was going to post it!!!! I also noted that students know with or without a data wall, if they are struggling more than their peers and if they are making less progress!!! Those kiddos do not need a “data wall” to know how well or poorly they are doing in comparison to their peers. They already know!!!!
My response was that maybe these walls should be better utilized as a reminder to the teachers in illustrating how they are failing to successfully teach a significant portion of their students and how this should be more of a chart on how successful they are at meeting the educational needs of ALL of their students!
When a significant number of students who are cognitively able to benefit from proper instruction, and are sitting day in and day out in a teacher’s classroom, and yet they are not reaching a basic level of proficiency in literacy or numeracy, there is something wrong with the instruction being provided to them, and their teacher should be asking why that is and what other alternatives are available to help them achieve and close the gaps they are struggling with!
These students know they are struggling! The wall is really a distraction from the real problem. Why are these students not progressing and what other methods of instruction can be provided to help them reach these skills sets with proficiency?!?!
And unless a caring educator CHOOSES to do something about such struggles early on, they will continue to struggle for the rest of their time in public school, as well as beyond!!!
A learning difference doesn’t mean they cannot learn the skills! It means they need it taught to them in via different method!!! Yet once these kids get set on the Special Ed track (and many times the 504 track as well), the bar is lowered on them, by the adults that are responsible for their educational progress. It doesn’t help them anywhere outside of the P/K-12 parallel universe of public education, to have been passed through and never learning how to read and write proficiently, nor how to calculate out percentages which are used daily for sales tax calculations, discount sales, etc!!!!
But go ahead and deflect from those facts!
As a parent, such “data walls” are just as telling in regards to where teachers stand in relation to effectively reaching the struggling learners in their classrooms!!! And you just don’t seem to like it that a parent (vs say a school employee) would dare to point it out to you!
I just hope that such “data” is not ignored and that you all would reach out and get those struggling learners more effective remedial help, rather than ignore the fact that they are continuing to struggle and not make progress! The kiddos struggling in 3rd grade if not provided help early enough will continue to be struggling for the rest of their life statistically! You are the ones on the front lines with them! Their future is in your hands! Especially for those that are known to be at risk due to demographics, ELL or LD’s. You all do have the power to change their lifelong trajectory if you would care enough to do so!
I can think of no good reason for data walls other than to publicly shame the students. That is why I oppose them. It doesn’t matter whether the names are replaced by numbers. The very fact that the people who think they are good want the information to be in a place where the students can look at it every minute of their day speaks volumes.
You keep tying yourself in knots insisting that the data walls serve some other purpose. And yet you haven’t come up with a single one that depends on that data being publicly posted so every student in the class can see it. Your claim that the struggling children are embarrassed by their struggles anyway so publicly shaming them should not be a problem is truly appalling and it right out of the reformers’ playbook. No doubt you do believe it just like the reformers do — low-performing kids need to be publicly humiliated to do better. Their “proof” is that the charter schools that publicly humiliate kids perform better! Of course they perform better because so many more students leave, but hey, let’s not talk about that because that’s a GOOD thing as those children are unworthy as the data wall shows! Yes, I admit it disgusts me that reformers are so highly paid to spout such things. As if high attrition rates at charter schools that use data walls and other humiliation tactics is just a coincidence. There is a reason that the private schools that billionaires’ kids attend don’t use data walls to post their 5 year old children’s progress.
I am not arguing with you that children need to learn how to calculate percentages or sales tax. I am arguing with you that the purpose of a public data wall is to teach that. It is to humiliate the low performing children by making sure their progress (or lack thereof) is there for every other student to see in the misguided belief by stupid people that 1. it will motivate the child to learn faster or 2. it will humiliate him into leaving your charter school so that you can claim good results because the people who reward those results do not — and have never — cared about attrition. That’s more than enough for a “reformer” to promote them! The humiliation is a feature, not a by-product. The data wall is one of many tactics that the “reformers” have perfected over the last decade that misguided people think are “good” because the data walls in top performing charter schools show all students at high levels. Illogically, parents leave those high performing schools more frequently, but reformers are so certain that low-income minority parents just prefer their kids to be in failing schools rather than the best charter school money can buy that they ignore attrition.
Can you imagine if all that effort to humiliate the low-performing children was actually used to TEACH them? Not hound them by inexperienced teachers thinking if they repeat the same thing over and over again a child will miraculously “get it” (and if not, his name stays in the low levels, of course). But TEACH. Funny how the same people who love data walls keep insisting that small class size doesn’t matter — just data walls! The cheapest method out there to get those struggling kids out of your charter schools. The cheapest method out there to attack public school teachers because too many kids remain on low levels on the wall.
M – you revealed your agenda when you said “As a parent, such “data walls” are just as telling in regards to where teachers stand in relation to effectively reaching the struggling learners in their classrooms!!!”
No parent thinks that.
Parents don’t say “my child is unhappy in school and doesn’t seem to know anything, but hey, look at that data wall where all students are above proficient so I am delighted.”
Parents don’t say “my child is reading advanced books and is grasping advanced math concepts and I see her good writing and she is happy in school. But look at the data wall that says half the class is struggling so I despise that teacher who obviously is terrible for the other half of the class or they would all be performing at the same high levels as my child”.
I doubt you are a parent, unless you are one of those uber competitive and very insecure ones and you left out the real reason you like data walls. “Look there is only three kids at the highest level and I know one of them is mine — how proud I am to know my kid is smarter than the other kids in the class”.
Are you one of those insecure parents, or one of the ignorant reformers? Do you teach at a charter school?
NYC public school parent: I’m a PARENT that has been put through H3LL trying to get the public schools we are forced to attend to do their job and provide a struggling learner with proper instruction and services, so they would not appear to be illiterate with a high school diploma in hand! (Unlike yourself, correct? Aren’t you an employee of a school? While your alias moniker is one of “parent”)
“instills a “healthy competitive culture.” ”
There are only three problems with this three-word expression “healthy competitive culture”.
1) A “healthy” competition is not mandatory. If it’s mandatory then it’s more appropriate to call it a gladiator fight.
2) A “competition” is a competition only if it’s not rigged. If the outcome is manipulated then it’s more appropriate to call the activity a rigged fight.
3) “culture” implies some level of sophistication in some human activity. Lack of sophistication in a regular human activity makes it a custom at best.
So what we have in schools instills the custom of children’s rigged gladiator fights for the entertainment and exploitative use by the priests of the Market and Business.
Data Walls for kids to see is a horribly wrong-headed idea!
Intrinsic motivation does not stem from external carrots and sticks. A lot of competition is quintessentially unhealthy, and data walls are degrading and dehumanizing.
I DON’T NEED TO EXPLAIN THIS!!!
Those pushing for this kind of public data are stupid, malicious or deeply deluded!
Oh no!!!!! Their “safe space” might be violated!!! We must protect the children from any potential negative emotion or thought!!!!
Don’t try to downplay the public shaming of children.
oh please, give me a break
Granted, many high school students have very thick skins when it comes to test scores, especially those who don’t buy into academics at all. To them a score is just something to laugh about, or get almost jokingly and momentarily angry about, and use as justification for their disaffection. For them, the public data may stir their external motivation for enough time to get their grades up and graduate on time. But some things that work, can still be fundamentally wrong. It’s fundamentally wrong to be abusive. Period. It’s fundamentally wrong to dehumanize. Period. It’s fundamentally wrong to take life and other people as a game. That’s a sociopathology. Period.
Who the heck is dehumanizing? This is hysteria.
Most students are highly critical of themselves when it comes to the demands of schoolwork. “I’m not smart” or “I suck at math” are common refrains. These self images are formed at far too young an age, and far too soon into their brain development. So its not about violating their “safe space” or protecting them from “negative emotions or thoughts”, Its about teachers helping them to understand that they are truly works in progress. It’s about rejecting a reform movement that is constantly demanding that we quantify (1? 2? 3? 4?) an immeasurable growth process. And it’s about rejecting really stupid, ineffective ideas like data walls that do nothing but help confirm the notions that they are really are not smart (at age 8?) or that they really suck at math (at age 10?).
Thank you, Rage!
And these data walls also contribute to the very damaging idea that their worth as a student is restricted to a very narrow slice of a very narrow curriculum (math and reading). I perused dozens of data walls and didn’t see one that recognized any other aspect of school life. Why do we insist on maintaining what by all accounts is the most restrictive learning environment in the history of public education. Only charter school are more restrictive.
some fair points
Wow. You’re equating safe space policies in universities with shaming 5, 6, 7, 8 year old children?
My freshmen debaters could be on to your false equivalency in seconds. Try again.
Let them fail. Yes. Enough turning kids into coddled permanent babies.
“Oh no!!!!! Their “safe space” might be violated!!! We must protect the children from any potential negative emotion or thought!!!!”
What’s the point of doing it, systematically, in school?
to celebrate…gasp success. What are you people so afraid of?
What is success? Is that what these charts show and measure? Why is it so important to compare kids at a young age?
Scaring kids at a young age doesn’t make them brave, does it? Then why do you think letting kids fail at a young age enables them to be successful?
success is improving, not achieving a certain score.
success is growth.
scaring them? oh please. anything in life could “scare” them…sports, having friends, playing outside. you expose them to the chance to “fail” or “succeed” or grow at something at an age they can be trained to learn from it.
Putting these kids in a bubble isolated from these opportunities may be well intentioned but it isn’t what’s best for the kids. It’s what is TEMPORARILY best for insecure adults. Go ahead and be all upset and emotional about it but it’s true.
These are openings to TEACH them how to deal with adversity. Teach them it’s a challenge. It’s a temporary setback.
No freaking wonder we have so many people unemployed these days…
So you assign some scores to kids’ activities just to get them out of some kind of bubble you think they are in? Is scoring kids some kind of general recipe to make them better at anything or there are exceptions?
Do you think that this public display of, say, math scores will help kids overcome math anxiety and their understanding of math will improve? Can you show me supporting research?
Personally, I only post the names of kids who improve the most each time we redo an assessment (top 5-10), not everyone.
I get where some of you are coming from and that’s not how I’ve ever used data walls or seen them used.
markpteachers – you sound like a model teacher at a charter school! That is exactly how they are trained!
“Five and six year old children do better academically when they and their classmates are aware of their failings. Their emotional well-being is a crock that those “liberals” care about. If you humiliate those 5 year olds, they will learn much better.
Of course, the billionaires that pay high salaries for newly minted teachers to be taught that data walls are what those kids need would never subject their own children to such walls. Safe spaces are reserved for privileged children. Children in public schools are best taught with lots of negative emotion and thoughts (free!) instead of things like small class sizes (expensive).
You raise your kid that way, go for it. so they are crushed the first time they have a setback. Great plan.
Zero-substance rebuttals.
Unlike this one, right? Are you familiar with the book, “Antifragile?”
I am on your side believe it or not. I want what is best for kids. Is it POSSIBLE you are wrong? I am totally open to being wrong but when I see people who have differing views shouted down that tells me someone is afraid to discuss something.
Believe it or not, it is being discussed over and over again, and beyond that it is being done!
It’s wrong. That’s the conclusion.
Go ahead. Rehash it. Don’t toss out book titles. Explain concepts. Go right ahead.
Nevermind. You aren’t really interested in hearing anything outside your comfort zone.
Aaaaand you’re right back where you started.
markpteachers, you think the ONLY way to teach a 5 year old or 7 year old is to use public humiliation of their struggles?
Why would you equate us pointing out how outrageously wrong that idea is with some notion that you need to give every child an A+ if he hasn’t earned one?
The fact that you made fun of people who are concerned with what a data wall where a child’s failings are made public for his classmates demonstrates that you are not on the same side as people who care about the well-being of children.
You seem to be on the same side as those who believe that humiliating children is a substitute for experienced teaching because if a child doesn’t understand something, humiliation is all you need to teach him.
I wont respond to someone who misrepresents my position.
markpteachers wrote @ 7:49am:
“Oh no!!!!! Their “safe space” might be violated!!! We must protect the children from any potential negative emotion or thought!!!!”
Your chutzpah in claiming that people are misrepresenting your position is breathtaking. You are the one misrepresenting this entire discussion. It is about whether public data walls with the class performance of every student in the class (even if supposedly “hidden”) is a worthy educational tool.
If you think public humiliation and shame is an excellent way to increase academic performance by young children, just own it. But attacking people who disagree with what you believe by characterizing their view as “never wanting to violate a child’s safe space” is pretty low.
But it’s interesting that you used a page right out of the Karl Rove playbook to attack and mischaracterize your critics. I’m sure he would be proud.
YOU are the one who jumped from data walls to public humiliation as if they are the same.
Why are you so obsessed with right wing political figures? What do they have to do with anything?
markpteachers@7:30pm
“I only post the names of kids who improve the most each time we redo an assessment
That isn’t a data wall so why is that relevant? That is a wall that honors the top 1/3 of students who improve the most. There is a different debate to be had about whether this might be helpful or not, but I’m shocked you think that is anything like a data wall.
markpteachers:
The coddle versus tough love discussion is different from the data walls discussion. And both are different from Antifragile discussions, which would run close to ideas about shaking things up and disruption and breaking away from comfort zones, big deform phrases and buzz word.
they are all pretty related. fancy ideas or phrases aren’t what will help our kids, nor will coddling.
can we at least all agree that edu is not heading in the right direction?
Mark,
Education is definitely not headed in the right direction but it is
not because students are coddled.
May I humbly suggest that you read one of my last two books?
I will but I see nothing but a VERY limited viewpoint about education and it’s coming from a political first point of view.
I’ll check your books out but I am in the classroom every day and know that coddling is at least part of the problem.
“You raise your kid that way, go for it. so they are crushed the first time they have a setback. ”
What does gradually making kids ready for life with ranking 3rd graders? Is that what life is about: ranking in some kind of competition?
But even if life was a sports event, good coaches get kids ready gradually and do not throw them into deep water, do not make them jump triple somersaults, and certainly don’t force them into mandatory, rigged competitions and if they don’t do well, good coaches never display their failure.
No, good coaches first and foremost want the kids to love their sport because that’s the only way to make sure, they will persist in the sport and do their best. Love of a sport is the main motivator of Olympic champions, not fear of failure.
In fact, overly competitive kids need to get the most attention since they are the ones destroying a team, they are the ones prone for burn out.
But: life is not a sport.
wrong on so many levels
just curious, what success have you had coaching or as an athlete?
I am really curious, how much, if any experience, do most readers on here have at professions outside of edu? We’ve got a serious box imposed on ourselves when most of us have never worked outside of edu
“just curious, what success have you had coaching or as an athlete?”
I was a member of the Hungarian swim team for over 10 years, and to this day I help coaching some of the best Hungarian age group (and sometimes adult) swimmers every summer. My 10-14 year old swimmers will have their national championship this coming weekend.
In the US, in grad school, I was the goalie for the Ohio State water polo team and was 4th in 100 yd backstroke at the Masters Nationals in 1992 (see page 68)
Click to access 1992_scnats_results_men.pdf
My son sustained injuries both as a gymnast and a soccer player. The injuries in soccer were due to overly competitive coaching and they ended his career.
Most importantly: during my 30 years teaching in the US, I have rarely seen tough love working in math education, even at the university level. Kids do best if they love the teacher and love the subject.
Stating “you are wrong” is not a convincing argument, is it?
That’s awesome on sports. Congrats! Success in many areas of life is achieve the same way. I don’t see why education needs to be some cocoon where we apply a totally different set of rules.
I hope your son is ok now!
Tough love at times is necessary as is letting kids fail.
” I don’t see why education needs to be some cocoon where we apply a totally different set of rules.”
Well, there are places where sport mentality don’t work.
Is it perhaps time to get out of the sport-box and see the real world where sport mentality rarely works? 🙂
Should symphony orchestras make the strings compete against the winds to be able to play more beautiful music?
Should kids get scores to see which one of them deserve their parents’ love and attention more?
Should we assign scores to the Mona Lisa and David to decide if Leonardo or Michelangelo was the better artist?
Were Einstein or Newton in some kind high level competition that motivated them to come up with their theories?
I’ve done both successfully and some things are universal and have worked for me. Caring about kids, getting to know them, caring about their FUTURE and not just taking the immediate path of least resistance.
You bring up some fair points but the same thing applied to those examples with art and music. Their work took MANY failures before they produced something great. They had to learn hard work, to keep going, etc.
He is impervious to evidence and truth…marches to a beat in his head…why bother to respond?
Mark may not realize that he lacks evidence or even that evidence is needed. He may not realize that his proposal of using market and military methods in education has been proposed many times before, and has been found harmful over and over in the last 100 years.
“He is impervious to evidence and truth…marches to a beat in his head…why bother to respond?”
You were correct, Susan. He “argues” like Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter: he doesn’t even pretend to listen, he assumes his opinions don’t need justification, and he thinks in categories such as “liberal” or “lefty”. He also exhibits peculiar mental instability: yesterday, he is almost friendly as he assures us that he doesn’t want to offend anybody and that he is happy that we engaged him, but he then comes back today, refreshed, and states that he is bored with our lefty comments.
Still no substance.
Oblique attacks, yes.
attacks? are YOUR feelings hurt now too?
One good point, though. Edu is a mess right now.
http://www.lohud.com/story/opinion/contributors/2016/07/18/why-we-sticking-common-core-view/87245348/
that’s my MAIN point.
I care about kids and teachers.
I’ve worked with top level athletes as a fellow athlete, as a coach, I’ve worked in journalism, I’ve worked in sales, fast food, minimum wage outdoor labor jobs…I’ve seen it all. I’ve also been teaching ten years and feel as though I’ve got a good grasp on what motivates people and recognizing their improvements is one.
I am humbly asking many of you to put aside how you FEEL and think outside the box some for your students.
“I am humbly asking many of you to put aside how you FEEL and think outside the box some for your students.”
No, the current box has been created by the reformers, and it brings market and sport mentality into education. Their justification is exactly like yours: these methods seem to work in business so it makes sense that we train kids at an early according to the same principles.
We, on the other hand, are thinking outside this box, since no evidence supports the reformers’ theories.
Evidence shows that it’s a mistake to bring market and sport values into education.
No, you are “in the box” when you are in total lockstep with everyone else who doesn’t want the profession to be changed.
I don’t necessarily agree with reformers about much but the knee jerk reaction by teachers to oppose what the business world does as being evil isn’t a great idea to me.
Thanks all for engaging with me.
I am obviously NOT the normal teacher mindset around here and I am cool with it. I am “just” the voice of the marketplace that the kids will have to work in in the future. I am “just” the voice of how future bosses will think.
I am telling teachers that kids are going to have some difficult challenges to face through their entire life and mainly in the workforce and that needs to be first and foremost our priority. Not that our political views might be made upset.
“No, you are “in the box” when you are in total lockstep with everyone else who doesn’t want the profession to be changed.”
This statement is not even wrong. You, in lockstep with the reformers, apparently decided that the values and methods of a very narrow part of life, namely the values of the market, sport and military, are universal and hence should be used to change the culture of education. This is a theory by ignorant and arrogant outsiders with no supporting evidence, whatsoever. Nevertheless, they are forced on tens of millions of kids and educators.
Th reason for not jumping into your narrow box of thinking is that it makes no sense: despite more than a century of experimentation with market values and methods in education (don’t think for a minute that the reformers have been pushing for something radically new), no evidence has appeared to show that they have any benefits. On the contrary, plenty of research has shown that market values don’t work in education.
Yes, billionaires think, the purpose of education is to train workers for the market ( their market ), and hence they’d like everybody to think in terms of winners and losers from an early age. We don’t think this way, and we want these charlatans get out of the business of education professionals.
Finally: we only support methods which make kids succeed not only in the market but in all other aspects of life. Early emphasis on competition and ranking may create some winners but will also result in an unacceptable number of losers, and hence we don’t support data walls.
ya, when I see the usual “enemies” pop up (the military, business) I glaze over and quit reading another hard lefty who has simply developed an irrational hatred for some of America’s most successful and necessary institutions.
I just don’t get the “everyone deserves a trophy” liberal mindset.
We are free to disagree though.
The mindless belief system you’ve been fed and that continues to fail our kids and our society makes me sad that people really believe this wishy washy koom by ya stuff.
Of COURSE all our kids can be successes in their own ways. I am certainly not the one pushing them to be a drone to some employer.
Market values, sports values work but go ahead and wing it and hope for the best and ignore successful people out of jealousy or hatred or bitterness or whatever but it is your kids who suffer and that is a freaking crime to me.
” I glaze over and quit reading another hard lefty who has simply developed an irrational hatred for some of America’s most successful and necessary institutions.”
Military, sport and economic successes are just three possibilities of being successful, but reformers (and you) want to define it for the rest of the population just in those very narrow terms.
You glaze over my argument and reasoning and then you accuse me of staying in my box at any cost. You frame me as a hater and a lefty so that you can excuse yourself from learning about my views. Weird. I wonder if you do the same in your class when a kid doesn’t agree with your insufficiently reasoned explanation:
“ But teacher Markp, the evidence shows that you are incorrect.”
“ Student, are you some kind of disrespectful lefty who dare to demand evidence from me, a successful athlete, coach and worshiper of the economy?! Well, let me make some appropriate reductions to your column on the data wall, so that you and the rest of the world understand what a loser you are.“
It isn’t a liberal mindset. I am so sick of ignorant people throwing the word liberal around like it is an evil thing.
The mindset that wants to treat children as a separate species to be coddled and protected from every possible harm to their alleged innocence, as if they are all angels and not human at all — until their 18th birthday and then they are rotten humans like the rest of us and have to pay the price by going to work and being treated like a number stamped on a piece of consumer trash destined for the dump.
Children were once treated like adults, just smaller versions, and then there was this concept born about the time of Walt Disney and animated cartoons that humanized fish and wild animals that children were different. The politically correct concept of children today is recent in the history of our species and crosses the political spectrum. It is not exclude to liberals. In fact, the self esteem movement started in with religions and conservatives. Liberals joined the movement after it was already in movement. Then, like Donald Trump, conservatives decided to lie and blame this all on the far left just like they blame everything else on the left.
For tens of thousands of years, children were expected to join adults as young as 5 to hunt, grow food and fight for survival. Then during the industrial revolution, factories owned by psycho CEOs and/or psycho oligarchs saw children as a cheap source of labor easy to control, and the children of the poor became slaves to a heartless capitalism system.
I rally don’t mean to be offensive to anyone but just kind of speak that way.
I truly love all of you for caring about our profession and kids and think I need to cool off. It’s ok that we see different paths to the same end result. I do think there is more than one way to get there.
Your mode of commenting speaks for itself. You yourself don’t seem to want any sort of real discussion.
Ha, I am the only one here diversifying the conversation. It’s a freaking echo chamber here without me.
Fair enough.
markpteachers
Because, you are 100% right and the evidence and opinions of others, make them, “you people?”
Disappointed to learn that a.m. talk radio’s audience is in the classrooms.
Yep, it should be the liberal echo chamber of NPR and MSNBC that you never move outside of.
I am disgusted with all politicians and KNOW they aren’t going to fix any of this. I am not the one who thinks politicians are going to come save the day.
It is on US, the teachers to clean this poop show up. One by one from the ground up.
“Fair enough”
Is in response to the 8:32 main point comment, not the echo chamber comment it for some reason follows, though it was made 4 hours beforehand.
As for political leanings, my politics can be completely explained here, by Mr. Trololo
????
Data walls are disgusting and I refused to put them up and then was marked down on my evaluation. It is true that you cannot use names and probably not even student IS numbers but simply, an unnamed tally if you will.
I was a public school teacher for thirty years (1975-2005). I worked with more than 6,000 students, and I know from experience that most children are not motivated to overcome failure when they are humiliated publicly especially in front of their peers. It takes a huge effort on the teacher’s part to convince almost every student that failure is nothing to be embarrassed about and convince them to learn from their failures without embarrassing them.
And I’m not alone.
Live Science reports that Embarrassing punishments Hurt Kids, Experts Say
“The research is pretty clear that it’s never appropriate to shame a child, or to make a child feel degraded or diminished,” said Andy Grogan-Kaylor, an associate professor of social work at the University of Michigan. Such punishments can lead to “all kinds of problems in the future,” Grogan-Kaylor said, including increased anxiety, depression and aggression.
http://www.livescience.com/20314-embarrassing-punishments-children-discipline.html
From Psychology Today, “Shaming Children is Emotionally Abusive”
“Adult children raised by narcissistic parents frequently tell similar childhood stories of shame and humiliation. Often these shaming acts take place in front of other people. Treating children badly and without respect is not the golden rule for parenting, but why do we see this so often?”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-legacy-distorted-love/201209/shaming-children-is-emotionally-abusive
Any authentic teacher knows this.
Any loving parent knows this
Anyone who works with children ( or dogs) knows that kindness works, and that noticing when a child achieves a goal, reinforces the behavior and encourages practice… and PRACTICE makes skills stick.
So simple to real teachers like you Lloyd, but the idiots that have turned public schools into a marketplace put business people at the top, to run things like a business, and if data sheets encourage office workers to compete, the same thing makes kindergartens feel like failures.
Rewards are the path to getting children to practice, and it is only through REPETITION AND REVIEW that the HUMAN BRAIN LEARNS.
BUT THEM FOR TEACHERS it is all ABOUT LEARNING!
LEARNING, LEARNING LEARNING…not teaching, teaching and evaluating teaching., nor about COMPETITION or humiliation.
Business people.BAH HUMBUG!
CHARLATANS…. THROW THE BUMS OUT OF THE SCHOOLS, and get NON-EDUCATORS out of the legislative decision -making school boards.
Bring back THE TEACHER-PRACTIONER to the PROFESSION that is PEDAGOGY.
My youngest faced a data wall in Kindergarten (just for homework turn in). A teacher who’d be a TAG teacher, had a baby, then returned to teach K was his teacher.
She, of course, never told parents that she was posting a homework turn in log publicly. So we did all the homework. But it’s Kindergarten. Who would expect the secret police would be posting logs of turn in?
In March, I’m in the classroom and see the wall – and that he doesn’t have anything on it. Damn. Wish we’d known. Truth is, we care far more about our son learning than about impressing the teacher. And K was a very rough year for him in general so getting him acclimated to school was far more important for us than ensuring the chart filled in.
The saddest part of the whole story is he was a problem K’er…because he is autistic and need SPED services – something not diagnosed until the end of 1st grade.
And that is, perhaps, one critical element missing in all this. Behavioral, psychological, and SPED challenges are rarely known at the start of K or 1 or 2 or even 3rd grade. Enthused shaming may shame those who shouldn’t be shamed.
That’s because nobody is looking for any sort of special ed needs from K-3 unless the parents bring it up to the attention of the schools. And then it depends on the school and if it wants to listen to parents inputs regarding the struggles they see with their child. I agree that what is important is academics along with social emotional needs. But one doesn’t need to be at the expense of another. We need schools that are informed and educated on how to help ALL students and not wait until they are in 3rd grade because by then most students will never close the gaps and your schools will have set them on a path of classifying them which equates to classifying them in the same boat as those with cognitive disabilities, when it is other sources that are causing a struggle for the student.
M, by law districts must have a system in place for identifying and referring students of all ages who may have a disability. This includes having a child find process for early childhood. While it is true that it is difficult to meet the criteria to establish a specific learning disability (LD) in grades K-1, students with autism, emotional /behavioral disabilities, speech and language, and other health impairments are identified and served in the early primary grades.
Learning disabilities are rarely identified in K-1 because of the criteria for this area of disability. LD criteria used to be a “severe discrepancy” between a child’s academic achievement and intellectual capability as measured by individualized testing. The discrepancy classification model was criticized for delaying identification and provision of special education services (wait to fail). When Congress reauthorized the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) in 2004, federal law was revised to allow states NOT to use a discrepancy model. This led to more widespread use of response to intervention (RtI) based classification systems where students are identified as at-risk through universal screening (similar to what has existed for decades in targeted assistance Title I programs) and the provided with academic interventions in a general education setting. If a student does not show enough progress after a specific number or duration of interventions, they are referred for a learning disability. This early intervention approach has both reduced the number of students referred for LD and allowed students needing significant support to be identified for LD earlier in many schools.
Just curious, what state do you teach in?
Stiles – I understand that’s the truth. But our experience is consistent with M’s. We had to push, and push hard, with the help of our son’s medical and therapeutic providers before the school would listen.
In fact, his 1st grade teacher was horrible with him. He received numerous referrals. And, in one meeting, I remember sitting with the teacher who said “he doesn’t sit in on the big group activities but goes and stands in the midst of the four carells.” To which I replied: “Gee. Don’t you think that it’s pretty obvious he’s trying to get away from the stimulation?”
She responded “No. He is just being a bad kid.”. Later a similar discussion happened in a meeting with an Occupational Therapist and everything changed. She perked up when I noted the stimulation difficulties and immediately took control.
It has a good ending. Because the OT helped us get him on a IEP. And, when he was in 5th grade, that 1st grade teacher came up to my wife an apologized – said she’d seen how successful he was with support and was really sorry she hadn’t seen it.
The K teacher? Not a word. Ever.
I understand the school’s challenge: It’s really tough at those ages to sort out what’s going on. But agree that it’s the parent’s responsibility to get action for their kids. We can’t simply trust the good of the school district because they mean well – but it’s an overwhelming job.
Doug,
Thank you! I don’t think that the majority of school admins or teachers get the struggles that students and parents experience and how hard parents have to advocate (many times it’s much more like a battle). And you were one of the lucky ones as somebody finally bothered to listen and then ensured that they provided the proper supports and services that he needed to achieve to his potential!
But unlike your child, many families are either unable to advocate, or not in the picture,or they too struggled in school and can’t figure out the hoops they would need to jump through.
Parents should not have to battle with their school to provide the proper services and supports, especially when it comes to literacy instruction when it already offered in the school to other students, when their own testing and an independent evaluation confirmed the severity of the issues and the proper remedial services that should be offered to close the gaps this child had! At that point ds was entering 10th grade!!! These programs take on average 2 years or more to complete. We had already wasted 2 years begging for the proper instruction to be provided.
As well as they denied the student eligibility to be allowed to take an Honors English class with accommodations because they said being in Special Ed co-teaching section was the proper placement, but it wasn’t. They did not provide anything of benefit.
Plus this was right after telling us that no special services were needed because of how splendidly ds had done the year before (when I was trying to point out that ds didn’t meet the proficiency score to be considered proficient, and none of the work was showing that ds was on grade level with skills in literacy, reading as well as behind in many areas of math too!!!!)
Also the discrepancy model has been out of favor now for over a decade! But anyone could see the discrepancy in ds’s literacy output vs what they were knowledgeable of. And RTI is never supposed to delay evaluations for identifying those in need of proper individualized special educational instruction and services.
This is the whole problem! They ignore the obvious and glaring deficits and never provide any remedial help, and the gap widens!!!
Besides the classes there are small!!! Most teachers would envy the class sizes and minimal number of hours they have to actually instruct classes. There’s typically less than a 15:1 teacher to student ratio, and many times even less!!! There is absolutely no excuse for the entire negative experiences that we repeatedly were put through trying to get this child the proper instruction and supports that ds was entitled to. Besides the fact that the cost wasn’t even coming out of their tax base as ds was in foster care and they got reimbursed, including extra Title 1 funding because of foster care placement!!!!
But unfortunately, they don’t want to hear from parents that are strong vocal critics when they are not doing the proper thing for a student after being repeatedly denied over and over and over again, while the evidence was so strong against them. So then they hire the lawyers to bully parents and they would rather pay lawyers than jsut offer the struggling student the spot in the specialized classes. They actually stated that there will be no AIS for ds!!! They outright refused to provide any useful remedial instructional opportunities.
Hence why I find it hard to listen to many here that seem to live in a public school bubble lacking exposure to experiences that many of their student’s families are dealing with outside of their limited educational circles. 😦
M – Agree with the difficulties you outline. It can be really tough.
At the same time, I’m sympathetic to teachers, administration, and districts. They face incredible pressures to minimize the number of students given SPED because of the cost of those services. And that goal of minimizing introduces incredible waste into the system.
Most SPED teachers are primarily IEP specialists who spend their days mired in paperwork to justify students being in SPED while their aide’s do the teaching. It burns those teachers out – because most of them got into the profession to teach.
And administrators are pilloried by crazy political forces who keep shouting “schools are too d..n expensive” when what our politics have done is cut social services then force schools to provide those services. (In other countries, SPED families would be getting significant support OUTSIDE of schools. But not in the US. That would be far too smart for our politics.)
And I’m not disagreeing at all. But sometimes we parents create our own nightmares. In our district this year, one SPED parent couple found out their kids were being sent to their SPED buses about 5 minutes early each day to avoid the chaos of the halls. (I LOVED that they did this for my son who was extremely overwhelmed by the chaos.)
So they filed a lawsuit claiming the district was harming SPED by under delivering hours. The district settled – and set up a 2-3 days special learning opportunity this summer (with transportation) just to avoid the lawsuit. Of course, none of the SPED parents we know were going to participate and we certainly weren’t.
It was an incredible waste of money forced by this specific couple.
Unfortunately, those extreme experiences at the district simply make it even harder for parents to get what’s needed. What an ugly spiral.
Doug,
I am confident it was not the parents initial intent to pursue legal avenues as a first resort.
The school obviously chose to take that route rather than to work out a plan through less expensive and time consuming options.
The school could have pursued an agreement to accommodate the students in a manner that wasn’t discriminatory.
(And I understand that for your son and your family it would have been preferable, but obviously it is was not looked at the same way for this family, and yet the school chose to ignore that.)
My guess is that there’s been a heck of a lot of water spilled under the bridge between the family and the school, and that the school chose to play hard ball.
They could have chose to accommodate the initial request and avoided the entire legal mess, but obviously the school didn’t want to agree to work with the parents on a resolution that was acceptable to all parties.
(Talking from personal experience, where the school chose not to work with the student’s family, I am confident that they expected the family to back down and settle versus taking it through a hearing. Kudos to them for not settling though as they most likely would have been steamrolled if they settled, as we were. )
Besides the fact that most cases that get to an IDEA hearing tend to rule in favor of the student and family vs the school. Plus in this type of case something like this would also be looked at as an OCR violation since they were treating disabled children differently than other students. I am actually surprised that the school did not know that and why they just didn’t work with the family to come to a settlement about how to work through this.
This is exactly the type of waste that goes on though in schools and the games that are played to bully,nharass and torment families while it does nothing other than results in souring parents against the public schools while wasting precious tax dollars!!! 😦
In this case, we know the parents. They are inherent trouble makers. My sense is that there was never any chance of making the parents happy.
And I know our district administration pretty well. They very quickly settled and are generally good at these issues.
Guess my point is this: Every situation is different. In fact, every time I hear about a SPED parent lawsuit I have become skeptical. There are local lawyers who make their careers on these things.
And there are bad districts and bad situations where, perhaps, legal action is unavoidable. But, as a businessman, legal action is always a last resort because it’s the single worst way to settle anything. To many SPED parents can feel it’s a first resort.
Cheers…
For anyone interested, here’s a review of Antifragile. It certainly knocks top-down control. But it sounds like it is a victim of itself due to the author.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/books/antifragile-by-nassim-nicholas-taleb.html
Akademos, he’s a big liberal. Like you.
Take a break from this.
Stiles-
We are quite familiar with Child Find.
Child Find is also supposed to offer students in special ed IDEA parent, when they do not have any identified parent, such as many foster children and other parentless children, but how many times does that happen??!!!
We had to battle both the school and the foster care system on being recognized as this child’s advocate educationally. We repeatedly asked to be officially granted that status for 3+ school yrs. It took until just before we were finalizing the adoption before we were officially recognized as the special educational guardian/parent! And then after adoption, we ditched the IEP because it wasn’t an IEP. It barely was even a 504 plan. The goals were broad and subjective and not measurable. Nor were there any specialized instructional services that would help ds close any literacy & numeracy gaps.
None of the various schools we attended did any effective “Child Find”.
Nor any effective RTI.
It was only after we went and paid for an independent evaluation (which the school dragged out agreeing to an IEE at district expense from October thru March, which is also was in violation, because schools are supposed to agree or go to hearing and present their case as to why not paying for the IEE is appropriate, but we didn’t know that until afterwards.
We finally could not wait any longer and we went ahead and paid for the evaluation OOP ourselves.
The LD classifications were never recognized until after the IEE was performed by the independent neuropsychologist.
Ds was much better off outside of the public school system! Thank god we were pushed out of the public school system to the private sector for the proper instructional services. But it came at a cost for ds. Instead of having down time, ds spent the equivalent of another full school day traveling and in tutoring sessions, for instruction that was available but denied to him in the MS/HS!!! Ds obtained the foundational skills that eluded this kid for >10 years from VOLUNTEERS! Not the teachers in the public schools and classes he sat in for 12.5 years!!! Not one offered and provided proper instructional services! Instead, we heard, it’s not our problem, the student should already have those skills. We can’t spend time on those more foundational skills that are lacking!
Seriously???? You or somebody else on staff should be responsible for helping these kids close gaps they have!!!
These kids eventually end up out of the parallel universe of P/K-12 public schools! And without literacy and numeracy skills, or experience with AT and other ways to work on grade level, they risk being at great risk to struggle forever as an adult and find it hard to find employment without having foundational reading, writing, and numeracy skills that will be accepted in the real world of life! Without those skills, they risk being looked at as illiterates! 😦
Thank goodness, we knew what was needed and we found it outside of the public school system! We found it from UNPAID VOLUNTEERS! We found it in colleges that readily offer 504 accommodations and assistive technology for students that attend their schools! Without ever having to beg them to provide such supports and services!!!
We also were able to afford to go out and purchase a laptop and Nuance Naturally Speaking, and signed up ds for Learning Ally and BookShare, independent of the public school that again refused to set the student up for success rather than for a life of illiteracy! All of this was in addition to the proper and proven remedial instruction provided by UNPAID VOLUNTEERS!!!
Public schools let this child down! Nobody can deny the progress that this child has made OUTSIDE of the public schools once ds was provided with the proper instruction and supports and services! This young man has achieved beyond anyone’s wildest expectations!
Ds is entering a 4 yr college now as a Junior, while cohorts are only starting college, if they are even ready and able to attend college classes at all. I’m quite confident that the majority of Special Ed students are probably not even planning to go to college. They are either routed to the military or to trying to find an entry level job. They probably will be struggling to find even an entry-level job, having poor literacy and numeracy skills, and many will probably end up struggling for yet another generation- just as their parents and grandparents before them! And how many of them ended up there because nobody cared enough to speak up for their academic/social emotional needs and help them learn how to read and write and do math and integrate successfully and strive to reach their potential, but struggle with skills at even a foundational level?
I’m sorry, but as a parent of a struggling learner who more than demonstrated how greatly they benefitted from proper instruction (not from the schools, but from a non-educator, just another mom who wanted to help a kid learn to read).
A parent of a student who was repeatedly denied by the public schools to allow this student into courses that were needed to close the gaps…. Hence I am speaking up and making sure that these other kids are not going to continue to be overlooked, and left behind, especially when the methodologies already exist in the schools they are attending!!!!
I am going to make sure that other families will be able to find greater success in dealing with these public (and private) schools that prefer to deny these students what they need to achieve and reach a higher academic bar! Because these kids can achieve much more than what they are currently being offered.
And of course, they will never close gaps when teachers, CSE staff, and admins, do not offer these students useful IEP goals and useful methods to learn literacy, numeracy, and social skills!
Oops.. my apologies Stiles… it’s been a long work day…it’s not Child Find that allows for IDEA educational guardians, it’s IDEA… But it is yet another educational guideline that is usually ignored by public schools… Child Find has rarely been implemented appropriately… and in many districts, RTI is being used to delay or deny students from obtaining timely evaluations…
Doug,
PS-
One more thing, schools get extra funds for special education students and many times it’s actually preferable for them since they get additional funds for those kids (while students on 504 and general education students don’t get extra funding, so it’s actually economically preferable many times to keep students classified on IEPs than on 504 plans.) But depending on the numbers of special Ed students, at some point then they get dinged if they exceed greater than average; and that’s when the schools really start trying to keep the numbers in control and denying student classifications….
The schools have the game down and the families are pawns. It’s extremely sad and one is really feeling despaired when it gets to the point that communication is non-instant and you exhausted all other options. No parent ever prefers having to utilize a legal challenge, it happens when the school has no interest in working with a family or never plans on agreeing with them. 😦
Doug,
Your district must be one of the exceptions.
So many of us can only dream of such a district!
I can honestly say that I know of no families that can afford to take that legal route as an initial resort and we have all tried every other avenue first, but the schools just refused to work together with us and pushed the families to the point of bringing in the lawyers.
The SPED lawyer in our district is a known bully and plays all sides.
He is an impartial hearing officer, a school district lawyer and also represents families in districts he doesn’t represent. (He was even on our school districts list of impartial hearing officers, but was farther down on the rotation! How is that appropriate or acceptable, to be on the IHO list for the district that you are representing?!?!)
But recently more families seem to be pursuing OCR complaints instead of SPED /IDEA and State complaints and it seems to be much more efficient and productive for families;
it does not require hiring a lawyer and it tends to be significantly more effective.
The Procedural Safeguard Process is lengthy and expensive.
We asked our district for mediation and they denied to use a mediator to try to resolve our differences. (The President of the School Board told us to discuss it with the District’s lawyer at the impartial hearing. This is the sort of SD that will shoot themselves in the foot rather than work with a vocal and informed family. We even had our neuro-psych come to 2 CSE meetings to discuss the results of hte independent evaluation and she recommended Wilson or another similar multi-sensory, explicit, systematic method (and Wilson was being offered to others in the district) but for 2 school years after being aware of her report, continued to deny any sort of remedial instructional options outside of SPED co-taught classes! If we knew about OCR at the time, that would have been much more effective route to pursue than the Procedural Safeguard Process.
We were bullied by the school district admins and by their lawyer … and even the teachers would probably attest how they too, are also bullied by the culture of the SD and the current administration. It’s not just the families and students.
I am always happy to hear when a family was able to meet with success for their child and was able to get him what was needed and best for him so that he could reach his potential! You are one of the lucky ones! But I know exponentially more families that are repeatedly denied and were met with nothing other than a slammed door.
M,
How many of the more than 15,000 community based, democratic, transparent, non profit public school districts across the United States with more than 3.5 million teachers that teach about 49 million children in about 100,000 public schools do you have friends in?
Alot… Join some Special Ed forums Lloyd! Become a foster parent. Plus speak up locally and you’ll be shocked to find many, many families with struggling learners that are being left behind! Plus, speak to any foster parent! And since there are an estimated 500,000 foster children, there’s many more families out there than you can fathom!!!
Your answer, “a lot”, says nothing. Be specific. List all the districts where you personally know people who will be willing to support your allegations.
Community based, democratic, transparent, non-profit, traditional public schools vary in their support depending on many elements and one of the most important elements is funding in addition to finding enough specialists while the country is facing a teacher shortage.
This week, NPR ran a piece for almost an hour about special ed in California and talked to both parents, specialists, activists, etc.
It was clear from just about everyone that talked on that broadcast that the biggest challenge to meeting all the diverse and many needs of special ed children boils down to funding. It was mentioned that in San Francisco alone, state and federal funding to support special ed programs linked to federal laws was about $75 million annually but the costs to the district were more than twice that creating a burden that caused serious challenges for the district to deal with.
July 19, 2015
Rate of Autism in California School Age Kids up 7 Percent
http://www.npr.org/podcasts/432307980/forum
I learned more from that one broadcast that I think you will ever know.
Lloyd, You can start with Decoding Dyslexia if you’d like; there’s a chapter in pretty much every state (plus Canada too!)
I was born dyslexic. I still live with it. My older brother was dyslexic. I overcame my severe dyslexia thanks to my second, 1st grade teacher who my mother turned to for help. The teacher couldn’t do it all because she had over 30 students in her 1st grade classroom, but that teacher told my mother what she could do at home and recommended the books she could buy and use.
I know what learning disables are. I don’t appreciate you, M, lecturing to me about special ed and all the challenges teachers and even the specialist face dealing with it.