Wendy Lecker, civil rights attorney and columnist, says that everything the corporate reformers are doing is contrary to science and research. Kids are not helped by closing their schools and firing their teachers.
What matters most is not pressure, incentives, rewards, and sanctions: What matters most is relationships.
Connecting students to mentors and to teachers who care about them makes a huge difference in their attitude towards school.
It stands to reason that school mechanisms promoting a personal connection improve learning as well as social development. Neuroscientists have found that the brain does not recognize a sharp distinction between cognitive, social and motor functions. Consequently, research has shown that feelings of social isolation impair key cognitive abilities involved in learning.
Though they require substantial initial investments, educational policies that foster relationships save money in the long run.
Developmentally-appropriate preschool, with an emphasis on play, enables children to acquire the skills necessary to form healthy relationships. There is near universal consensus that quality preschool benefits children, increasing the chance of graduation, higher earnings, and decreasing placement in special education, involvement in the criminal justice system and the need for other social services. It also can save society as much as $16 for every dollar spent on preschool, by avoiding the costs of these later interventions.
Small class size, which fosters closer relationships between children and their teachers, has been proven to provide similar benefits, increasing graduation rates and earning potential, and decreasing the likelihood and cost to society of risky behavior. Research also shows that increasing class size has detrimental and costly long-term effects on at-risk children.
In the next round of reform, when the current era of test-and-measure, rank-and-stigmatize is thrown into the garbage heap, can we focus instead on connecting kids to adults who care about them?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Needs no ghost come from the grave …
Since the goal of Rewormers is not to improve public education but to augment their stock portfolios with a brand new industry they are busy creating I don’t think any of this should come as a surprise anymore.
Well stated!
I fully understand that what I’m about to post is not earth-shattering.
Yes, relationships are critical. As teachers, we know that but the students aren’t really aware of it. Plus, in this age of fragmented families of every sort, kids are often not connected to adults at home as much as a teacher.
If we went by test scores, our math teacher for the most remedial level kids would be the first to go. But ask those kids which teacher has their backs always and his name is usually the first one they say. He’s a good math teacher but he’s a huge life-saving influence. They sometimes call him their life coach. We’ve had kids say they don’t want to leave our school because of this teacher. He gets more visits from alumni than any other staff member.
Still waiting for the quantitative metric that proves this. I’m sure the Gates Foundation will develop something to measure it.
One of the many lame excuses given to me for my firing was that I didn’t raise reading scores “enough.” What is enough when students who are barely literate are expected to meet program goals designed for far more advanced students? What is enough when you have students who barely speak English and are illiterate in their own first language? What is enough when you have a student so traumatized by life events that even getting him to want to be in class is your first task? What is enough when you have students who have spent years failing and are convinced they are stupid? Anyone who thinks relationships are secondary is a fool. Hats off to your remedial math teacher. Let’s hope that someone in power recognizes his worth.
VSAM is a SCAM to keep teachers from tenure.
“Still waiting for the quantitative metric that proves this. I’m sure the Gates Foundation will develop something to measure it.”
If you give me 2:1 odds I’ll bet ya two bits that it will happen.
My reply above is brought to you by a generous grant from the BM Gates Foundation.
Reminds me that the insidious group “Deans for Impact” deserve a special place of dishonor in a throughly dishonorable enterprise.
Ed reform is actually moving in the opposite direction- less and less adult interaction with students.
This is from the US Department of Education. It’s ed tech grants to school districts.
They’re spending an enormous amount of money on devices, internet capability and private consultants. They’re also hiring ed tech coordinators- full time jobs with no student contact. Once the grants run out schools will cover that cost. It’s a continuing expense.
The Obama Administration is wrong. It isn’t “plus/and”. If public schools hire ed tech consultants they have to make that money up somewhere else.
This whole “plus/and” thing is a fantasy. I don’t know which corporate leader they’re parroting when they say it but it’s nonsense.
It’s ridiculous on its face. Budgets are lists of priorities and all the ed reform slogans in the world won’t make that reality go away.
If I have X amount of money and I spend Y on one thing that means I have LESS for the other thing I want. That is reality. They can’t run on a deficit, school districts. They prioritize costs- lists- 1, 2, 3 not “plus/and!”
The worst thing about the ed reform echo chamber is this insistence that everyone can have everything they want- every gimmick, every experiment, it all promoted and gets scaled up.
It is a fantasy. Something has to give.
https://rttd.grads360.org/#communities/pdc/documents/12121
My diverse school district has high graduation rates and high post secondary education rates despite the 30% free or reduced lunch students. The reasons for success are simple: caring teachers and support staff, outreach to parents and demanding comprehensive academics available to most students. As someone that worked with very poor ELLs, I was fortunate to work in a team that always put the needs of all students first. My students were embraced by all members of the community. When my students needed a pair of glasses that the family couldn’t afford or a class trip, the staff had a fund to help fill in the gap. The PTA embraced my students. When they ran the book fair, my students got to pick out a free book, compliments of the PTA. We always worked to be inclusive. As a teacher of the poorest students, I got to the enormous generosity of the community first hand. My students benefited a great deal from attending an integrated, mostly middle class school. I mention this, not to brag, but to say it is possible to do with support and building relationships. We did not eliminate “the gap,” but we put a big dent in it. Many of my former students escaped poverty from the work of our teachers, counselors. social workers and nurses.
“Reform” is not only built on a mountain of assumptions and lies, it harms public schools and the challenging work they do. Not only is the over testing soul crushing for poor students, targeted communities see class sizes increase and members of the support services to poor students furloughed due to the parasitic impact of charters siphoning off much needed funding. The lack of resources in many urban schools now is the opposite of what these poor students need. They need more support and relationships than middle class students, but under our current misguided policies, they get less.
The Wendy Lecker article refers to an article on relationships in early childhood in Mosaic science magazine, on which it relies—but it gives no link. And I can’t find it at Mosaicscience.com Can the author or another person give us the link to the article?
http://mosaicscience.com/story/surviving-troubled-childhood-resilience-neglect-adversity
Some edited remarks from that article.
Werner and Smith were psychologists who had become interested in which factors in a child’s early life set them off on a positive trajectory, and which ones really get in the way of them reaching their full potential. Little did the families or the researchers know that this would turn into one of the longest studies of child development and childhood adversity that there has ever been.
The researchers monitored the families from before the babies’ birth, following them and checking in at ages one, two, 10, 18, 32 and 40. They managed to track most of the cohort
The researchers followed first the parents and then the children, finding out all sorts of things about how the cohort were doing and what sort of background they had come from. They used a mix of semi-structured interviews, questionnaires and community records of mental health, marriage, divorce, criminal convictions, school achievement and employment.
The researchers in the Kauai study separated the nearly 700 children involved into two groups. Approximately two-thirds were thought to be at low risk of developing any difficulties, but about one-third were classed as “high-risk”: born into poverty, perinatal stress, family discord (including domestic violence), parental alcoholism or illness.
The researchers expected to find that the “high-risk” children would do less well than the others as they grew up. In line with those expectations, they found that two-thirds of this group went on to develop significant problems. But totally unexpectedly, approximately one-third of the “high-risk” children didn’t. They developed into competent, confident and caring individuals, without significant problems in adult life. The study of what made these children resilient has become as least as important as the study of the negative effects of a difficult childhood. Why did some of these children do so well despite their adverse circumstances?
The Framingham study over decades showed that it was the family connection that made for success. Kids in poverty lose this boost.
Today, the radio and newspapers’ talking heads were saying how the brains of children gain the most int he first 3 years…
Exactly… Schools matter, but it is at home where children get the nurture they need… or not!
One other statement from Maddox’s article and an observation:
“Our relationships really are key,” says McCubbin. “One person can make a big difference.”
Alas, I am unaware of an algorithm to quantify that quality . . .
One of the reasons many of my poor ELLs managed to escape poverty is that they had at least one loving parent or grandparent in their life. Their parents worked hard, and most parents did not have a substance abuse problem. It also helped that these kids got to attend a middle class school with caring adults.
Thanks GE2L2R!
I swear, I get crazy when I read about what works, after being part of that huge Pew study on THE PRINCIPLES OF LEARNING, which was the real NATIONAL STANDARDS RESEARCH. I ironically, all the links to the research that I have result in an ERRO PAGE. This vastly expensive research for which I have THE VOLUMES produced whine ended is GONE. Thus we can talk endlessly both what does not work.
I love Wendy, and I agree it is the TEACHER and the relationship built between the adult and the child which is key, which is why tying the teacher’s hands and mandating everything needs learning. But after 2 years as the cohort in that study, which concluded that REWARDS for hard work and genuine performance/ achievement was a clear PRINCIPLE in every one of the 20,000 classrooms studied, I think that it matters when a teacher uses this principle to BUILD A RELATIONSHIP of trust… ‘you do the work, and you will see the rewards.’
Only in education is there a constant stream of “here’s what works,” even when the evidence is out there, proven in real third level research in tens of thousand so classrooms, but teams from Harvard and the LRDC at the uNi of Pittsburgh. http://ifl.pitt.edu
I mean here is a 1989 piece from the district in which I taught , written before Pew chose our district, AND MY CLASSROOM AS COHORT.
Click to access challengestandards.pdf
If I had not been in the study, not attended weekly LRDC seminars in Distrct 2, for 2 years, had not seen the results, I would believe I was hallucinating.
I HAVE THOSE VOLUMES IN MY BACK ROOM. No one wants to see them.
After all, I am just a mere teacher who remembers what it was like to teach from 1963 until 2000, when everything changed.
SLS,
Like you, I was a mere teacher who remembers what it was like prior to 2000, but I was unaware of the larger forces that were changing the nature of my classroom for the worse. Being mired in the reality of the classroom did not allow much time for awareness of and reflection on the larger picture.
It was around then that I slowly realized that I had gone from being a professional to an employee. It has only been since I have retired that I have started to realize what those forces were.
Go to perdaily.com and see the devastation in LA…the second largest school district in the FIFTEEN THOUSAND, EIGHT HUNDRED And EIGHTY.
NYC was the first, and the largest. It worked here so they imported it nation wide. In a little over two decades the EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX completely destroyed public education and created a marketplace to enrich the hedge funds and billionaires, making real professionals TEACHERS, into mere employees.
Click to access eic-oct_11.pdf
Yes, yes, and yes. This article states well the importance of relationships. It’s sad that this has to actually be studied and stated, because it should be an inherent value and goal in all education.
I don’t know whether to cheer at reading this or cry. I work so hard to build my classroom community. Last year was especially hard with all of the issues that my administrators kept throwing at me, but I still made it work.
But my new to the country kids weren’t reading at the end of the year and I was told I had low expectations and was fired. I still don’t have a job for the upcoming year and may be leaving the profession altogether.
I’m so disgusted by all of this.
Join the club. You would think that perhaps the powers could be could figure out that blindly worshiping the numbers doesn’t tell you squat. Welcome to the club. I hope you are not too experienced or too old; that’s a job killer.
Here in Nashville, TN (where we just defeated 4 pro-charter school board candidates who received scads of cash from Stand For Children! Woot! Woot!) a new initiative is creating Standards for Social and Emotional learning. Let the testing and surveys begin. Duane is right!
http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/tn/2016/08/03/tennessee-to-become-national-pioneer-in-creating-social-and-emotional-standards/#.V65gZE1ujIU