Whenever you listen to the rhetoric of “reformers,” you must always bear in mind that what they mean is actually the opposite of what they say. “Reform,” for example, does not mean that they want to improve public schools; it means “privatization” and the elimination of public schools.
Emily Talmade, teacher-blogger in Maine, says that we must be wary of the new reform focus on “social emotional learning.” They do not mean that teachers and parents should pay attention to children’s ability to work and play well with others, or to their feelings of adequacy and self-worth.
Behind the new buzzwords is a renewed effort to push competency based education (CBE) and computer-based teaching and assessment. The leaders of the new reform movement hail from the tech sector–Gates, Zuckerberg, Reed Hastings, Pearson, and more–and they see a future of computer-driven education, teaching and testing at all times, measuring and ranking students.
Can they be stopped? Emily doesn’t say how, but the answer lies with local school boards who are informed and who refuse to jump on their bandwagon. Maybe that is why ALEC is so determined to strip power from local school boards and transfer it to governors and state control. After all, it is easier to buy 50 governors than to persuade nearly 15,000 local school boards. The answer also lies with informed parents. Be aware of what your state is doing; refuse to allow your child to be subject to data mining and CBE. Opt out. Send a message: Not with my child.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Emily is a sharp one. All should take heed of what she has been and is saying about public education.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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Quotes from the fictional novel, The Circle, by David Eggers, about a powerful internet company and our society’s obsessions with sharing and social media.
“The crew has been working to coordinate all student measurements-to make sure all homework, reading, attendance and test scores are all kept in one unified database. They’re almost there. We’re inches away from the moment when, by the time a student is ready for college, we have a complete knowledge of everything a student has learned. Every word they read, every word they looked up, every sentence they highlighted, every equation they wrote. Every answer and correction. The guesswork of knowing where all students stand and what they know will be over.”
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Once again, “reformers” address a very complex issue with narrow focused non-solution. Humans are complex, emotional beings. We cannot and should not try to force people to think like a computer. Duckworth and company want to teach children to act like trained seals by teaching them to be compliant, conditioned drones. Then, they will be amenable to CBE and other forms of computer based instruction. They believe they can suppress the emotional component of human psyche which they want to ignore in the same manner they refuse to accept the harmful impact of poverty.
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true: ““reformers” address a very complex issue with narrow focused non-solution” be careful because this will get reduced down to “grit” as it already has… It is personality theory and just that — theory. It is appropriate for college students to fill out questionnaires but those same questionnaires cannot be used in middle school (as Duckworth tries to do)…. Parents need to tell the schools if we are talking about personality issues then I want a trained MD or Psychologist with appropriate licensing and clinical practice (the clinical hours they put in for training.) If people recall, we went through this kind of discussion with the “values clarification” movement and it boiled down to getting tossed out because the teachers were criticized by parents and others “you let the kids talk and decide whether they are going to bring knives or guns on the school picnic.”
One of the better models that was evolved was Klausmeier at the University of Madison WI and it included Individually guided motivation and conferencing.
This finding “traits” and measuinrg “grit…. ” etc is not appropriate. Even OCEAN one of the favaored frameworks is not validated and we do not have operational definitions for students at these ages (checklists and rubrics but lacking in reliability and validity so it is even worse than the PARRC crap)
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Maybe that is why ALEC is so determined to strip power from local school boards and transfer it to governors and state control. Not just ALEC.
Think of the billionaire-funded Center for Reinventing Public Education promoting Portfolio Districts, achievement districts, charters and computer-based everything and hundreds of other fans of market-based solutions that by-passing elected school boards and citizen voice. The hope for public education rests with parents who are not ready to give in to the billionaires who do not care about “unprofitable” students.
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Gates, Zuckerberg, Pearson,… are investors in the largest seller of schools-in-a-box.
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What’s wrong with SEL?
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a lot of things — namely the conceptual model and framework because you are delving in personality theory — and there are many different “theories” and I am not buying what David Driscol is doing with NAEP measuring grit.
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Even beyond that. Trying to reduce social emotional learning to set of checklists and rubrics reduces a child to some cookie cutter image of what a child should look like. Take the statement “Student interacts with peers… often, occasionally, infrequently, not at all. Not that anyone asks that question, but some version of that type of question might be used to analyze a child’s social emotional development. Someone decides what is acceptable, typical behavior. Everyone else is deficient if they don’t reach that standard. As a special education teacher, I have been asked occasionally to fill out a survey type questionnaire on a child up for an IEP review. That information, along with input with other significant figures as well as from the student, is interpreted by a psychologist who contributes a report which is then combined with classroom data and any other reports from professionals working with that student. All of the reports are read and discussed by an IEP team and recommendations are developed. It is a process that may take a while but is more likely to lead to a plan that meets the needs of the student and their family. This process should never be handed over to a computer.
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I had a professor at Fresno State in the early 1960’s who wrote a pretty decent book on the same topic. Dr. Larry Pape. The neuros will tell you that virtually no learning takes place without emotional involvement being a prime factor.
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As always with terms, look behind the label – many folks use same term to mean different things. Don’t assume behind the label is automatically good or bad – see both who is saying it and what they are saying.
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“As always with terms, look behind the label – many folks use same term to mean different things. Don’t assume behind the label is automatically good or bad – see both who is saying it and what they are saying.” and what philosophy and conceptual framework is behind it… We have too much of the narrow restrictive interpretations of Skinner and Pavlov and not enough of the emphasis on attachment theory, Vygotsky, etc.. so they build a crappy questionnaire but you have to know what philosophy/model/personality theory is behind it and these are not well developed with school populations of the age groups we deal with K-12.
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If you look behind the curtain of SEL you’s see pulling strings CORE. CORE is California Office to Reform Education governed by 9 or so California Superintendents. It may seem like this is a government group but CORE is private closed group influencing education policy often claiming to represent their local school district. However, the problem is the local school district is suppose to make public policy with input from all, including of course the superintendent. CORE is the tiger and climbing on the tiger for a reform ride could mean that the local school board policy is driven by the hired help. Line diving management and policy makers between democratically elected school boards and the hired superintendent is broken when the Board doesn’t know whose interest a school board’s superintendent is promoting.
Words that are being used are important. And, CORE tries to pretend that they are part of government with not just their name making it sound like a government agency, but with promoting the concept of a CORE District. The Department of Education gave the CORE seven school districts a waiver regarding NCLB lobbied for by CORE. Some of the seven California school districts receiving waivers the school boards discussed and voted on the waiver. But, some, like Oakland, never placed the requested waiver on its school board agenda and bypassed the Board as did the Department of Education in granting the waiver. A private group applied for NCLB waiver in the same of Oakland School District and it was granted with no public meeting on the subject never being put on the Oakland School Board agenda. Back door successful attempt to take a school board out of its policy making role by CORE. Most of the Oakland School Board members that where just re-elected don’t see anything wrong with end run around local school board’s exclusive right to make policy decisions believing its about the end and not the means.
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July 31, 2014
If interested, see … information about Creative Learning Exchange’s upcoming 2014 Systems Thinking in K-12 Education Conference.
It was my pleasure to sponsor DeKalb County [Georgia] parent Kim Ault’s participation in the 2012 conference. Kim was chosen purely by luck of the draw. The conference was held at Babson College, Wellesley MA, near Boston. Folks from Canada, China, Japan, Iran and other places of the world attended the conference.
I asked Kim why she thought there was such a global presence at the conference. What she relayed the folk from China said is a bit arresting, or it ought to be:
“China wants to learn from what the U.S. is not doing. China sees the U.S. is not doing Systems Thinking and cannot understand why not.”
Following is some more of what Kim said about her conference experience. You may recognize the relevance to social and emotional learning (SEL).
“Tracey Benson, a former teacher and district leader, and Kathy Sheppe, an assistant principal at a school in Tucson, Arizona, demonstrated how application of systems thinking resulted in some of the youngest children gaining self-control and self-governance. Systems thinking helped the children develop awareness of their mental model and stock of kind words that can play out as positive cycles of causality and of their mental model and stock of upsetting words that can play out as negative cycles of causality.
“The six-year old children were able to figure out why a negative cycle of causality would continue to get worse and worse and cause more and more problems for themselves and others. Theirs was a newly developed awareness that caused them to move from a negative mental model to a positive mental model and what the end result would be if they strived to maintain behavior in the positive mental model.
“The two models of positive and negative causality caught on with the little six-year old boys and it was reported that while on the playground, if one child was leaning toward a negative cycle of causality, or moving out of a positive cycle of causality, the other children would gently nudge the child to stay aware of being in the positive cycle.”
“When looking at this application of systems thinking and systems dynamics, I immediately thought about how it could be applied even by school administrators and guidance counselors to help guide children through instances of bullying and being bullied.”
This is year I have managed to save a dime so as to sponsor a person’s participation in The W. Edwards Deming Institute’s 2014 Fall Conference and Pre-Conference. And, by luck of the draw, as with Kim, this time that person happens to be an Atlanta Public Schools teacher. Awesome! Oh how I wish I had the dimes to sponsor an APS team, or at least the teacher and the teacher’s principal!
The “Deming journey” is a style of Systems Thinking that also encompasses social and emotional learning (SEL), inherently. A school district near Austin TX that has been on its Deming journey for a while has come to speak of itself as “Happyville,” arguably a consequence of SEL though not necessarily known as that.
Ed Johnson
Advocate for Quality in Public Education
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“Systems thinking helped the children develop awareness of their mental model and stock of kind words that can play out as positive cycles of causality and of their mental model and stock of upsetting words that can play out as negative cycles of causality.”
What could positive or negative “cycles of causality” be? How is causality a circle? Is using a linear concept such as causality adaptive to modification by a circle shift and distort the meaning of the word causality?
Are there related circles of association as association is often mistaken for causality?
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