I am trying to take a break. Reading all the comments, but posting only when I must.
Doug1943 asked a long question. He is immersed in the privatization narrative, as you will see. His email ID suggests a connection to a libertarian institute.
My short answer to him is: read my last book, “Reign of Error,” which goes into detail about what children and schools need. No school is so bad that it can’t be improved. No high-performing nation in the world has turned its public schools over to the private sector. Test scores are primarily measures of family income. Choice promotes segregation by race, religion, income, and social class.
Here is Doug’s question:
“I think the problem is this: the people opposing allowing people to escape from bad public schools don’t seem to want to acknowledge that there is such a thing as bad public schools. Or, at most, they seem to believe that if we just raised taxes and put more money into these schools, they’d be better. Or, that there is nothing the schools can do, it’s general poverty that is the problem.
“Of course, if any or all these views are correct, then you must carry on doing what you’re doing (which seems to me, as an ‘outsider’, is just talking to yourselves, which is the norm for American forums on both Left and Right).
“However, I think you ought to give some thought to trying to address the issues that proponents of vouchers, charters, etc. claim are real: that at least some public schools are unreformably bad, and parents who have some ambition for their children should be allowed to escape from them. In other words, should have the same opportunities that the Clinton and Obama children had.
“Or, if you agree that some public schools are bad, but not unreformably so, how can they be reformed?
“It’s this that — again as an outsider — strikes me as your great weakness: you don’t seem to admit that there is a problem at all. Thus your quotes around “better” in your reply: you seem to dismiss good exam results that some charters get. Now, maybe you’re right about these results– I certainly have huge reservations about multiple-choice standardized tests. But you ought to make the case.
“By the way, I personally would prefer there to be a system of state schools that had high standards, and educated all children to the limits of their inherent capabilities, so that the issue of ‘charter schools’ and vouchers wouldn’t even arise.. I assume that such a system would cost substantially more than the current system, but that it would be well worth it. But we don’t seem to be allowed to have that choice.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
You deserve a break, Diane! Have a very happy and healthy 2017!!!
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When all forms of “choice” require
*bad standards
*bad assessments
*bad accountability
~ STATE or FEDERAL MANDATES ~
then there is NO CHOICE
mykidzliberty
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Kick back and relax. You deserve it.
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Escape is laughably not a solution to the overall problems.
We’ve wasted precious opportunities on failed methods. We could have gotten quite far by now in learning what works and what doesn’t work, and why for various schools and school cultures in turning things around.
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The voucher folks always like to point out how privileged families like the Obamas send their children to private schools. Yet, I’ve not seen a voucher program that offers $20-30K so any poor family can send their kids to the elite private schools. The lack of serious proposals to offer vouchers at elite schools levels means that the voucher proponents are unserious when they compare the options of poor families with those that are well off.
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Joel,
In urban areas, the voucher must be $40,000-50,000. Trump paid $50,000
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In my area, there are parochial and private schools that cost $8-12k per year. Many children would do better in that environment, but we force their parents (who can’t afford it) to send their children to traditional public schools that cost about $20k/year per kid.
I used to be against vouchers, but seeing this situation repeat itself has led me to support vouchers solely for low income families.
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John,
NYC has some good parochial schools. In most parts of the country, the religious schools are not good schools. In Indiana, for example, they accept voucher money because they don’t have enough students to survive. A recent study of vouchers in Louisiana and Indiana (which I posted here) concluded that kids who transfer to these schools lose ground academically.
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Whether any parochial school is good is irrelevant. Vouchers for religious schools are a blatant violation of the constitution.
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John: How is draining funds and resources from the real public schools a good thing? Public tax money going to a private school that may or may not be better than the public school? Who supplies the transportation and bussing for these voucher schools? These private and religious schools already get a tax break.
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Joe,
“How is draining funds and resources from the real public schools a good thing? Public tax money going to a private school that may or may not be better than the public school? Who supplies the transportation and bussing for these voucher schools? These private and religious schools already get a tax break.”
I don’t look at vouchers as a solution to the problem, but I take issue with two things that you said. If we spend less per student when they go to a voucher school, that leaves more money to spend on other students, not less.
Also, while I agree that vouchers are not a good solution for the public school system writ large, I think they are a good solution for some individual students, and as a parent and advocate for low income students, I just get frustrated when we (the public) will pay to send a student to a high school with a 50% drop out rate and very few models of success for low income students, but won’t instead spend a fraction of that to send them to a school where the parents believe (IMO frequently accurately) that their students will do better.
IMO, it’s no different that what my parents did, which was to move from a city with a poor school district to one with a better one. That kind of choice happens every day in our country. I would just like to see low income students have the ability to go to whatever school they have the highest likelihood of success at. If we’re not doing that, we’re blocking paths for families to escape generational poverty for political reasons.
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John,
Your parochial and private schools that cost 8 – 12K/year only take the kids who can be educated cheaply. And if they can’t or are disruptive, the schools can dump them. Or just ignore them since no one is really checking on whether or not they are doing a good job. No system to test them for any issues or any oversight of teachers or abuse because who needs it! After all, the typical NYC neighborhood public school budget is LESS than 10K per student! (That’s 300,000 per class of 30). No one argues that as long as you don’t care about the kids who aren’t cheaply accommodated in your neighborhood public school, you can’t save money.
Very few parochial or private schools have their kids take the state tests but the ones that do and KEEP all their children have results that are no better than public schools. Check out the state test results of the typical Yeshiva schools which have been notoriously abysmal in NYC. Even the private school Epiphany — in Manhattan — has test scores that are worse than many good neighborhood public schools.
It is appalling when the public schools that spend 20K a year per pupil ON AVERAGE because they provide the dumping grounds for the many unethical charter schools and the private schools that expel kids who have special needs or are too much trouble are attacked by people for spending “too much money”.
What you are advocating is that cities simply set up a two tier system with public schools that are charter-like in their ability to dump any child who won’t be a credit to their school, and public schools where those kids are dumped. And we can underfund the public schools where the kids are dumped because they will have the poorest and least able to protest parents and kids and all those kids with special needs aren’t worth it anymore. Warehouse them, the privatizers say! And no doubt lots of privatizers will be happy to make a profit to warehouse the unwanted children who can’t be educated for $12k year. Let’s see, give those privatizers 1.2 million for 100 kids pay 3 teachers $300,000 plus $10,000/month to rent a few rooms and you have over $700,000 profit for the privatizers! Nice.
And the public schools can model themselves after charter schools and now choose which of the poor kids are worthy of the better education and which are worthy only of being in the “dump” public schools. We can cut that 20k spending way down because the high needs kids in the “dump” public schools you advocate would now be left to warehouse in classes of 40 because who cares about them anyway, right? No need for one on one aides anymore. Your 5 year old has a severe allergy? Sorry, but our public school is under attack for spending too much money so either you sit with him every day like that aide that is now too expensive for us, or better pray he can survive an allergy attack. That “aide” adds 5,000 per student for his class and people like John will attack our school for “wasting” too much money so better home school.
We can save so much money by telling kids with special needs we can no longer afford to educate them and if they don’t have rich parents they are SOL. we can save so much money if we merely cherry pick the cheapest to educate kids and leave the rest — mostly poor and disadvantaged and disabled or severely allergic or ill — to their own devices where the school says “get out of here” your kid is just too expensive and we no longer have any obligation to him.
I’m sure that’s the kind of “public” education our President-elect can get behind.
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Q Whether any parochial school is good is irrelevant. Vouchers for religious schools are a blatant violation of the constitution. END Q
I pose you this: If a Baptist gets food stamps (SNAP), and redeems them at a food pantry run by the Roman Catholic Church, to purchase Kosher food, is this using tax money to “establish a religion”?
The constitutionality of using tax-supported vouchers to be redeemed at schools run by religious institutions, to provide education has been solved by the Supreme Court in 2002, in the case of Zelman v. Simmons-Harris.
Why do you feel there is a constitutional violation, when the Supreme Court has ruled clearly that there is not?
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John: A LOT of areas spend nowhere near $20,000 per student in public school. In Utah, for example, the state spends less than $7000 per student per year.
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Threatened Out West,
Re spending, yes, I’m frequently shocked by how little is spent on education in states like Utah, Arizona, etc.
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Here in Az we see lots of money for computers, none for teachers. The reason: computer companies give kickbacks. The solution: form a powerful teachers union which gives kickbacks to legislators. Done.
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pbarret: The “kickbacks” from teachers are the votes from an informed public–“informed,” which is why the propaganda has trashed teachers for years.
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John,
If a family comes to you informing you that their child is struggling with literacy and numeracy skills and has had an IEP and the neuropsychologist who evaluated this teenager informs you they are looking for a school that can help remediate them in those areas noted in prior psycho-Ed evaluations and most frequently I’m an independent educational evaluation what would it look like regarding accepting the student and what is offered in regards to any remedial instruction that’s been identified as a need ?
What programs or methods would be offered? Would you earnestly work together as a team? or would you instead call in your legal team to avoid providing the needed instruction?
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M,
Try a charter school. Unless they are created to serve only children with disabilities, your child won’t be accepted.
Why don’t you suggest alternatives since the charters don’t want your child?
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M,
“what would it look like regarding accepting the student”
We, like most charters, are either open in a grade or not. If we are, all students are accepted, first come first served. If we have too many ahead of April 1st, we have a random lottery.
Regarding programs or methods, here are a few thoughts…
– IEPs are determined by the sending public school district in NY. We can work with parents to lobby for services (or removal of services).
– Most charters are too small to support 4-1-1 or 8-1-1 services, and are unfortunately prohibited in NY from working with each other to provide these services (unlike traditional schools which have BOCES). Money follows students with IEPs, so some services are provided by the district and they get the funds.
– Charters are generally very good at remediation. We’re a middle school, and our incoming kids are frequently many grades below level.
– Each charter has a different way of doing things, so assuming you have some charter and non-charter options, I would recommend to anyone that they meet with school leaders and teachers to get specifics.
– We have never fought providing services, but in fairness, it is the district that “spends” the special education funds that follow students, so they would have the need to balance student needs against budget for IEP students.
– My experience with charters is that they do work well with parents, who have the option at any time to leave. Enrollment is what pays the bills, so there is incentive to keep every student that enrolls.
– Contrary to what many here say, my experience has been that most families who leave charters do because they have moved out of the area. The remainder are mostly because they disagree with a decision to retain their student, or annoyed that the school is holding them partially responsible for their student’s behavior and work.
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M,
Two more thoughts…
– We (and many charters) have an open door policy, so parents are invited to visit at any time as long as they are not disruptive.
– Longer school days give us a lot more flexibility for additional remediation with students who need it without pulling them from regular classroom instruction. I know many traditional public school teachers will do this after school, but it is easier for everyone when it is just a scheduled part of the day.
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Good luck getting into Success Academy, M. They will let you visit but they won’t accept your child.
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Diane & M,
“Good luck getting into Success Academy, M. They will let you visit but they won’t accept your child.”
I won’t pretend this is other than anecdotal, but I wouldn’t take Diane’s “advice” about charter schools at face value.
https://www.successacademies.org/education-blog-post/standing-up-for-my-special-needs-scholars/
In fairness, there is a lawsuit by a few parents alleging students with IEPs not treated well, but we’ll see how that turns out. That seems to be more about behavioral issues and disagreements with parents over whether they are willful or a result of disabilities. As Diane points out, parents are sometimes the weak link and not willing to confront behavioral issues.
Also, what Diane describes is illegal and IMO, fictitious. There is no data to support that allegation, and few if any media stories or lawsuits despite the willingness of anti-charter folks to support those things. People who are against charters for philosophical reasons or are threatened by them make up or repeat a lot of false information about them. Ask for evidence.
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John,
Funny how so many parents with special needs kids at Success Academy who write about the accommodations their kids are given seem to be affluent and college educated.
Funny how many of the parents suing the charter school chain for ushering out their special needs kids are less affluent and often non-white.
Funny how the mother who claims Success Academy taught her ELL kid who “didn’t speak any English at home” just happens to be completely fluent herself in English and obviously reads and writes at a very high level in English!
Most ELL students in NYC public schools translate for their parents who have little English. They aren’t raised in bilingual homes where the parent chooses only to speak in the non-English language in the early years but can easily adapt once the child enters school.
It is incredibly misleading for charters to promote this as having miraculous results with ELL students instead of recognizing that they are offering up a very unique kind of ELL student with a parent who is fluent and literate in English but who wants their child to have a 2nd language before they get to the school years.
But since charters want to rob resources from schools who teach the ELL students who don’t have one parent fluent in English, they continue with the lie that isn’t it a miracle that this child of a parent who is fluent and writes remarkably well in English was able to be taught English by the fantastic Success Academy teachers!
Keep it up — you can rob public schools of even more resources. And LOL at your suggestion that the ONLY parents who leave Success Academy are those who move far away! That’s only true if you are talking about the growing number of affluent college educated parents they are desperately marketing to. The notion that the kids on the got to go lists are just leaving because their PARENTS wanted it should shame you but it won’t. Humiliate a kid, fail him over and over again until he is 9 years old and tell his parent you aren’t letting him get out of 2nd grade (to be tested) until he is worthy and blame the parents (always low-income of course) and accuse them of caring so little about their kids that they want them in a failing school instead.
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The voucher program proposed here in Virginia, and vetoed by the governor, would have proffered an amount roughly equal to the per-pupil expenditures already underway. The amount was estimated to be about $3,625 per annum. No one, suggested that this amount would be adequate to pay the costs of an elite prep school, like Phillips Exeter or Choate.
Nevertheless, even this modest amount, could be applied with parental contributions, to enable families to pay tuition at lower-cost private schools, or home-school their children.
I have never seen a school-choice opponent suggest that a voucher scheme have payments adequate to enroll children at elite academies.
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Cema4yb,
If the amount of the voucher is so small that it would be accepted only at backwoods church schools with underpaid teachers, why do you keep saying that vouchers would allow kids to have the same choice as Obama, Clinton, and Trump? That’s not true. A voucher of $3625 would not get any student into a reputable private or religious school.
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It has been my experience, that people who are opposed to school choice, often pose “bogus” issues, instead of discussing the real issues.
No serious person is suggesting that a voucher program, which would proffer an amount roughly equivalent to the current per-pupil amount in a state, would be adequate to send a child to an elite private academy.
Just because school choice, would not enable all children to attend an elite prep school, is no reason to kill the program. This is like killing Pell Grants (BEOG), because recipients cannot afford the tuition to an Ivy League school.
A voucher program, which presents an amount of x dollars, will enable the parent to send a child to a school with a tuition cost of x dollars (or a tuition of less than x dollars, or to home school the child).
Of course, some families could augment the voucher payment with their own financial resources. This would enable the payment of tuition in the amount of x + family contribution.
Vouchers need not necessarily be the exact same uniform payment. The payments could be calculated on a formula. This formula could consist of various factors:
Urban v. rural (Urban schools generally have higher overhead costs than rural schools)
Sliding scale (Lower income families would receive more in voucher payments than the rich)
Special Needs (parents of special needs children would receive a higher payment. This is entirely fair. Already, more is spent on the handicapped, learning-disabled, etc. Also parents of gifted/talented children could receive additional funds, to assist the child in reaching full potential)
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cema4by,
enough with the pro-voucher lectures. This is a blog devoted to the strengthening and improvement of all children and to public schools. I won’t post any more from you unless you have something new to say.
As I said to someone the other day, you are akin to a fan for the Boston Red Sox coming in to the locker room of the Yankees and trying to persuade them that the Red Sox are a better team. You won’t persuade anyone here. Stop repeating yourself. Repetition is not persuasive either.
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cemaby4y writes: “It has been my experience, that people who are opposed to school choice, often pose ‘bogus’ issues, instead of discussing the real issues.”
That’s funny, you could replace “opposed to school choice” with “opposed to public schools” in your sentence and be completely correct. Then you say:
“No serious person is suggesting that a voucher program, which would proffer an amount roughly equivalent to the current per-pupil amount in a state, would be adequate to send a child to an elite private academy.”
And it’s not being sold that way?–or at least NOT explained so that parents’ keep their misguided assumptions in place–that with school choice, “my child will be able to attend an elite private academy”?
And then when public schools have been reduced to trash or entirely eliminated, they will have “choice” no longer?
If you read this blog regularly, and unless you mentally cherry-pick, you have to know the many REASONABLE and well-thought-out arguments opposing vouchers. One of those reasons is: many parents don’t have time or the background to get into the politics of the situation, or to be (as you say) “serious,” about what vouchers actually do, or what’s going on in the long run.
So, the privateers say, with their own needs in mind, let’s sell the idea of vouchers to unsuspecting parents, by denigrating schools and teachers, focusing on problems and erasing from the conversation what’s good about them; so parents too-easily think public schools and teachers are bad. Then, we can using the deliberate OMISSION of facts, the sleazy abuse of parents’ trust, and the manipulation of their apparently “un-serious” fears-about and authentic desires-for the education of their children.
What good is a school, or even an institution of education, if it cannot make money for its owners?
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Cemab4y,
Yes, straw man arguments are the rule here rather than the exception. Posit something ridiculous that no or few reformers actually say and then knock it down and feel like you accomplished something. Then pat a few people on the back for doing the same thing.
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I appreciate the nature of this blog. It takes a measure of courage to post information that is obviously at variance with your viewpoints. I hope that we can strengthen education, and work to prepare all of America’s children for the 21st century.
Sadly, many American schools are failing at the task that has been commissioned to them. This is an empirical fact, and not a criticism of any individual or profession.
It will take courage, to face up and examine the difficulties encountered, and to effect solutions. I am open to any solution that will enable the schools to do their job.
I am particularly horrified by the public schools in our nation’s capital. I ride through this city twice a day. These schools are in the shadow of the federal government, and they are a disaster. It is a taboo subject, the feds do not want to go near the problem. The silence is deafening.
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Cema4by,
Wrong, wrong. Please read “Reign of Error.” Don’t comment again until you do.
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To cemab4y: who drives through Washington D.; C. every day and see horrible schools: So if you want more of the same, Betsy DeVos is your girl. Fortunately, her influence, and that of others like her, is not universally implemented–yet.
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cemab4y-
Have you visited Washington DC in the hours before it officially wakes up for business?
If you have, you may have noticed that number of homeless and poor that sleep in the streets and on the grounds of the federal buildings (or at least did prior to 9/11, as I admit I have not been there that early since that fateful day)- but it was truly shocking to see how many poor and homeless people were there in the streets and how they “disapeared” once the grounds people arrived. It had an almost apocalyptic feel to see how it was all whitewashed by dawn!
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For the record, I am NOT opposed to public schools. I went to public schools, and a public university. As I have said, the public schools here in Fairfax county VA are uniformly excellent. The public schools in Baytown TX (Where NASA is located) are excellent. The publicly supported and publicly ran Illinois Math and Science Academy is an excellent public school (for the gifted and talented).
I believe sincerely, that all children deserve a quality education, regardless of their zip code. Are not children in SouthEast Washington as deserving as children in Herndon, VA?
The Andover prep school charges about $52,000 per year for a boarding student. The failed Virginia voucher plan proffered about $3,625 per year. Anyone can see, that the voucher is inadequate to meet the costs at an elite prep school. Any parent who would believe that he could send a child to prep school for this amount, is fooling themselves.
I do not get this statement Q And then when public schools have been reduced to trash or entirely eliminated, they will have “choice” no longer? END Q
Parental choice will not reduce or eliminate public schools. Schools which meet the demands of parents, will survive and prosper. Schools that do not make the cut, will be forced to down-size. What’s wrong with that?
I have more faith in parents than you do. I believe that parents will act in the best interests of their children. Are you saying that you have the insight to act in their behalf?
I have not yet read any reasonable arguments against giving parents more control and influence in determining the course of their children’s education. It usually comes down to :
1) Constitutionality. The Supreme Court put this to rest in 2002, but people still pull it out.
2) Vouchers will not pay for tuition at elite preparatory schools. The amounts proffered were never intended to.
3) it will destroy public schools.
And I really do not get this one: Q What good is a school, or even an institution of education, if it cannot make money for its owners? END Q
There are many schools all over this land which are not money-making operations.
Public schools, run by governments
Non-profit private schools, like Sidwell Friends in WashDC
Roman Catholic schools
Home schools.
None of these, produce a profit, but they still manage to deliver education to the students.
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Cema4by
I told you. Don’t comment until you read “Reign of Error.”
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cemab4y writes, first, that he doesn’t get that parents will have choice no longer once public schools are gone. The point is that they won’t be able to choose public schools any longer. And the private schools’ noose around parents’ voices will tighten, while the owners’ and stockholders choices of students will become more powerful. Maybe “home schooling” will be an option? aka: coming soon: the community garbage dump.
Second, cemaby4y says: “And I really do not get this one: Q What good is a school, or even an institution of education, if it cannot make money for its owners? END Q” I was being sarcastic–speaking in the voice of those who have a silo-view: of a capitalist-only thinking. In such thinking, words like “public” “public service,” and “common good” are sleep inducing.
Third, cemaby4y says: “I have not yet read any reasonable arguments against giving parents more control and influence in determining the course of their children’s education.”
That’s nice–I agree with it–however, per usual, something is missing–like full disclosure to parents? and, behind the scenes, the planning for absence of accountability (to parents and their government?), the reduction of local control, and the installment of people in boards who are “plants” for the privatization movement. “Rigging” comes to mind?
But I like Diane’s suggestion–to read what she has already written on the matter.
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cemab4y: You mention Catholic schools: I’ve said this before here several times: the relatively new privatization movement has little if any similarity to long-successful Catholic or Montessori, and other schools of that kind.
So don’t Trojan-Horse yourself in with those schools. And BTW, are privatizers telling parents how those schools differ from this relatively new and self-serving encroachment on public education?
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Catherine: I appreciate your comment, but please don’t put Catholic and Montessori in the same category.
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stevenelson0248–I speak of Catholic and Montessori as in the same category–in this sense only–that they both have been around a long time and are not a part of the present encroachment on public education. We need to distinguish these kinds of schools from the present corporate privatization movements.
But it goes without saying that these are completely different from one another in their curricula and foundations. I take it that’s what you mean?
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Yes, Catherine, that’s what I meant, particularly in that one is religious, thus not a constitutional option for tax dollars. From your other lucid comments I gather that you are quite thoughtful about schools and education.
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I am little confused. I said (BEGIN) Sadly, many American schools are failing at the task that has been commissioned to them. This is an empirical fact, and not a criticism of any individual or profession.
It will take courage, to face up and examine the difficulties encountered, and to effect solutions. I am open to any solution that will enable the schools to do their job.
I am particularly horrified by the public schools in our nation’s capital. I ride through this city twice a day. These schools are in the shadow of the federal government, and they are a disaster. It is a taboo subject, the feds do not want to go near the problem. The silence is deafening.
(END)
And you said “wrong, wrong”. What is wrong in this statement?
Many public schools in the USA are failing in the task of delivering education. I can show them to you in person, next time you are in town. Eight of the seventeen public high schools in WashDC could not produce even one(1) graduate who was college-ready. If this is not failure, what is?
I have lived in WashDC metro off and on, since 1983. (I was deployed to Iraq/Afghanistan for 11 years). I have been in the city at all hours. Yes, I have seen the large number of homeless people. I used to work at the Treasury Department and I literally had to step over the people sleeping near the subway entrance.
The public schools in our nation’s capital are already some of the worst in the USA. In many categories they come up 51st out of 51. I can run all the statistics at you again or you can look them up on the ‘net. I find it hard to believe that the public schools in WashDC can get any worse.
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Cemab4y,
It is an empirical fact that you are wrong.
Test scores on the only long-term measure (NAEP) are the highest ever since they started measuring almost 50 years ago.
Graduation rates are the highest ever in history.
Please don’t comment again until you have read “Reign of Error.”
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This thread seems to be running its course, unraveling, so to speak. We have the same people (I forgot to list ponderosa in my previous post) over and over again, cudgeling us with their observations on just how rotten public schools, public teachers, public admins, public test scores, public spending, public funding, pu……. you get the picture: a libertarian deregulating sorting of the public into good and bad, top and bottom, hard-working and lazy, slow and quick, smart and dumb, the whole panoply of conservative thought (see the intro to The Viking Portable Conservative Reader). They front little Black kids to disguise their resegregationist objectives and sing the praises of a few “dedicated” teachers aka people willing to work for peanuts under bad conditions and still produce, a corporate denizen’s dream robot. Fulsome praise for dedicated teachers sounds good until you look up ‘fulsome” (nauseatingly, cloyingly excessive). It’s all crap except for a few like M who seem to have been wounded by a bad experience with a public school, has found the key to success, and now wants to shove it down everyone’s throat. Cherry-picking “empirical” data is their trademark.
How about this, Diane: using your connections, go out and find us some genuinely informed persons who think charters are, can be, or should be a valuable addition to the educational “market place” (gad! they’re even infecting me with their slippery language) and let them engage us. It should make for a real donnybrook.
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Pbarret,
I have many friends on the right (not as close as we used to be) who would willingly defend charters as the civil rights issue of our time, but I fear that the discussion would not be enlightening. Just a rehash of competing claims and facts. Do you really want that?
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On second thought……………. Happy New Year! Everyone.
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In other words, with about two decades worth of data, they still spout the major talking points of the reform movement and refuse to see the obvious drawbacks. The majority of these people must have no skin in the game or be so focused on a personal narrative that they cannot see beyond it.
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First of all, what criteria is used to determine whether a school is “bad”? Test scores? While a faulty measuring stick, fine, let’s go with test scores.
Doug, I am going to ask you the same question I asked Peter Cunningham, one of your brethren, at the NPE Conference last year:
Can you cite a single instance of a “failing” or “bad” public school in an affluent neighborhood?
Mr. Cunningham did not hesitate “No,” he said.
So maybe there is more to the narrative you and the reformers wish to acknowledge.
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“So maybe there is more to the narrative…”
…like maybe schools should not be asked to solve all society’s problems. Poverty does impact a child’s ability to be successful in school, however you assess it.
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There is no ‘ “failing” or “bad” public school in an affluent neighborhood.” ‘
Exactly. Additionally, in the urban areas where I come from, after white flight, neighborhoods that had been primarily made up of white middle income families, with a scattering of upper middle income families, if there were more rental apartments than single family homes, when black families moved in, they became mostly low income communities and the “good” schools suddenly turned “bad,” such as my high school.
However, when neighborhoods with more homes than rental apartments changed and there were large numbers of upper middle income homes, upper middle income black home owners replaced the upper middle income white home owners and the good schools continued to be good, such as my elementary school.
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Can you describe what a bad public school looks like?
Can you find and compare the statics of a public school and a charter school that are exactly the same in population – with the same number of ELLs and Special Education Learners? The same teacher/student ratio and the same physical plant?
Can you copy the exact same resources from a school that the Obama’s and Duncan’s children are going to and place it in all the public schools in the nation? Then all our students would have the exact same opportunities as the Obamas, Clintons, and Duncans.
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If you are looking for a bad public school system, you need only look at the school system in our nation’s capital. (I live in WashDC metro)
see
http://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/terence-p-jeffrey/dc-schools-29349-pupil-83-not-proficient-reading
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cema4by,
What? I thought Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson solved the problems of DC public schools!
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And the D.C. charters are solving the rest (sarcasm)!
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Here is a story about Michelle Rhee that you will never see
http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=6490
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Cema4yb, that article by John Merrow about a Rhee was posted here in 2013.
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Read this and weep. From an article about DC public schools:
Q At eight of 17 public high schools, 0% of the students met or exceeded expectations (categories 4 and 5) in math and/or language arts. That means no students are considered on-track for college in those schools. End Q
Here is the whole article
http://www.forbes.com/sites/maureensullivan/2016/08/30/d-c-charter-schools-outperform-districts-public-schools/#2174b5c4425f
The public schools in our nation’s capital are a train wreck.
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Cema4yb,
Did you forget that Rhee and Henderson reformed the DC schools?
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Q Did you forget that Rhee and Henderson reformed the DC schools? END Q
These two individuals made a lot of changes in the WashDC school system. Unhappily, things are worse, and the schools are horrible. I am just an observer, I do not wish to defend any individual.
The fact that only 79% of the school children in WashDC, who are eligible to attend the schools, even bother to show up, and get the education offered in these schools, should be indicative of just how bad things are. This is the lowest participation rate in the nation (tied with Hawaii).
I think that we can all agree, that WashDC public schools are unquestionably the worst in the entire USA.
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Trying to place blame and treating people, from teachers to students to parents to admin accordingly has done great harm.
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At the same time those teachers and admins are responsible for implementing the many and various malpractices that harm many students. So yes, they should be blamed for placing personal expediency over the students’ needs:
“Should we therefore forgo our self-interest? Of course not. But it [self-interest] must be subordinate to justice, not the other way around. . . . To take advantage of a child’s naivete. . . in order to extract from them something [test scores, personal information] that is contrary to their interests, or intentions, without their knowledge [or consent of parents] or through coercion [state mandated testing], is always and everywhere unjust even if in some places and under certain circumstances it is not illegal. . . . Justice is superior to and more valuable than well-being or efficiency; it cannot be sacrificed to them, not even for the happiness of the greatest number [quoting Rawls]. To what could justice legitimately be sacrificed, since without justice there would be no legitimacy or illegitimacy? And in the name of what, since without justice even humanity, happiness and love could have no absolute value?. . . Without justice, values would be nothing more than (self) interests or motives; they would cease to be values or would become values without worth.”—Comte-Sponville [my additions]
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I’m talking about initial blame, not blame for the subsequent failed policies.
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That’s reserved for deformers of all kinds.
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Our national educational crisis reminds me of the war in Vietnam. There is enough blame to go around for everybody.
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Cema4yb,
We have a national social crisis, not an education crisis. Some would say that the attacks on teachers and public schools are indeed a crisis.
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No one will dispute that there is a social crisis in our nation. Run through the list: Crime, poverty, opioid abuse, etc.
I dispute that we do not have an education crisis. Our nation is spending billions, and the children are not getting the education they deserve. The result, is children leaving school, unprepared for college (like 8 of the 17 high schools in DC, where not one graduate is on college track).
The results of this failure (assign blame to anyone you wish) is a less educated workforce, unable to do the jobs of the 21st century. More people on welfare, more crime, more poverty, more hopelessness.
All of us will have to live in the “wreckage” of a failed educational system.
I am not interested in attacking teachers, administrators, public schools, etc. There is no progress in attacks.
All citizens, who each have a stake in the direction our society will be taking, must get up and demand, that this crisis in education be faced and turned around.
What’s wrong with that?
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cemab4y,
If you read any research, which you obviously have not, you would know that students who go to charter schools and voucher schools will get a worse education than in public schools.
Last post, cemab4y, you waste too much of my time responding to ill-informed comments. Go read a book.
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cemaby4 writes: “All of us will have to live in the ‘wreckage’ of a failed educational system.”
“Wreckage”? Really?
Okay–it’s all bad? Here’s the plan: (1) jump on minor or even serious problems with public schools (but don’t mention they are rooted in under-funding/under-resourcing, class size, grinding family and community poverty, etc.); then (2) blow those problems WAY out of proportion; and then (3) totally ignore (and do your best to erase) what is AND HAS BEEN good about public schools for a very long time, or how they connect with the whole idea of democracy (which you seem to have blanked out); and (4) don’t mention that public schools don’t cater to the wealthy or “suggest” certain students should go elsewhere (for their own good, of course); or that public schools don’t make money for some corporation or other–because that’s the real problem here.
Until I hear a reasonable dialectical treatment, given in good faith about solving real problems in education, to me: YOUR POSTS ARE TOAST.
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Did the “wreakage” of our public schools somehow result in the wealthiest, most creative, and most innovative society in the world?
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Michael Brocoum: Indeed.
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Michael,
Our education system was the best in the world, and it certainly contributed greatly to our success as a country.
But, it has failed to adapt to changing demographics, so I’m less enameled of its current state and prospects for the future.
We also have global competition now that we didn’t have then.
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John,
Sorry but that’s not true. Our education system in the past was “the best in the world,” but it was racially segregated, it had no obligation to accept students with disabilities, and most low-income students dropped out long before 12th grade.
Are those the good old days you long for?
Our education system has become the recipient of every social problem and takes the blame for not solving the problems that our society ignores.
Do you think your hero Eva Moskowitz holds the key to success? Just kick the problem kids out.
No, my hat is off to our great educators, who have a tough job and come back for more, despite being underpaid and under appreciated.
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Diane,
“Are those the good old days you long for?”
No, but the post I was responding to asked how we can have such a great country if our education system isn’t doing a great job. I think it’s because it takes decades for K12 school results to impact GDP.
“Our education system has become the recipient of every social problem and takes the blame for not solving the problems that our society ignores.”
I think it would be less expensive to solve the problems in schools by setting children up for success regardless of background then to solve the problem by somehow employing people who have become unemployable in our economy. Sure, minimum wage and healthcare are needed and blocked by republicans, but IMO, he major fix for poverty rests with compensating for children’s deficits in all ways possible in school.
“Do you think your hero Eva Moskowitz holds the key to success? Just kick the problem kids out.”
I’m not a fan, but I also don’t think her results can be explained away by attrition.
“No, my hat is off to our great educators, who have a tough job and come back for more, despite being underpaid and under appreciated.”
Mine too, including charter educators and the people who make huge personal sacrifices to open schools.
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John,
I don’t take my hat off to those who want to get rich by opening charter schools. Nor to charter leaders paid $600,000 a year. Nor to those who ignore the research showing that charter schools do not outperform public schools when they take the same kids. Nor to the hedge funders who buy politicians to achieve their goal of a dual system.
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Diane,
The vast majority of people in charter schools are not who you pretend they are.
Also, as you know, the data you reference is dated, requires lumping in states with lousy charter sectors, and that charter performance is improving every year.
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Not true, John. The “good” charter schools don’t accept kids likely to get low scores. Dual systems are inherently undemocratic.
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That’s not what urban CREDO says, nor much of the data. Charters serve a higher percentage of low income and minority children and get better growth results with them. That’s an inconvenient fact for those against charters for ideological reasons, but a fact nonetheless.
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John,
You and Trump are on the same page.
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Diane,
You and Trump are on the same page on Common Core. Does that mean anything? No.
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John,
Trump and I are not on the same page about Common Core. I am deeply knowledgeable about its origins, its implementation, and its weaknesses. He is not. He has announced his intention to appoint a woman as Secretary of Education who is an advocate for charter schools and fork-tongued about Common Core. In short, his criticism of CC is phony, but his devotion to charters, vouchers and privatization is genuine. You are in the same boat with Trump and DeVos. Your hero Eva Moskowitz met with him. Not to talk Common Core (she loves it), but charters.
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John: Diane has it right. Even if some charter schools do well with many students (and I’m sure there are many); and even if some public schools need ALLOT of work (of course many do); the deeper issue (which we have covered here again and again) is that privatization splits the foundations of education. With that split democracy and corporations share the means-to-ends ground of schools. It’s inherently conflicting where, on the one hand, education is for the children’s development and autonomy-in- community–for their well-being in a free and democratic culture; and on the other hand, education is for the corporate coffers, some of which have nothing to do with democratic movements. Where the curriculum goes is similarly split at the foundational level, and an entirely different problem.
These are significant long-term problems that don’t become obvious unless we can get past just saying “this school is good, and that school is bad.” When the foundations of a house shift causing the roof to leak, we often fix the leak, but the foundations are still broken and are bound to cause problems. .
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Catherine Blanche King,
I don’t support for-profit charters.
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John,
Do you support charter leaders being paid $500,000-600,000?
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Diane,
“Do you support charter leaders being paid $500,000-600,000?”
No. I do support salaries of 200-300 for the leaders of large networks, because I think it takes that to get the best people at that level. Obviously, it’s much less than they could make as corporate CEOs, but if they’re mission driven, I think it should be enough.
Salaries should be consistent with appropriate compensation for comparably sized, efficient and effective not-for-profits.
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Diane,
“Do you support charter leaders being paid $500,000-600,000?”
One other thought. Since I think your comment is about Eva, I think about half of that is paid by the school network. The other half is paid out by the foundation and reflects the enormous success she has had in fundraising. I’m sure her board is happy to pay that given the amount of money she raises, and her students get huge benefit from those extra funds.
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Nobody denies there are some problems in public education. One of the reasons many urban schools are in poor condition with few resources is that funding education through real estate taxes provides sound funding for affluent communities while impoverished communities with greater needs get less. The funding system is unfair. In addition, the whole “reform” movement has siphoned additional funding from these same distressed schools leaving these schools with little money for repairs, books and materials.
All schools are suffering due to the current “choice” agenda, It has led to a disivestment in the common good, and many districts are spending less today than they did before 2008. Choice simply means there is less funding for the majority of students, and it magnifies the inequities that already exist. It also undermines neighborhood stability and local control. Choice is no long, term, scalable solution. Investing in community based, democratic public education like every other high performing nation is a much more effective “choice.”
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It takes courage and integrity, to admit there are problems with public education. It is bizarre, to fund public education through property taxes. Affluent areas with a solid tax base, can spend lavishly on education. Poor areas, with an eroded tax base, cannot be so generous. This inequality exacerbates “white flight”, depriving the inner cities of both tax revenue, and motivated students and parents who are engaged. This starts a “vicious cycle”, draining the inner cities of more revenue and leaving the poor areas with poverty, crime, bad schools, single-parent families, less motivated teachers, children with poor nutrition, etc etc etc.
Washington DC schools spend about $29,000 per pupil per year. see
http://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/terence-p-jeffrey/dc-schools-29349-pupil-83-not-proficient-reading
How much spending is enough?
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Inequitable spending is wrong. Money must go where need is greatest
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I agree that inequitable spending is wrong. Schools in areas with greater needs, need additional resources. No one would object to applying additional resources in areas, where there is greater need.
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No one would object, cemab4y? Try the whole GOP.
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Utah sure objects to more spending. We spend between 11% and 17% (depending on the source of the data) LESS than was spent on students in 2008, despite school populations in the state growing by several hundred thousand.
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Christie objects to spending more per pupil in poor school districts.
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The community of Doug1943, will have even fewer “choices”, related to common goods, now that the Koch brand of tyranny is well-funded and widespread across the nation. He, his family and friends, can acquiesce to the attack on public schools. But then, they should start saving their money for Gates’ for-profit schools-in-a-box. Gates funds Aspen Institute’s, Senior Congressional Education Staff Network. Gates financed New Schools Venture Fund. NSVF’s goal, “to develop diverse charter school organizations to produce different brands on a large scale”. Doug 1943, unless he’s as rich as the self-anointed education philanthro-barons combined, is arrogant to think his opinion matters. If he lived in Mass., in might, but, no where else.
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So true. Corporate schools first responsibility is to provide ROI to the parent company. Public education’s primary responsibility is to the student and his or her family. Public schools provide adequately trained teachers, not fly by night teaching temps. Parents are grasping at straws if they believe most charters will do a better job. In fact, creating more charters and opening up the flood gates to self serving profiteers will only diminish any existing quality.
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Can you name a time ever when the public schools have NOT acknowledged they could be better and have worked tirelessly to become better? Can you really believe that politicians know best how children learn and care more about them than the teachers who have spent their own money when politicians fail to provide the necessary resources, have devoted their lives to the interests of children, our country, and society at large? Do you really believe that independent, in depth scholarship is subservient to the ignorant, I did not say stupid although that is sometimes apparent also, understandings of politicians under the thumb of corporate influence who see money, not children as the bottom line? I could go on and on but would urge you as Dr. Ravitch mentioned, read her books and research in depth the problems which schools face, the societal problems which teachers, schools, and yes – listen also to the police who are also asked to solve societies problems which the politicians fail to adequately address.
Educate in depth yourself before forming a final judgment.
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“Can you name a time ever when the public schools have NOT acknowledged they could be better and have worked tirelessly to become better?”
Gordon, I don’t see that. There seems to be no humility in the profession, nor acknowledgement that things could be better, except possibly in light of spending more money.
I had a discussion about my local high school, which has a sub 50% graduation rate, with Diane, and asked her what she would say to parents who wanted better for their children. She said that she would say that this high school was “a good school that will meet the needs of your child”. This is not acknowledging a problem.
Traditional public schools are not (currently) able to be successful with a majority of minority and low income students. We now have more of those students than historical (white, affluent) students. So, there is no doubt that public education is failing and getting worse. The question is what to do about it.
If one blames poverty exclusively, one does not need any improvement in public schools. Of course, if one doesn’t blame poverty at all, it leads to equally preposterous solutions. The answer is that poverty causes all sorts of challenges, and that we need to adapt public schools to be better at educating children of poverty.
The CREDO urban schools study shows that charter schools are being more successful at this than traditional schools, but the ideological opposition to them requires that traditional educators disbelieve this.
Can you show me some of this acknowledgement of needing to do better by traditional public schools or their associated institutions? I honestly like to read things like that. Instead, I see lots of things saying nobody but experienced teachers are entitled to have an opinion about education, tests are meaningless, and other rationalizations that allow educators to avoid acknowledging the challenge.
There are no easy solutions, but certainly acknowledgement of an issue is an absolute requirement for improvement.
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John: 1:09: “Can you show me some of this acknowledgement of needing to do better by traditional public schools or their associated institutions? I honestly like to read things like that. Instead, I see lots of things saying nobody but experienced teachers are entitled to have an opinion about education, tests are meaningless, and other rationalizations that allow educators to avoid acknowledging the challenge.”
The trouble with your statement is that all you want to do is read about it. Guess what —teachers are too busy doing to have the time to write about it. Heck some teachers are required to write a narrative before and after an observation just to prove they are a good teacher.
John, I sincerely advise you to walk into a public school during a meeting discussing the data against their school improvement plan. That is where you will hear the discussion on how can we do better. And then it follows to the grade level meetings. I bet you never step foot in a public school recently.
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Cheryl,
“John, I sincerely advise you to walk into a public school during a meeting discussing the data against their school improvement plan. That is where you will hear the discussion on how can we do better. And then it follows to the grade level meetings. I bet you never step foot in a public school recently.”
I’m in public schools quite often. What I typically see is a group of dedicated teachers trying to address things in the school improvement plan, and other teachers resisting the changes. What is your experience?
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John,
I have a shared responsibility with each of my students. If half of them graduate, I can try to improve, but blaming myself is irrational and detrimental. I must take into account all parts of the equation. It makes no sense to say that if the failing half went to a school with lower paid, less experienced teachers, they would graduate. It also makes no sense to label American public education as a failure, but then, I carry no illusions of convincing you union haters to stop hating unions. You would never admit that calls for equitable funding are not calls for more funding. You will never admit that you and your charter scam are harming the public high school down the street.
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LeftCoastTeacher,
“It makes no sense to say that if the failing half went to a school with lower paid, less experienced teachers, they would graduate”
If you frame it in that way, of course. But, what if you frame it as schools run by educators in the leadership positions, continuous, meaningful professional development, more learning time, etc.?
I disrespect people who are against these schools on principal as much as I disrespect those who think they are a cure for everything. We should all want more good schools and we should all be willing to look at what works, regardless of where it’s happening.
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John,
Can you show me a high performing charter school that has low attrition rates?
Can you show me where the charter organizations have ANY interest in looking closely at charter school attrition rates to make sure that they aren’t simply dumping the kids back to those public schools that are too much bother or too expensive?
Charter school advocacy organizations funded by right wing billionaires have spend untold millions hiding and fighting any comprehensive examination of how high charter attrition rates are. Democracy Builders is the one charter organization that basically proved that the highest performing charter schools actually educated the FEWEST kids successfully because they were ending up with fewer proficient students in older grades than the charters getting attacked because “only half” their kids were proficient (it’s just that they kept the other half instead of dumping them).
When I hear a pro-charter organization say “we have to look into why our BEST charter schools lose the MOST students and why the mediocre to below average ones keep more of them” then I will believe that charters are any solution.
Charters are no different than choice schools that are all over NYC and are not failing. Establish a school where you put in barriers so that only parents with an interest in seeking out a better school will enter the lottery, and you have already limited yourself from taking any of the most at-risk kids. Then insist that no one look closely at attrition rates of those lottery winners.
The ugly little secret that charters want to hide is that the top performing charters have higher attrition rates for at-risk children than mediocre ones. But charters insist that they should only be compared to public schools serving the most transient and disadvantaged population instead of showing any curiosity into why parents desperate for good schools would leave a rich high-performing charter offering all the bells and whistles far more frequently than they leave a crappy one. Maybe it’s because folks like you already know why and you look the other way.
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NYC public school parent,
Yes, it’s absolutely true that attrition can make it look like a school is performing well when it in fact isn’t.
But, here are some studies showing lower attrition in charter schools than in Traditional Public Schools. Not always the case, but your assertion that charter school performance is always due to attrition is not accurate.
http://www.wnyc.org/story/nyc-charter-school-attrition-rates/
http://educationnext.org/student-attrition-explain-kipps-success/
Click to access 02CharterReport.pdf
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John said, “If one blames poverty exclusively, one does not need any improvement in public schools. Of course, if one doesn’t blame poverty at all, it leads to equally preposterous solutions.”
Not exclusive but poverty is the major culprit followed by learning disabilities and/or dysfunctional middle-class families.
There is not one country on the planet that has successfully educated all of their children, EVER!
This study out of Stanford supports the fact that children living in poverty is the major factor children do not succeed at learning while in school. Most of these children start out behind and never catch up.
“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 simliar 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
France offers the world an example of what to do to deal with the setbacks in learning that impact children living in poverty. More than 30 years ago, France implemented a national early childhood education program in their public schools. France did not offer vouchers. France did not create another competing education sector with autocratic, often fraudulent and inferior, for-profit corporate charters that financially hurts the public schools. France did not label public school failing and close them while turning children over to these autocratic corporations that were allowed to operate in secrecy.
The teachers who worked in this French program had to earn a masters and go through a year long, full time internship that focused on early childhood education. The poverty rate in France at the time was more than 15 percent. Thirty years later, the poverty rate had fallen to about 6 percent. K – 12 didn’t change that much. The success was due to early child education program that allowed children to start as young as 2 to make up for what poverty causes.
From the US National Library of Medicine we have this: The impact of poverty on educational outcomes for children
“Over the past decade, the unfortunate reality is that the income gap has widened between Canadian families. Educational outcomes are one of the key areas influenced by family incomes. Children from low-income families often start school already behind their peers who come from more affluent families, as shown in measures of school readiness. The incidence, depth, duration and timing of poverty all influence a child’s educational attainment, along with community characteristics and social networks. However, both Canadian and international interventions have shown that the effects of poverty can be reduced using sustainable interventions.”
“School readiness reflects a child’s ability to succeed both academically and socially in a school environment. It requires physical well-being and appropriate motor development, emotional health and a positive approach to new experiences, age-appropriate social knowledge and competence, age-appropriate language skills, and age-appropriate general knowledge and cognitive skills (9). It is well documented that poverty decreases a child’s readiness for school through aspects of health, home life, schooling and neighbourhoods.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2528798/
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Thank you, Lloyd, I appreciate your wisdom and common sense.
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You’re welcome.
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John,
Thanks for the links — but I suspect you don’t realize how bad they make charters look.
The WNYC study includes a charter that shows that even within their very unscientific study limited itself to 9 months only, the attrition rate of the highest performing charter chain is twice as high as the attrition rate of far lower performing charters. When comparing apples to apples, the charter with the most students who leave has the stellar test scores and the most money to lavish on its students. That charter that keeps more of its students has mediocre results.
Ironically, the reason KIPP’s test scores in NYC are so lousy compared to the high attrition charters is because they made a concerted effort to keep their students — something they did not do in other cities where they also had high attrition rates in their schools.
The other little interesting fact in the charter-funded non-peer reviewed studies that the researchers mention in passing is that in the KIPP schools outside of NYC that had high attrition rates, the students coming in to replace those students already perform significantly above average! The students who leave have very low test scores and the students who replace them have high ones. We’re supposed to ignore the elephant in the room and say “oh that can’t account for it” but of course it does. Because if it didn’t, the charters would fight hard to KEEP all their students instead of fighting hard to be allowed to suspend, humiliate, punish, refuse to send renewal forms home with, and all the other nasty nasty tactics they use to get rid of the students who take resources and attention from the students who can be taught.
If you want to insist that charters just get rid of those struggling kids because they get their jollies from the mere pleasure of humiliating them until they leave, then your opinion of charters is far, far lower than mine. According to you, they just humiliate 6 year olds for the fun of it. I think it helps save money to spend on more “teachable” kids. As to what happens to the rest – well that does not seem to be any of their concern. By not being “public”, charters get to say “it’s not my concern because as soon as I can get them out of my charter, they become the responsibility of the public school system we like to attack. Win-win for the charters and lose-lose for people who actually care about educating ALL students.
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You cannot have read “Reign of Error” and still claim that the teaching profession does not admit that there are problems. Teachers, their unions, and education experts all agree on what the problems are:
1. Unstable and grossly inequitable funding
2. Poverty and it’s thoroughly documented toxic effects on the developing brain
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Miron Boland and John on Teachers’ Self-Criticism: I suggest that what’s going on with teachers is similar to what the Atlantic article said about Hillary (recently posted here) and her attitude towards her critics (see my emphases):
“Some of Hillary’s biggest mistakes began as rather inconsequential errors in judgment and exaggerations. When they were seized on by her critics, Hillary followed—and continues to follow—the same pattern: She dug in because she feared that admitting a mistake would arm her enemies.”
The article says about Hillary “Growing paranoid is easy when, because of your gender, people really are out to get you.”
The same could be said about teachers: “Because you are a teacher . . . ” many want you and your students to fail to–to support their preconceived propaganda-born ideas about you,the teaching profession, and schools in general, not to mention their political and financial investments. The same can be said for college professors–overblown and ill-motivated criticism puts you on the defensive so that you keep your own creative self-criticism to yourself. And that sets you up to look like you cannot be wrong on principle (you look dogmatism) and cannot take criticism. It’s a vicious circle.
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Catherine Blanche King says “You cannot have read “Reign of Error” and still claim that the teaching profession does not admit that there are problems. Teachers, their unions, and education experts all agree on what the problems are: 1. Unstable and grossly inequitable funding 2. Poverty and it’s thoroughly documented toxic effects on the developing brain”.
Yes, they all admit that there are problems, but don’t admit that there are any that are under their control. Pretty easy to “admit” that someone else has a problem. Much harder to acknowledge your own failures. Yes, the factors you mention are responsible for a lot, but they are also not going to change soon. E need to be looking at the things that we can change.
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John,
With Trump as president and a Republican Congress, none of those problems will be addressed. Given their druthers, they would abolish certification, tenure, anything that protects the teaching profession. They would let anyone teach who wants to.
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Diane,
I agree with you re Trump, but I do think we overdo it in the “teacher protection” department to the detriment of some students. It’s a balancing act, but I think no policy should stand without evidence that it directly or indirectly benefits students. Some aspects of schools as employers benefit students directly, and some indirectly (e.g. things that help retain great teachers), but many policies do not benefit students and need to be looked at critically.
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Diane and John: that wasn’t my note, but I agree and replied to it.
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Catherine,
“she feared that admitting a mistake would arm her enemies”
Yes, absolutely. I think the main issue with public education is that it has been around long enough that all “sides” feel that way, which is a recipe for stagnation and actually actively opposing change even if something might be in the best interests of kids’ education.
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John,
Privatization is not in the best interests of children, nor are no-excuses schools where children are taught to be “little test taking machines”
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Diane says “Privatization is not in the best interests of children, nor are no-excuses schools where children are taught to be “little test taking machines””.
My comment wasn’t about privatization or no excuses schools. I was talking about the relationship between school leaders, teachers, their unions, PTAs, school boards, and voters. I think all sides feel that they can’t give on minor issues because of fear that they will lose on major ones. This fear of the “camel’s nose in the tent” contributes to traditional public schools having trouble adapting to change, such as the drastic changes in student preparedness and lives outside of school. Some initiatives, like community schools are promising, but traditional public schools are very resistant to change.
In some ways, it’s good that they don’t change course too quickly or follow fads, but there has to be a happy medium.
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John: Yes–such thinking as we go through (probably most of us–who would blame Hilary for it ever since her “vast RW conspiracy comment) in such conflicting situations is, as you say, a “recipe for stagnation” and more, it’s rot is organic and, thus, dynamic. If left unchecked, it will die, but only after it has its run through violence.
In our present situation, however, it’s become systematic and exponential and now is poisoning our entire governmental system from the top down. Dealing with its constant manifestation is like playing whack-a-mole–exhausting. But those who make a living at it, and who are politically, financially, and spiritually invested in it, know that.
To them I want to ask: At what point in being human did you sell-off your integrity?
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“No humility in the profession?????” John, have you ever even talked to a few public school teachers? I am one, and have talked to many. The humility (and humiliation) is palpable. Most teachers have internalized the “teachers are the problem” message that has been the case for a decade or two. Most of us believe that if we don’t work hundreds (if not thousands) of extra, unpaid, hours, we are not doing our jobs. The vast majority of teachers I know go to constant classes and trainings, on own own time and money, to learn more. You are invited to come to visit my Utah classroom, and those of my colleagues, anytime, and then tell me that there’s no humility.
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Threatened Out West,
“John, have you ever even talked to a few public school teachers”
Yes, quite a few. I find that there are some that truly want to continuously improve, and some for whom that is not a goal. If you’re surrounded by the first group, that’s great.
Honestly, when I mentioned that, I was primarily referring to the profession and the groups that represent them, as well as on this forum, where it’s hard to find a person who will acknowledge that we need to and can do a better job of educating minority children and those from low income families.
In my local traditional school, there are some leaders and some teachers who really want to change things for the better, but their colleagues are against the changes and are keeping them from happening.
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Maybe the area you are in does not bash teachers to the level that my area bashes teachers. Between the insane class sizes, reduced and dropping funding, and bashing the teachers for everything wrong with the world, no teacher in my area feels proud.
And if your definition of “improving schools” is to focus on the status quo, which these days is more testing, more technology thrown at students, more restrictive, “teach by numbers” teaching, than I am probably one of your “doesn’t want to improve teachers,” too.
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Threatened Out West,
“no teacher in my area feels proud.”
I should be clear that by “humility”, I mean being humble about student outcomes vs. what we would hope to achieve. Humility is what drives continuous improvement. If one is satisfied with the job one is doing, there is no reason to change.
I acknowledge that teachers are in many ways getting humiliated, but IMO, that is happening because of lack of perceived humility by the teaching profession writ large. If teachers won’t acknowledge that there are effective and ineffective teachers, teacher prep programs, and schools, the powers outside school feel forced to apply this externally, frequently resulting in very poor policy and execution.
It seems to me that the most effective countries have management/labor relationships that look more like European trade unions than like the UAW. I think everybody would be happier with that type of cooperation, but I’m not sure how we get from point A to point B given the entrenched positions of all parties. We seem to be getting worse at this, not better.
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I taught 1975 – 2005 and worked between 60 to 100 hours a week. The demands never let up, never let up, never let up.
Even back then teachers were being blamed for everything. The blame game started when the Prince of Darkness, Ronald Reagan released his misleading, lying Nation at Risk report and then later ignored the Sandia Report that revealed the Nation at Risk lies.
https://www.edutopia.org/landmark-education-report-nation-risk
Since I couldn’t work any harder, I just got angry and that anger is bubbling even in retirement. It’s easy to stay angry because of the frauds with the greed-is good- agenda pushing vouchers, corporate charter schools, etc. and repeatedly bashing public school teachers.
There are very few FAILING public schools. There are very few INCOMPETENT public school teachers. Even in the .A. Vergara trial the expert witnesses from Harvard for the vigilantes behind that court case said they “estimated” from years of observations that between 1 to 3 percent of teachers were incompetent.
The original Vergara ruling was overturned.
“In breaking news on August 22, the Vergara v. California lawsuit brought by wealthy corporate special interests looking to eradicate educators’ professional and due process rights has ended at the California Supreme Court. The justices refused to review the April unanimous state appellate court’s decision that ruled all the laws constitutional, criticized the lawsuit and overturned a lower Superior Court decision.”
http://www.cta.org/vergara
Even if the 1 to 3 percent estimate was correct, how does that justify punishing 100 percent of public school teachers by firing them or closing the public school where they teach?
In California, the legislature made it mandatory, decades ago, for teachers to take training classes in an effort to improve teaching methods. I should know because I went to several every year for decades.
There was no time to be arrogant. John, that’s BS. But angry, yes.
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From Diane: “Test scores are primarily measures of family income.”
And from Liz: “Test scores? While a faulty measuring stick, fine, let’s go with test scores.”
“For the umpteenth time” quoting my mom, test scores are not a “measure” of anything. They correlate with family income quite well but a correlation is not a measure. Using edudeformer and privateer language only serves to further their cause and not the cause of “a better education for all”.
Liz, why would one “go with test scores” when you admit they are a “faulty measuring stick” (of which they really are not, see above paragraph on language usage) other than they are supposedly the “coin of the realm”-a pyrite coin if I’ve ever seen one?
To understand why standards and standardized test scores are not “measuring devices” one has to understand the lack of valid onto-epistemological (foundational conceptual) justification. Let’s start with what Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” says in unwittingly letting the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”. Not a good assertion! Actually, a false argument!
Now since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, nor of an exemplar of that unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit exemplar, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable” with a non-existent measuring device that hasn’t been calibrated against a standard which is what all this standardized testing insanity is about???
And that is not meant to be a rhetorical question! Someone please tell me how it is rationo-logically possible to do such a thing.
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Only for ease of comparison, and to allow the reformers to see the fallacy in their arguments on their grounds. It is still a measure of SES, which was basically what the rest of my post said.
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No, it isn’t “a measure of SES”. Test scores are supposed to be an assessment of student learning. Assessment and testing 101 tells us that to use testing and assessment results for anything other than for that which they are designed is UNETHICAL. A properly stated correlation is one thing and there is no doubt about the test score and SES correlation, but to misuse the term measure plays into the false/pseudo-scientific narrative that is used to lend a false credence to said narrative and obfuscate, not enlighten the teaching and learning process.
Ease of comparison = ease of bullshit in my book.
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Duane, 12:51: “No, it isn’t “a measure of SES”. Test scores are supposed to be an assessment of student learning. Assessment and testing 101 tells us that to use testing and assessment results for anything other than for that which they are designed is UNETHICAL.”
You are right when you said test scores are supposed to be an assessment of student learning.
But the tests that we have been mandated by the feds and states are not grade level appropriate, nor are they being used to assess what they are designed for. Supposedly they are to measure student learning, growth, and attainment, but instead they are being used to rate the teacher, the principal, and the school. The pass/fail score keeps on changing every year and I’ll state again that the test is way beyond the grade level of the students.
How can you assess a student who reads at grade 2 but must take a grade 4 test that has reading passages from grade 6? On top of that get results 6 months later with a plain number and no concrete data showing the skills attained or skills needed.
A teacher created assessment gives a better idea of what the student has learned. Heck – NWEA MAP tests give the growth and attainment data better than any other education market big stakes test out there but that is being phased out.
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That’s why they instituted the Common Core Standards. Those standards would have levelled the playing field between public and private. But guess what, everyone complained about the standards – too hard for some students. Too hard for some teachers. Really bad choices from school district administration. Paying consultants to do their work. Dumbing down the curriculum so everyone can graduate and take remedial classes in college, using local property taxes to fund education. Just saying.
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“That’s why they instituted the Common Core Standards. Those standards would have levelled the playing field between public and private.”
NO!! That is not at all why the CCSS were instituted. Start here: https://dianeravitch.net/category/common-core/ and read not only Diane’s posts but also all of the comments to find out all about the CCSS.
“. . . using local property taxes to fund education. Just saying.”
Just wondering whether or not you know what are the authorizing documents for public education? Do you? Just asking!
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During my career I have worked on numerous curriculum at the local and state level. States that have their acts together already had effective standards in place a variety of subject areas. The CCSS are just more of the same or slightly different. The worst part is that they are attached to over testing with capricious cut scores designed to fail a lot of students to show that public education is a “failure.” The CCSS have become a template of the test and punish agenda. They have become a politicized tool of destruction to public schools and bias against them. Then, of course, we have VAM, more political garbage to designed to attack teachers through scores.
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Correction: curriculum projects
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The private schools in my area clearly state on their websites that they do not use common core or the state 3-8 testing.
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And for that they are wise to not do so.
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“That’s why they instituted the Common Core Standards. Those standards would have levelled the playing field between public and private.”
NO! Standards do not level anything- they are nothing but an arbitrary set of statements established by a few people who know nothing about cognitive development. CC was imposed based on false assumptions that: 1.all children are the same, 2.all children learn the same way, 3.at the same pace, and 4. under the same learning conditions. This is 18th century factory model thinking!
We’re not opening up a child’s head & pouring in information. Learning is multi-directional & uneven. Learning happens within and around a complex ecology of interacting systems.
Our affluent culture has identified very broad elements of developmental benchmarks that are useful for diagnosing learning disabilities. But even those developmental benchmarks have major variations that educators & psychologists admit have serious limitations.
CC was the brianchild of techies like Bill Gates who think learning is like entering data into a computer. No use for human interactions (This idea is not unusual in Silicon Valley & in Business Schools. Most of these folks don’t really like people) Learning depends on meaningful efforts at social communication and inter & intrapersonal interactions.
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What a wonderful comment! Of course I think that because my 264 page book says the same thing. Perhaps i elaborate a bit! Or you’re just more efficient!
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monicafeffef @December 28, 2016 at 11:35 am:
Where’s the popcorn 😉
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Read Diane’s book “Reign of Error.” It is an eye opener to help answer your questions Doug. Far better than I can.
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When all public schools are funded equally, all children come from stable, loving homes, all communities are equally crime free and families have the jobs they need to finance their personal needs? Ask again. Obviously as an “outsider” you have not taken any time to determine what it takes to educate a child in any situation, let alone in a situation that is less than ideal. Standards, testing and state/federal mandates will never equalize education.
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Doug strikes me as a person who is more eager to offer uninformed opinions than to examine professional judgments of the kind that you offer in Reign of Error.
Doug seems to be totally unaware of the abundant criticisms of standardized tests as measures of excellence in education. Doug speaks as if there is “no case” on the matter of testing. Wrong Doug. The case has been made over and over again.
Parental choice for education is a marketable idea until you realize that the worth of vouchers depends on state and local funding for education with the federal share about 12% on average.
“Choice” really means that schools get to choose the students they want. Choice means that public funds that should go to education are poured into marketing and recruiting students that will make the school look good. Choice means that for-profit offerings of educational fare will be tax subsidized and cut funds that could be invested in public school improvements. Choice through vouchers will not provide anything close “to the same opportunities that the Clinton and Obama children had.”
I suggest that you make a study of Reign of Error and pay attention to the good work of other scholars and well-informed bloggers such as Mercedes Schneider and Peter Greene.
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the core standards are crap and have resulted in kids in every state being dumbed down, monicafeffef.
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mykid,
The standards are not crap if you’ve worked with them at all.
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The Common Core standards are one thing.
The tests that rank-and-punish based on those Common Core standards are another, and that is where the crap is.
Finland has national standards too, but in Finland the teachers are in charge of how to implement those standards and even what standards on that national list to teach, and there are no tests that rank and punish in Finland.
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Hi Lloyd, I totally agree with you. Sorry I’m responding late (?). I jst said the same thing to Ed Detective. The tests and what they are used for should not make the standards in and of themselves bad. Thank you!
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Your welcome.
Finland has standards, but no rank-and-punish tests. Finland doesn’t force its teachers to teach to a test. Finland doesn’t even force its teachers to teach all the standards. Instead, Finland trusts its teachers to decide what standards to teach, how to teach them, and treats them like the professionals that all educated teachers are.
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Key, Lloyd, key… Finland trusts its teachers”. The disdain the Right and now DeVos-led team, have of teachers is really at the root of our educational problems. Lord, help us.
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Doesn’t God help those that help themselves
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helps_those_who_help_themselves
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Why didn’t Gates promote the educational standards of Massachusetts, the best in the nation, instead of recreating the wheel?
The former aren’t protected by copyright, the latter are.
The packaging of copyrighted standards/curriculum/testing/data analytics/data mining- big opportunities for profits for Wall Street and the tech industry.
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Linda, Happy New year! Sorry for my lateness. 🙂 You still deserve a response. Also, we need to keep having these discussions and act as things are going to be changing drastically for the worse.:(. You make a valid point but think again. State rights…The CSSO had a choice. They could have chosen one of their own too. Anyway, the politics of it either way would still have been raw. More important, we have to separate the standards from the political decisions of “accountability” and testing. That’s where corporate greed comes in. One thing educators have to fight for is separate the two. We need to teach our kids well and with quality content and standards. Testing-that’s a whole different story. They do not need to be tested and punished, as we have been doing. Agree totally.
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Yes, and unions don’t care if the death of higher national standards is a side-effect of killing the testing. They supported Common Core until it became unpopular with their members.
Not sure about other states, but in NY, no teachers have been let go due to the supposed “high stakes” tests. This is all about avoiding any accountability measures.
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John,
The mantra of “high standards” is just that: a mantra. If all schools have high standards, half the kids are not likely to be promoted or graduate from high schools. What shall we do with these children? They may have many talents and skills that are not measured by standardized tests, but those gifts don’t matter. The kids will be sacrificed to “high standards.” When I look at unusually gifted artists, musicians, and athletes, I wonder how many of them would fail by your narrow measures.
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Diane,
“If all schools have high standards, half the kids are not likely to be promoted or graduate from high schools.”
You are conflating standards with cut scores.
“They may have many talents and skills that are not measured by standardized tests, but those gifts don’t matter.”
Yes, I agree that standardized testing can result in narrowing of the curriculum, and I think schools should be able to encourage success of all sorts. But, I also see that used a rationalization for poor performance. Are there more kids with alternative talents in urban schools?
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Hey John,
And in that, you have a point. Unions should care about the quality and content of instruction. We can say one or two more things about letting teachers go, etc but even at that, teachers have to be allowed to work in a context of appreciation for who they are and what they do. Teachers should not be demonized and labeled as the cause of all of education’s problems. The unions have tended to labor more on the latter. Accountability should come with Appreciation.
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drrosaire,
Agree 100%. I think respect, accountability, freedom, humility, and appreciation are all intertwined. It seems that the “conversation” between the teaching profession and the public (at a policy level; not one-on-one) has become dysfunctional. I think the public wants some measure of accountability to results and some humility about the challenges facing education and the need for change. In the absence of those, we get demonizing and micromanaging. It’s a shame because it’s been to the detriment of the profession and teachers as well as students.
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The standards are junk if you’ve worked without them at all. I haven’t forgotten what it was like to have the academic freedom to treat kids like kids and meet students’ individual needs and interests before all this Darwinian nonsense came about. There was more learning, less intolerance.
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LeftCoastTeacher,
Great teachers, which I’m believing you were, could totally do that. But we also have a mucher flatter world to deal with. It’s not impossible to do both–teach to interests and standards.
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Response to John- Excessive testing and grade reporting is not about teachers. And, It’s not about union leadership or rank and file. It is about communities and their children. For understanding about the consequences of arbitrary judgments based on filling in bubbles, read media interviews with former Ohio State Board of Education member, A.J. Wagner. who corroborates Dr. Ravitch’s point.
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Parents who choose charters specifically choose a school with higher standards. To their surprise, if they have a kid who can’t meet them, they are no longer welcome.
Or they are welcome, and the charter’s “high standards” results in exactly the same outcome as public schools.
The fact that charters small advantage cannot be claimed unless they include all the high-performing no excuses schools that rid themselves of low scoring students is very telling. The charters that keep their kids have results no better than publics. That’s why they never call out the charters whose bad practices SHOULD be called out by any ethical educator. Charters like John’s need to average in the high scoring high attrition schools so that he can claim the “average” charter is better. Thus they cheer their practices on instead of insisting that they stop.
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So well said, Laura Chapman!
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So if a school is “bad” (and others have already addressed the issues associated with making that determination), shouldn’t all the kids be able to “escape” from it? Yet do you have even one example of a “bad” school being privatized or otherwise having choice imposed on it and all of the kids from that school doing better? If choice is such a good thing, then outcomes for all kids in the area should improve, right? I mean, otherwise, you’re just shuffling around kids – even I could make a school “improve” if I kick out all the “bad” or “dumb” kids and only keep the “smart”, “good” ones. Yet never does that happen. Even if we allow “outcomes” to mean “test scores”, there has never been a case of school choice improving test scores for all kids in the area.
So really what you’re talking about is that the privileged few should be able to escape, amiright? So perhaps there should be more lucky few like the Obama and Clinton kids, but we’re still only talking about “rescuing” a few, right? Getting the “good” kids away from the “bad” kids?
If that’s the case you’re making, then make it openly and let’s have that discussion. How, exactly, do we decide which kids/families should have access to “good” schools. Which kids are worth “saving”?
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Even if we can save a few “strivers,” is it right to do so at the expense of everyone else? In IMHO, it makes sense to focus our resources on quality public schools for all, and not make assumptions about students’ potential as many students are “late bloomers.” All “choice” does is diminish resources for many at the expense of a few. You are correct is stating that a lot of “choice” shuffles students around for no better or even worse results. Nobody in charge is looking at the meager results and the community destruction because a select few are making a profit by shifting public funds to private pockets.
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To add to Dienne’s post, have you (original poster) ever seen a charter school labeled as failing that was considered “irredeemable” and taken over by a public school? In Utah, several charters that have had consecutive “Fs” were passed over for state takeover, and public schools with higher scores are being taken over by the state instead.
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Threatened Out West,
Can’t speak for Utah, but charters get closed for poor academic performance frequently in NY. Their students then go to another charter or back to traditional schools.
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Only a few charters have ever closed in Utah, and those were all for financial reasons. The charter board in Utah has NEVER closed one for academic reasons. It seems that several other states are similar, including Michigan and Ohio.
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Threatened Out West,
“including Michigan and Ohio.”
Yes, absolute worst charter sectors in the country, which even most charter supporters are embarrassed about (especially those of us who view charters as a vehicle for student outcomes rather than being pro-privatization or pro-choice for their own sakes).
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I’ve stopped trying to “answer” these kinds of “questions,” because they really aren’t questions–they are baseless accusations predicated on false premises. Doug isn’t interested in improving struggling schools–which are struggling due to systemic defunding and destabilizing. He’s basically trolling.
I had lunch with an old friend who teaches in an urban school district the other day–her teaching assignments, principals, and evaluation systems change on a yearly basis. This simply does not happen in most suburban school systems, at least not to the same extent it does in urban schools. And it doesn’t happen by accident. Stable schools “work” better; destabilizing schools is an intentional business strategy to keep schools functioning poorly.
The truth is that our schools are doing a magnificent job under horrible conditions. Graduation rates are at an all time high, the achievement gap is narrowing, and families are largely very happy with their schools. The reformers, and Libertarians, want to privatize the system. That’s not about improving schools, or helping kids learn better. It’s about turning schools into profit centers.
No one who is truly interested in helping find a solution starts out by insisting their “opponent” accept the premise that they are already failing, and needs to suggest a solution. Doug is trolling. Don’t feed him. 😉
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Doug may be trolling, but you just provided an excellent answer. I have taught many students in public schools that beat the odds out of poverty and have carved out a middle class life. The public schools built the possibility of a decent life for these poor students. To me public schools are democracy in action.
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mrobmsu,
“Graduation rates are at an all time high”
We all know that graduation rates are more a matter of policies and graduation requirements than achievement.
“the achievement gap is narrowing”
Where?
“families are largely very happy with their schools”
The majority of families have always been “happy” with their schools. But, a lot of that has to do with having the freedom to move to a school district they like. Low income families are voting with their feet in ever-increasing numbers.
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John 1:14: “Low income families are voting with their feet in ever-increasing numbers.”
That because they have either been evicted or their school was closed due to an over zealous mayor. They are being pushed out so as to gentrify the neighborhood. (those big plans in the sky for the future).
The choice parents have is where they live and it has a good public school. Vouchers don’t cover the total tuition of many private schools, so parents would still be on the hook for a hefty bill.
You are pushing the smoke and screen of a charter mantra. It is the for profit organizations who have the choice of students, not the parents.
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Cheryl,
“That because they have either been evicted or their school was closed due to an over zealous mayor. They are being pushed out so as to gentrify the neighborhood. (those big plans in the sky for the future).”
There are very few places in the country where this is happening. The majority of families in charters are there by choice and the numbers are increasing every year.
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And then some families don’t have the luxury of moving to a different zipcode with better schools; and sometimes people move to zipcodes expecting better schools, and find out that the level of funding is all smoke and mirrors and the education is no better and sometimes even worse in some ways! (iohpe….)
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M,
What you blame on the schools is usually traceable to parents. But that’s an inconvenient truth.
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@mrobmsu I agree with you. “Reformers” aren’t interested in improving public schools. Take Cami Anderson for instance. In an op-ed credited to her earlier this year, she blamed the teacher’s union for the fact that she could not get a coding instructor at a school. Really!?!? Why didn’t she ask one of her rich friends who fund all this “reform” nonsense to cover the cost of this coding instructor? Of course, these wealthy individuals don’t want the children to learn coding. They don’t really want these children to succeed. They prefer to donate the money to Families for Excellent Schools and other like groups, so they can run ads nonstop demonizing public schools and can fund ballot initiatives and politicians who will support their anti-public school, anti-union agenda.
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Doug1943 it just so happens that I published an article last night that answers your question: https://tultican.com/2016/12/28/education-discernments-for-2017/ I agree with you that there are failing public schools and I describe them and describe the causes for those failures. Teachers that have worked in schools the federal government labeled failures know that many of them were actually wonderful institutions falsely condemned.
Schools were falsely called failing because they were assessed by standardized testing which was never ever capable of assessing learning, teacher quality are school value. The measuring device employed manifested the illusion of scientific study but was really just another scientific fraud like phrenology or super-race.
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Thanks.
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“The measuring device employed manifested the illusion of scientific study but was really just another scientific fraud like phrenology or super-race.”
Exacto, Sr. tultican.
Psychometrics = phrenology = psychometry = astrology = eugenics.
All originally purported to be scientific but use no where near scientific processes.
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As you can see Doug, you only receive the standard negative answers. Virtually no one will admit there just “may” be a viable alternative.
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Read “Reign of Error”?
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There have always been viable alternatives, Tom. They are called private schools, parochial schools, home schooling, and many others. What I object to is my tax monies going to private, especially religious ones due to constitutional concerns, not publicly accountable to anyone other than the owners, church or parents.
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Jeepers, Tom, just what is that “viable alternative?”
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I made a non-defensive response. See below.
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I suggest the onus is on Doug to answer questions, such as these:
What, exactly, is a “bad public school?” How does or can one know a particular public school is a “bad public school?” What are the criteria for knowing? Without being able to know, there cannot be common agreement, wouldn’t you say?
What, exactly, are the “issues that proponents of vouchers, charters, etc. claim are real?” You name only one issue you say they claim is real. What other issues do they claim are real? Besides, why “claim” issues are real, at all? In other words, what issues do proponents of vouchers, charters, etc. know are real and that matter, if any?
Since you cheerlead the singular claim “that at least some public schools are unreformably bad,” by what criteria must a “bad public school” cease being merely “reformably bad” to then become an “unreformably bad” public school? In other words, by what criteria does a merely bad public school go over the brink to become “unreformably bad?” Criteria you stipulate will of course depend on what you mean by “unreformably bad.”
Does either or both “reformably bad” and “unreformably bad” necessarily mean a “bad public school” that cannot be improved, when, in reality, it is possible to improve any public school no matter how currently “bad” or good?
So what do you mean by “reformably bad?” What do you mean by “unreformably bad?”
And are you capable to imagine and embrace a paradigm other than reform-mindedness?
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Isolating any public school from its economic, social, and ethnic environment is a narrow and ineffective way of viewing it. Before any child ever enters a school, her/his chances for success as a learner are heavily affected by the home and neighborhood environment, and that means the economy, plus parental guidance, plus factors such as the powerful illusion of race (see Race: The Power of an Illusion).
Ignoring all these factors and focusing only on the school itself and its teachers and administrators guarantees that improvement will be limited, if not blocked. But the U.S. refuses to accept responsibility for raising the living standards of all its citizens as a vital part of its national security and its health as a nation.
Finland is so successful with its schools because of many factors, only some of which can be replicated here, but one thing is certain: Finland, as do the other Scandinavian nations, has a solid social safety net which provides a firm foundation for all its people. I would strongly recommend that Doug 1943 read The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2011).
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Yes!!! Thank you!!
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Great response, Ed.
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I agree. He should read “Reign of Error”. His is the typical caricaturist level of knowledge about what the challenges facing public schools are and what evidence- and data-based solutions are required to meet those challenges.
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Doug1943,
You live in a dystopian fantasy world if your misleading thoughts think the world will be a better place for children if we offer them a choice of schools to attend, between private and public, and make sure the school choices that are in the private sector have no rules, no transparency, no democracy, no oversight, nothing but a Milton Friedman greed-is-good mentality will improve education for every child.
1st: It takes a village to educate a child, not a corporation outside of the laws that are used to manage the nation’s school; laws that came about through the democratic process as defined by the U.S. Constitution.
That’s why the traditional public school system in the U.S. is community based, democratic, transparent and nonprofit so the local’s near the schools can keep a close eye on how their children are taught and treated as a community knowing that if they are unhappy, the law is on their side so they can bring about change for improvements at the community level.
2nd: A study out of Stanford found “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.”
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/january/test-scores-ranking-011513.html
3rd: How can America’s school be failing when the Nation’s Report Card (NAEP) shows them steadily improving, always improving, annually for decades before the Milton Friedman fanatics behind privatizing of our traditional public schools managed to push through NCLB, RTTT, and the Common Core Crap that turned those very successful community based traditional public schools into test-prep factories that rank and punishes teachers and schools based on test scores while ignoring the autocratic, private sector corporate charter schools that are turning our children into widgets on an abusive assembly line run by autocratic bullies who are not held accountable by the same laws that hold those traditional public schools accountable, laws that came about under the guidance of the U.S. Constitution.
http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/about/naephistory.aspx
4th: How can America’s community based, democratic, transparent, nonprofit public school be failing, when the U.S. is ranked, against all countries, as one of the most educated countries on the planet with almost 3 college graduates for every job that requires a college degree.
5th: How can America community based, democratic, transparent, nonprofit public school be failing if the U.S. has the largest publishing industry in the world with almost $30 billion in revenue from books sold vs 2nd place China with more than 4 times the people but a third of the revenue from its publishing industry.
6th: The problem is poverty, poverty, poverty, not failing schools, and the U.S. has the highest ratio of children living in poverty among all of the developed countries. (Refer back to #2.) I suggest you look at France to find out how that country dealt with the challenge of children living in poverty. If you do, you will discover that France paid for an early childhood education system for every child and they kept those classes in their public schools. France did not turn early childhood education over the autocrats in the private sector. The results over a thirty year period were a reduction in poverty in France of more than 50 percent.
7th: Finland’s public schools are considered among the best in the world. In Finland, the teachers’ labor union is strong, teachers are highly respected, and private schools in Finland must follow the same laws the public schools do, no opaqueness, no secrecy, no double standard, no bullying children, no testing them to death and punishing teachers based on test scores from tests that profit corporation like Pearson. It’s worth mentioning that Finland doesn’t test its children and punish teachers. It’s also worth mentioning that there is no comparison between Finland and the U.S. because child poverty in Finland is less than 5 percent vs more than 20 percent in the U.S. No country in the history of the world has ever tested its way out of poverty.
8th: How did Communist China improve schools?
China is on this list because 15 year olds in Shanghai’s public schools have been ranked 1st on the International PISA test repeatedly by a wide margin from 2nd place.
Before that happened, China send teams to the U.S. before 2001 when President G. W. Bush and an ignorant, easy-to-manipulate Congress bribed with corporate dollars passed NCLB.
Those Chinese teams studied how the community based, democratic, transparent, nonprofit public school in the U.S. taught students and then went home to implement what they learned in Shanghai’s schools, and when a public school in China doesn’t measure up, instead of firing the teachers, closing those schools, and turning the children over to the often abusive, autocratic, opaque, for-profit, often fraudulent and inferior private sector corporate charter school industry, teams of teachers/administrators from the most successful schools in Shanghai are send to help mentor the teachers/administrators in the low performing schools to help them improve.
I could go on with many more fact-based examples.
What’s happening in the U.S. with the tyranny and greed that is dismantling an incredibly successful education system that was once the envy of the world, up to NCLB, and what will continue under Little-fingers Donald Trump, will destroy America’s education system and the U.S. standing in the world, and the fight to save those schools from the Milton Friedman worshiping greed-is-good mob,has barely started.
When the smoke clears, if your mob wins, all that will be left is a mostly automated always-at-war military industry, backed by a private sector prison industry, private sector police industry, private sector education industry, and growing poverty and suffering.
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Thanks, Lloyd. You blinded them with science! Facts are in short order among the privateers.
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Since we are in the holiday[s] season, and not forgetting that this is the equivalent of the online living room of the owner of this blog so all of us are visitors that should mind our manners…
The first paragraph of the “question” is fatally flawed by assuming what needs to be proved. As I wrote some days ago on this website, the fiercest critics of the nation’s public schools—have been and are those that support and defend them, and want to strengthen and improve them.
Just three examples. Amazon. Click on “books.” Search under the name “Jonathan Kozol.” Just a few of his titles: DEATH AT AN EARLY AGE; THE SHAME OF THE NATION; and SAVAGE INEQUALITIES: CHILDREN IN AMERICA’S SCHOOLS.
Second example. Me. From the late 1960s onward you would not find someone more unyielding on the question of student-on-student violence in public (and other) schools.
Third example. The owner of this blog. ‘Nuff said.
As for other points, such as making the case that multiple-choice standardized tests are or are not useful/accurate/helpful—that and everything else raised has been covered, in extenso, on this blog.
But to ease the effort, a few personal favs… Among other accessible, readable, slim and inexpensive first-rate works: Mercedes Schneider’s latest book, SCHOOL CHOICE: THE END OF PUBLIC EDUCATION; Banesh Hoffman, THE TYRANNY OF TESTING; Anthony Cody, THE EDUCATOR AND THE OLIGARCH; and Cathy O’Neil, WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION.
Respectfully, do your homework.
I do not ask anything more than what I required of myself. As pointed out by a genuine American hero:
“A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.”
Frederick Douglass. Still right after all these years.
😎
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Doug1943 has an important point.
My brother is facing the dilemma he poses. My young nephews are precocious readers and knowers –far advanced for their years. They live in a very low-income city. I will not say the schools are “bad” because that implies that the faculty and facilities are bad. Rather they are schools whose students enter with very limited background knowledge and little acculturation into bourgeois norms. Their knowledge deficit requires that teachers take several steps back to meet students where they are, and the behavior issues prevent instruction from advancing very fast. While my nephews would undoubtedly gain something from experiencing the ethnic diversity and social opportunities at these schools, they would likely be very bored; their intellectual growth stalled on many fronts. They currently attend a private Montessori school.
What would make the situation better?
Real discipline options for teachers. Remove the stigma to disciplining. It probably has to start at the school board level –they need to stop scorning principals with high suspension rates. Have in-school suspension rooms with trained supervisors and, if a district is large enough, a separate school for kids who cannot or will not “play school”. I hear elementary teachers complaining all the time that their principals just “give the kid candy and send him back to class”. The teachers are not supported; classroom order suffers.
A content-focused curriculum instead of a skills-focused curriculum. The former shrinks the achievement gap (see France before 1989); the latter, which prevails in almost every American school today, expands the achievement gap (see France after 1989). If, instead of dreary units on “making inferences”, elementary classrooms were organized around topical units like the human anatomy or Japan, everyone would be adding new information to their knowledge base efficiently because the unit’s context would facilitate making inferences about new words and concepts (see, one does not need to “teach” inference making; it happens automatically in the right conditions). The lower-income kids would gain more because they started with less, but even my nephews would learn something new because they still have lots to learn about many topics. The general knowledge thus acquired makes them better readers, writers and thinkers; the “skills” curriculum is actually not very effective at teaching the skills it purports to teach. E.D. Hirsch explains this well in his new book, “Why Knowledge Matters”. All teachers and concerned parents and school board members should read this.
Tracking in the higher grades. If the achievement gap is still large by 6th grade, schools should be allowed to create a “challenge” track for students who want a harder work load. While not optimal from an egalitarian point-of-view, it keeps the professional parents from defecting from the public school, and keeps kids from different classes in the same building at least.
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That was a mighty long winded defense of the indefensible “no excuses” practices and the suspension and expulsion practices of most charter operators. Let’s allow the “smart” (white, privileged”) kids to have their own schools or classrooms and then severely discipline those little brown scofflaws because they need it.
That’s the corporate reform agenda in a nutshell and it is infuriating.
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Steve, what would tell my brother to do?
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Beats me, Ponderosa. I wasn’t responding to the real dilemma your brother faces, but the answer is not to segregate kids and treat poor kids of color like prisoners in privatized charter schools. Your brother,you and I might work to create a more just society with schools that serve all children so that others don’t face the real dilemma he faces. I have real empathy. I’m not being dismissive. But further dividing America by race and class and using abusive disciplinary practices with young children (however challenging they may be) is not the answer.
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If you read my comment above, I was not proposing segregation by race. I said heterogeneous classrooms through Grade 6, at which point the more ambitious –of any race –could take the “challenge” track.
By the way, it is not only white kids who are afflicted by classroom disorder. Middle-class black parents often take their kids out of public schools to escape disorder. Tracking is a compromise: it keeps kids in the public system while preventing the disorderly ones from harming the education of the others. I wonder if the decline of tracking in America has helped fuel the charter movement.
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I believe the insidious practice of denying equal access to the curriculum, called tracking, has been on the rise in response to privatization and competition for test scores.
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LCT:
Have you read about E.D. Hirsch’s very hope-inspiring thesis that a content-rich curriculum can shrink the achievement gap? If this is true, don’t you think it’s incumbent on those of us who want equity to embrace a shift to such a curriculum? Or do you dispute his argument?
Not tracking sacrifices real learning on the altar of equity. I see kids who can’t multiply in algebra classes where they’re totally lost. Not just at my school –I hear about it from teachers everywhere. Teachers can meet kids’ needs better in a class where direct instruction can be tailored for their skill level. “Differentiation” is largely a myth that was generated to make it seem as if de-tracking would not have any casualties. The war against direct instruction/”sage on the stage” is another necessary expedient to make de-tracking look better than it is. But studies show direct instruction is the best instruction. De-tracking steals this option from young learners. Thus progressive ideology militates against progressive goals.
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Direct instruction is not superior as you have claimed. Your gratuitous dismissal of progressive ideology indicates that you don’t really know anything about progressive education. A progressive approach is supported by virtually all current knowledge of child development, psychology and neurobiology. I don’t mean this as self-promotion, but you might read my recently published book where I make this case in greater detail than possible here.
Read it and then argue. The Kindle version is cheap.
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Steve,
Have you read “The Knowledge Deficit” or “Why Knowledge Matters” by E.D. Hirsch? These are powerful critiques of progressivist education. They convinced me that the road to equity is through systematic transmission of rich knowledge.
And what do you think of Project Follow Through? It’s widely viewed as strong evidence that direct instruction works extremely well. I see this in my own teaching: ten minutes of clear lecture beats days of having kids try to acquire knowledge on their own with texts or Internet research.
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Ponderosa,
You math teachers kill me. (Wink.) There is a huge difference between putting one kid in algebra, another in trigonometry and creating creating test score based “intervention” classes wherein adolescents are forced to read See Spot Run while their peers get extra foreign language elective classes. In English and other classes, reading levels do not prohibit learning to write and think on higher levels. And by the way, when I taught elementary math, we learned to multiply while solving algebraic equations, not in isolation.
It boils down to: when one child is on the success track, another has to be on the other side of the tracks. It’s not fair, whether it makes our jobs simpler or not.
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LCT:
I did not get the impression that ponderosa was talking about putting struggling kids into a class where they read “See Spot Run” only.
I see him bringing up important issues that public schools should be dealing with in creative ways because they aren’t charter schools where students can be “disappeared” if they can’t keep up.
Teaching a 5th grade ELA class where some students are illiterate, some are on a 2nd grade level, some are at a 4th grade level, 20% are on grade level, and 5% are above is an impossible challenge expected of public school teachers who may have 30 students to teach.
A relative teaches 9th grade Algebra — a required course — where half the students who come into the class are still struggling with basic arithmetic. Of the other half, some are barely on grade level and some are advanced. Yet the expectation is that unless 100% learn the Algebra curriculum, the teacher is a failure. How does any teacher try to address all their needs?
If you oppose tracking, maybe math should be computer based, with students logging onto a computer to do work at their level while the teacher spends half the time teaching small groups of students new concepts at whatever level that group is at, and half the time helping students working at the computers. Would it work? Who knows?
The other solution is, of course, very small class sizes as private school students get. Ironic, since those children of privilege don’t need small classes when their schools already demand a similar level of proficiency and ability before a child is admitted. Meanwhile, the reformers fight against small class size for the truly at-risk kids who need them most.
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In what universe does every student get an ‘A’ in every course? Learning is hard work. We teach the curriculum, the students learn as much of it as they can, and when they struggle, we help them as much as we can. That’s why we fight for smaller class sizes for more personalization, which means fighting to stop wasting money on computers (that fail to help especially when overused), and we fight against being called failures if every student doesn’t get 100% on every quiz or test.
But even though not every student learns everything, they each have a access to the knowledge if they go for it. Tracking is the practice of putting a child in a class that is taught differently — at a different pace, or as in my district, a different level or even different subject — than another. It is a system of haves and have nots, just like charter scams and private schools versus public schools. It’s school site based segregation and I cannot stand it.
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LeftCoastTeacher,
“access to the knowledge if they go for it”
This is not enough. Maybe it was when we had two parent families that could compensate for the fact that many K12 students are not intrinsically motivated to do well.
I am of the mind that schools, especially urban ones, have to take some responsibility for what was previously a parenting role if we want the majority of students in K12 to be successful. That will take more money, and it will take changing responsibilities and strategies, but I see that as the only way to make progress with today’s population.
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Sure. Tracking is not the solution, though. Lloyd has some better ideas on this post.
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NYC public school parent @December 28, 2016 at 6:57 pm
Or …. what about considering this novel idea?
Instead of accepting the status quo, how about you implement effective remedial instruction for those students that are not at grade level?
Or …. how about this progressive idea?
Separate students out by their instructional level AND REMEDIATE THEM—- BUT SEPERATE THEM ONLY IF YOU ARE GOING TO BE SERIOUS ABOUT CLOSING THEIR ACADEMIC AREAS OF STRUGGLE AND THEIR ACADEMIC GAPS!—
Else you will just leave them that much farther behind, as happens once they are tracked in typical SpecEd classes!!!!
(At least pushing them through EXPOSES them to GRADE LEVEL CONTENT if they are in a GenEd section!)
This is exactly what I mean by the status quo being unacceptable and yet schools are all too happy to keep this status quo in place (rather than actually do something to resolve the literacy issues and numeracy issues they are facing routinely!!!)
This is just proving my point and why I have no faith left in traditional public education, and to a lesser extent, private education institutions as well.
What you have described reinforces my feelings that as more and more parents see that schools could really care less with improving the literacy struggles and numeracy struggles and instead it is apparently accepting it as the status quo while doing nothing to seriously resolve the situation in their schools, they will continue to leave and choose alternatives such as cyberschools, online schools and home schooling….
Leaving only those that are using it as taxfunded daycare and recreational centers, where if any learning happens it’s incidental but who really notices or cares, so why bother at all, correct?
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M,
You started making a rational argument, then concluded that disgruntled parents would reject traditional public schools and choose cybercharters, online schools, and home schooling. This shows a shocking lack of knowledge. Every evaluation of cybercharters and online schools (not sure there is a difference) has concluded that they are woefully deficient. The quality of teaching and learning are abysmal. The latest CREDO study found that for every 180 days of enrollment in a cyberschool, students lose 180 days of instruction in math and 72 days in reading. The quality of home schooling is entirely dependent on the education level of parents. Most children will learn no more than what their parents know.
Your answers are retrograde and uninformed.
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John,
“’access to the knowledge if they go for it’
This is not enough”
I got tired of debating you last night. But your attitude bothers with this new day. It IS enough to teach in a way that doesn’t assume students have no responsibility to try. Students must try. What is not good enough is for you to take the students who want to learn away to your charter scam and leave me with the rest, and fewer resources with which to help them.
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LeftCoastTeacher,
2% of incoming kids to my charter middle school passed their state tests last year in their previous school, so don’t make assumptions about who is sending whom their poor students.
Yes, of course students have to try, but schools also need to take some responsibility for showing kids models of success and motivating them, as well as compensating to the degree possible for deficits they arrive with and frequent lack of the same parenting we got back in the days of stay at home moms.
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You are the one making assumptions about the effort my public school colleagues and I put forth, John. It’s far past insulting at this point. I make no assumptions about your charter scam, though. Test scores do not define the students in any school or scam, the PARCC and SBAC tests being nonsensical. The point is your students chose to go to your charter scam. Their families put forth the effort to apply (and probably made some additional commitments to your company as well). Even though their decision was not socially conscientious, it showed they cared enough to put forward effort. You have a lot of nerve telling me I don’t do good work with vast majority of students — the ones who didn’t apply. For crying out loud, stop it.
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LeftCoastTeacher,
I didn’t say anything about your work. The fact that you refer to my “charter scam” and my “company” shows you have little knowledge about the majority of charter schools and little interest in having a serious conversation.
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John at 8:46 on this thread. Your basic assumption is that public schools have to do miraculously more with less. Charter scams — I refuse to call them public schools until they are openly and democratically run with classroom conditions protected by collective bargaining with unions — take from needy populations of public school students and place blame on their teachers. You scoff. You scold. You take more. The NAACP calls for a stop. You continue. Revelations of fraud and waste abound. You go on. You will do as you please. You’re right, I will not discuss this seriously with someone who doesn’t respect me for the work I do and refuses to take responsibility for inequitable funding disparity.
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LeftCoastTeacher,
“Your basic assumption is that public schools have to do miraculously more with less.”
No, I think we should be spending more on public education, not less.
“I refuse to call them public schools until they are openly and democratically run with classroom conditions protected by collective bargaining with unions”
Do you think that elected school boards and collective bargaining are proven effective for student learning? If so, we have a difference of opinion.
“take from needy populations of public school students and place blame on their teachers”
No, I don’t blame teachers. And, charter schools get paid less per student than traditional schools.
“Revelations of fraud and waste abound.”
Yes, they do, and I’m against for profit charters and for strong charter laws that make self-dealing and other conflicts of interest illegal.
“doesn’t respect me for the work I do”
Can you point out where I’ve been disrespectful to you or your work (whereas you have called 20 years of my hard volunteer work a scam)?
“and refuses to take responsibility for inequitable funding disparity.”
Charters get less money, so I assume you mean the disparity in funding between rich and poor districts. I have spoken out about how unfair this is many times. This is the school choice that most families avail themselves of while low income families are stuck in less orderly schools with more disruptions, frequently less effective teachers, lost facilities, etc.
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John,
Do me a favor. Stop. You are not listening. You are not being respectful. You are riding a high horse in circles. No, I do have evidence that democracy is “more effective” than fascism. Idiotic. Enough already.
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LCT,
Some people come to the blog to say the same thing over and over and over. I find it tedious. Best to ignore them.
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You’re right, Diane. It’s like debating with an automated telemarketing device. What a waste of time. Frustrating. Lesson learned. I’m done talking in circles with them.
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Charter schools like John’s have mediocre results because while they do not serve the most expensive high needs students, they also don’t aggressively counsel out the low scoring kids because they receive far more in donations by touting outsized results with the handful left than they get from state funding per those students.
John also pretends that charters get less per student to run a system where they can simply get rid of any student who costs more than whatever they allocate to spend on students after paying for their CEO and other administrative salaries.
Charter schools operators like John have to defend the no excuses high attrition high results charter chains because if charters like John’s weren’t able to average in Success Academy’s cherry-picked outsized test scores then charters like his would be shown up for the mediocrities they are. John’s determined defense of all that Eva Moskowitz does and earns is because he knows that without her test scores averaged it, charters like his look like the failure they are. Charters barely do better than public schools, and that’s only because they desperately need to average in the ONLY charter that achieves near 100% passing rates.
It’s as if you took a group of mediocre public schools plus Stuy, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech and compared the “average” SAT score against a group of charter schools like John’s. Having all the high scores from Stuy, etc. to average in would make the public schools look far superior to John’s “failing” charter. He’d be crying unfair but he has always been a hypocrite when he posts here defending the very worst practices of no-excuses charters because he cares more about his own career than those supposedly nasty kids who keep disappearing from charters. Which explains what is wrong with charter school folks in a nutshell. Always willing to sell out at-risk kids if it promotes their own career.
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NYC public school parent,
Once again with one of your predictable personal attacks.
I’ll remind you that you know nothing about my school, so referring to our “mediocre results” or discussing the students we serve is nonsense. Saying it as fact is lying, plain and simple.
You view everything through the lens of Success Academy, and it’s crazy to compare us. I can tell you that we got less than $20,000 in donations last year, probably less than the traditional public school nearby. We don’t have a “CEO”.
“he cares more about his own career”
This is not my career, I’m a volunteer.
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John,
You support everything charter. You are a consistent defender of privatization, Eva, Success Academy, and the billionaires who shower money on them. That’s not normal. Give your real name. Otherwise I am certain you are paid to shill for charters.
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Diane says. “You support everything charter. You are a consistent defender of privatization, Eva, Success Academy, and the billionaires who shower money on them. That’s not normal. Give your real name. Otherwise I am certain you are paid to shill for charters.”
Nonsense Diane, and you know it. I’m 100% against for profit charters, online charters, lax charter law, unreasonable salaries, looking at achievement without looking at student demographics and attrition, forcing charters on parents by closing schools they prefer, etc and have been consistently. I don’t believe in privatization and don’t consider not-for-profiting charters that any more than I would a NFP soup kitchen or public library. I’m skeptical about Eva’s performance, but I like to see data. My kids are in great traditional public schools, as I was (in part because my parents could afford to move to a better district). I think urban schools need more money, though I don’t think that alone will fix much. I have huge respect for teachers who work hard to continuously learn and improve, and I think teaching is one of the most difficult jobs around. I am in awe watching a masterful teacher. I’ve volunteered working with at risk children and families for over 30 years with a charter school being the place I ended up only because I see the huge difference that education can make in giving children more choices in life than their parents had.
I realize that you don’t care for nuanced opinions and must use straw men to categorize everyone into “for us or against us” (hmm, how Trumpian) and realize I will always be in the against camp as far as you’re concerned because I believe in great schools but don’t particularly care if they are traditional public or not-for-profit charters. Also, I support unions where they work in concert with leadership for the betterment of the product or service they provide, but not where they don’t.
Last from me on this thread. I have work to do and family to attend to.
Happy New Years to all who work for better education and are in this for kids (even if we disagree on methods). I think we’ll be on the same side fighting against for profit charters, expansion without quality, and lack of charter accountability in some states for the next 4 years.
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I read some of the comments under Fred Hiatt’s editorial in the Washington Post, and someone had posted a tirade in favor of tracking. I don’t wish to incite anyone to that, hope I didn’t, but now I think this 400 comment post has cooled off enough I can go back to the subject without upsetting anyone. Tracking is a very controversial subject among teachers and parents. Very controversial.
A reason I oppose tracking has to do with SBAC. In LAUSD, most schools use SBAC scores to determine which class level, or track, in which to place students. Most secondary schools have changed to experimental bell schedules and give students with scores above the cut line extra periods for extra classes — enriching electives — and those below the SBAC bar get extra periods too — long, tedious, intervention block classes with blended, scripted curricula like Scholastic’s Read 180.
Students are told to perform on the test else they will lose their electives. Better not be ill, injured, or lose a loved one around testing time, or you lose your elective and have your entire class schedule designed around keeping you in the same classes as those who scored poorly like you. It puts high stakes on young people with computer based, standardized tests. It adds to a testing culture already overdone. In the nation’s second largest district, tracking supports Common Core. It is an aid to testing companies. Add these reasons tracking is wrong to my belief it causes micro-segregation. I oppose tracking.
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Gad! Is there a way out of this loop? To me, this is a matter of personality, aka an ad hominem argument. When I began teaching foreign language classes, the school had a rule made by people who did not understand learning, nor kids, nor language, nor teaching. The rule was a kid had to have a B in English to take a foreign language. Utterly, unforgivably wrong-headed and stupid. I ignored the rule and when I became department chair I made it official.
Who wanted the rule? The same sort of people who made the rules laid out in LeftCoastTeacher’s entry here. Everything is static, linear, hierarchical and “empirical” aka my empire, not the kid’s and I rule. Those people never understood why I didn’t want to exclude students; didn’t it make my classes more prestigious? Didn’t I want to attract just the “good kids”? Jerks.
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Re tracking: recently, Tucker Carlson, about to take Kelly’s slot on Fox, said once Texas reaches the critical number of Hispanics in the state, there will be no need to hold presidential elections b/c they’ll all vote Democratic. The underlying assumption is: Hispanics vote Democratic now and always will, just like they will always speak Spanish and be brown. In the same way, a student who “struggles” will always be in that position and will always be the same and can be categorized as this or that and so it’s best to sort all the kids into the “good kids” and the “good students” and the “slow kids” and the “not college material students”, maybe at birth, and then slot them into their positions in pre-school and teach them accordingly.
That reflects a certain kind of thinking, not a misunderstanding or ignorance of learning psychology and human development; you have to have a certain personality (ad hominem argument, again) to even start to think that way. And you are immovable, as we’ve seen in the exchanges on this blog.
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AWK sentence in paragraph 2. Sorry.
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Thank you, parent.
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Diane: it seems WordPress reformatted my response. I wanted bullet points or numbers before “Real discipline”, “A content…” and “Tracking”.
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I don’t think bullet points translate into a WordPress comment. Because I’ve had the same problem in the past, I use > this key instead of a bullet point.
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“I personally would prefer there to be a system of state schools that had high standards, and educated all children to the limits of their inherent capabilities… But we don’t seem to be allowed to have that choice.” That’s an interesting shift to the passive voice, and quite telling in the way that it illustrates how well powerful people who hate democracy and the ideal of a “common good” have succeeded in convincing people like Doug1943 to accept things as “just the way they are” and buy into false promises like “school choice.”
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He should have just written the last paragraph, as that is the only fair, inclusive and effective approach that will allow most students to succeed. So, he gets it, but like most of the privateers/reformers, he just can’t accept it. Doug: If you think the cost of education is too much, consider the alternative. Shifting the costs to private, religious or charter schools does not change that, it just duplicates efforts. We think nothing of the cost to deal with the results of a lack of education- welfare, health costs, unemployment, crime, prisons…. And, we never question the outrageous allocation of most of our taxes to the war industry or industry subsidies. Those evidently are the most valued public goods to most Americans. And, providing an “escape” to some children is the antithesis of No Child Left Behind, by definition.
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If Doug1943 thinks the cost of public education is too much, he should be complaining about the cost:
Korea $320 billion
Vietnam $686 billion
Person Gulf War $96 billion
Iraq $658 billion
Afghanistan $171 billion
Domestic Security Operations $33 billion
Post Iraq, Afghanistan $859 billion
“In FY 2017, total US government spending for defense (including military defense, veterans affairs, and foreign policy) is budgeted to be $853.6 billion. Military spending is budgeted at $617.0 billion, Veterans spending is budgeted at $180.8 billion, and foreign policy and foreign aid spending is budgeted at $55.8 billion.” (this does not include the cost of fighting the wars listed above)
“Among the 40 states surveyed in the 2012 report by the Vera Institute of Justice, the average annual per-inmate cost was $31,286. Topping the list was New York with an average annual cost per prisoner of $60,076. In total, Vera researchers found that the annual price to taxpayers was $39 billion.”
http://www.cheatsheet.com/personal-finance/what-are-americas-prisons-costing-you.html/?a=viewall
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/falling-apart-america-neglected-infrastructure/
“In the first ever of its kind, the report: “Higher Administration Charges of Arizona Charter Schools Cost Taxpayers $128 Million a Year,” calculates on a per pupil basis that Arizona’s charter schools spent $128 million more on administrative costs during the 2014-2015 school year than traditional public schools.”
Public districts spent an average of $628 per pupil for all administrative services. Charter schools averaged $1,403 per pupil, more than twice as much. If charter schools had the same administrative efficiency as traditional public schools, the state would save $128 million a year in administrative costs
https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2016/02/24/charter-schools-administrative-costs-128-million-a-year/
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Thanks, Lloyd, for more facts. The inflated administrative costs of charted are rarely discussed, but the public needs to understand how reckless many charters are with public funds.
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Well, Lloyd, here we go. The United States military is the status quo. It’s a failing narrative. We’re falling behind in warfare. Some military branches are dropout factories, like the Air Farce. Military families deserve choices, like the Andre Agassi Charter Mercenary Army. With Pearson’s computer based exams (Black Ops video game) and Private and Charter Mercs, every soldier from Cyber Corps to Civil Affairs will be Delta and Seal team ready. By 2014.
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Oh, that was funny. But laughter aside, it might come to pass with Littlefingers Donald Turmp as the “smartest” groping-liar in charge.
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“Some military branches are drop out factories.”
That assumption is wrong, another myth spread by the misinformation industry in the U.S.
Whenever you read something like this in the internet or in the media, you should fact check.
You can join the Army with a GED. Is it as easy to join the Army with a GED as it is with a high school diploma? No, it is much more difficult to join the Army with a GED compared to a high school diploma. …
The military is not allowed to accept more than 10 percent of individuals with a GED, and each branch of the military sets its own limit, which is generally less than that 10 percent. Military statistics have shown that people who dropped out of high school tend to drop out of the military in their first term at a higher percentage than those with a high school diploma.
http://www.militaryspot.com/enlist/can-i-join-the-army-with-a-ged
Today’s military: A well-educated force
“As a whole, the U.S. military is far better educated than the American population it defends. 82.8 percent of U.S. military officers in 2010 had at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to 29.9 percent of the general population. 93.6 percent of enlisted soldiers had at least a high school diploma, compared to 59.5 percent of America (Note: that 59.5 percent must include babies to the elderly, everyone, an obviously misleading statement).”
http://www.facethefactsusa.org/facts/tanks-and-humvees-caps-and-gowns
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Lloyd, my only quibble with your chart on spending is that I would have focused on discretionary spending, i.e., the roughly one-third of the budget that is determined annually through the appropriations process. That, to me, is a more accurate indication of where our political spending priorities are. Of that, with the exception of defense spending, since Newt Gingrich’s ascent to power in 1994, the process has been broken and politicized. For the current fiscal year, which began on Oct. 1, 2016, Congress was not able to agree on any of the 13 appropriations bills that fund every federal department and agency. So we are stuck with continuing resolutions that temporarily fund federal functions. That has now been kicked until March 2017, which will, in effect, give the Trump administration an opportunity to retroactively set funding priorities. There has been a whole bunch of noise about the stolen Supreme Court nomination and nary a peep about the hijacking of the appropriations process.
The one exception, of course, has been defense, which President Obama signed into law in late December. It provides more than $611 billion to defense, which translates into 53% or more of the TOTAL annual federal spending for EVERY federal department and agency. When you add in VA appropriations and the intelligence black budget, that leaves just 40% of all annual federal spending. Of that, about $32 billion will go to the Department of Education, which is almost the same we spend on the National Institutes of Health.
Trump will be able to dictate, with congressional approval, all those spending priorities. Your chart becomes more relevant if Trump and his complicit majorities in Congress decide to go ahead and “reform” Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. That will basically slash huge holes into the Great Society and New Deal social safety net that is outside the purview of the annual appropriations process. This is not as “sexy” as arguing about which party is more corrupt, the pro-choice/and so-called pro-life debate, LGBT issues, etc., but it is much more relevant to the everyday lives of average Americans. Too bad most don’t understand it nor know anything about it.
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Sorry, forgot to close the argument about your chart, Lloyd. By including both discretionary and mandatory spending, you chart over represents education funding (the number in your chart is far bigger than what the appropriations process funds) and under represents defense spending, which is almost all annual spending.
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I know the difference between mandatory and discretionary federal spending, but I’m not willing to spend the time to gather all the links to the sources so just the one pie.
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Thanks, Lloyd. I am not being critical of what you wrote, although I see now it can be interpreted that way. Just wanted to expand on your thesis. Most people, unfortunately, don’t understand the differences. I read a great letter to the editor in today’s Washington Post responding to George Will’s (wretch) argument that smarter defense systems would lead to savings. The writer of the letter basically said, we’ve heard that sermon for years and it has no merit. Defense interests and contractors will always figure out how to extract more money and the executive and legislative branches will always acquiesce to them. Nor do they understand how it limits our choices in other issue areas like education, health care, labor, or anything that is not military-related.
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Hmmm… so as long as schools pass through students that choose the militairy, schools are doing well enough and we have nothing to worry about! Wow, how the heck did wel miss that connection?
That must be why my school district is so thrilled with all of the students tfrom our district hat can’t make the grade for college or other employment and so they entersthe militairy.
I finally get this connection now to that being the solution to the education and literacy crisis across this nation!
Thank you for finally illuminating it for me! I now see the light! 🙂
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Lloyd,
This is a long comment section. I did not see your reply about dropout factories. All branches of the military are great places to learn (and hopefully not be deployed capriciously). My whole ‘military is falling behind’ comment was facetious, making fun of the pulled from thin air argument that U.S. students are falling behind. Speaking of which, the whole United States government is falling behind. It’s a dropout factory. It needs to be privatized. (It might just be.)
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I did reply about the “dropout factories”. Ctrl + F allows you to search for names. When the little search box appears, type in my first name and then click the down arrow until you find that comment.
I think we should privatize Littlefingers Trump straight to a private prison.
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LCT: Government “might be” privatized? I believe that train left the station a while back, achieving warp speed with Citizens United.
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Yes, Citizen’s United might well have been the point of no return for the U.S. to remain a republic with a media that at least attempts to balance its reporting by fact checking all the information fed to them from any source, so-called expert, or witness.
90 percent of the traditional media is now owned by six global corporations controlled by some of the same oligarchs that are subverting the U.S. Constitution. There are still reputable media sources out there but informing the public where to find them and who to trust is like climbing Everest to the top without cold weather gear or oxygen.
With the media compromised and/or bought off, it is almost impossible for most voters to become informed of what’s really going on. Bias, misinformation and outright lies runs rampant.
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True… No argument …The US military OFFICERS might be well educated currently in comparison to previous generations, but what about those as my Vietnam era army deployed dad would call them – “grunts”? And just because they may have the pieces of paper saying HS graduate, does it equate to them actually having the reading, writing and math skills to go with it? Or are those not really important if your only deployed on the front lines?
(As my dad would remark- The ones placed on the front lines to be cannon fodder? Especially in times of conflicts when they need more bodies?)
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Find out on your own. Take the recruitment quiz and discover if you are smarter than a US Marine.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2012/1109/Are-you-smarter-than-a-US-Marine-Take-the-recruitment-quiz/Word-Knowledge-1
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Doug says: “I think the problem is this: the people opposing allowing people to escape from bad public schools don’t seem to want to acknowledge that there is such a thing as bad public schools.”
First, public schools are not like a broken teacup–throw it out and get a new one, and all will be fine. Nor are they an abstraction–as others here have recounted, they are distinct institutions, but their quality is inextricably related to the well-being (the general welfare) of their communities and the families who live there–and even governmental presence and the small businesses who service them. If you think of schools in abstract terms, we’re done.
Then Doug says: “Or, at most, they seem to believe that if we just raised taxes and put more money into these schools, they’d be better.”
Second, no one I know thinks that way–more money, done deal–better schools? NADA. Schools and neighborhoods are not sinkholes. Perhaps they seem that way because there is no long-term, comprehensive, and concerted effort (that is not also obstructed) to encompass the “general welfare” of the people who live there; coupled with shorter-term efforts in communities who show that they need them and where intelligent spending WOULD make them better. (How much did we just send to Israel to buy back weapons from our war-machine manufacturers, to fight an aggressor that they are encroaching on?) And in a democracy (should we be able to keep it), there is no money made that is wholly “my money” or that is made without an inherent responsibility to “the people” who collectively are and own “the government.” Unless you are already a fascist, go live in a dictatorship–see how long “your money” remains yours.
Then Doug says: “Or, that there is nothing the schools can do, it’s general poverty that is the problem.”
Again, it seems you look at schools as an abstraction; but you cannot drive even a finely tuned car on roads that are neglected, flooded, and that don’t go anywhere anyway. Further, public schools DO work–despite horrible conditions, to start, by providing a safe island to learn within a community. And teachers rarely if ever teach there because they are well funded or get perks (ha!) or can make deals (ha again). They teach there because they recognize the beauty and value of “seeing the light come on” in their students’ eyes and, watching “their faces light up” with wonder and insight. See what’s right and sound, and build on it. That’s the fundamental method.
Finally Doug says: “Or, if you agree that some public schools are bad, but not unreformably so, how can they be reformed?”
Now THERE’S the question. Diane and others here, including myself, could provide answers to at least some of that question. However, I can say this: It WON’T occur from breaking up the relationship between (a) the institutions of family and their neighborhoods and (b) the institution of education in a secular Constitutional Democracy. That Democracy already fosters too many attacks, from many directions, on the unity and value of (a) the former: the institution of family that, as battered as it is, still provides the rock on which the quality of an entire culture rests. In several ways (as recounted on this blog many times) privatization is yet another multi-pronged and well-funded attack on that rock.
If you know what the institution of family means to the well-being and growth of any culture, you will look further into the problems of education you seem so open to understanding.
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Catherine Blanche King: thank you for your remarks.
In what follows I am riffing off of your comments, not responding directly to Doug1943’s question[s].
Your third point reminded me of how, whether meaning to or not, those arguing in favor of corporate education reform are often addicted (in the most casual, offhanded way) to the sneer, jeer and smear.
The idea that those choosing to work in public schools (certificated and non-certificated staff alike) are, by and large, lazy moochers that meet any problem with the mindset that “there is nothing the schools can do, it’s general poverty that is the problem”—
Is not just wrong, but, well, as Dorothy Parker put it:
“This wasn’t just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it.”
Regular readers of this blog know that I have posted some scathing comments about public school staff (mainly admins and teachers) but overall, the folks I worked with in elementary and HS not only faced up to whatever difficulties and challenges the students brought with them to school—
It inspired them to work even harder, and better, and to go beyond the call of duty. Why? The answers are not hard to find and understand IF one genuinely wants to know.
Speaking briefly just from firsthand experience: the vast majority of staff used to BE public school students and know what a difference a concerned adult can make, not to mention that most folks were (or were planning to be) parents themselves and genuinely cared about the well-being (in all senses) of the young people they encountered.
To put it mildly, in order to sell the notion that public schools are failing the rheephormsters hammer away at the idea that public school staff is heartless, unfeeling and self-serving. In other words, not the soft sell but the hard sell: demonize those standing in the way of reaping $tudent $ucce$$, the truth be damned!
That’s the way I see it…
😎
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To put in my two cents: Catherine and Krazy, you are both so correct in your comments. But what about the middle ground? What about teachers who are good and want to do the right thing (professionally respected autonomy, anyone) but are caught between unreasonable expectations from politically motivated superiors and the real needs of their students (poor, affluent, in-between, whatever)?. That’s what I am experiencing with my children. We moved here primarily because of public schools–which after my public, parochial and independent school experiences is what i wanted for my children–but their professionalism is constantly being attacked to the point that their employment and pension benefits, or fear of losing them, has neutered their motivation and creativity to teach?
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GregB writes: “But what about the middle ground? What about teachers who are good and want to do the right thing (professionally respected autonomy, anyone) but are caught between unreasonable expectations from politically motivated superiors and the real needs of their students (poor, affluent, in-between, whatever)?”
Probably what the rest of us have to do with the advent of Donald Trump: and as if teachers don’t have enough to do: ORGANIZE; learn and teach about the propaganda methods being used presently (start with logical fallacies), how to recognize and reply to them without engaging in the same sorts of subversive conversation-degenerating language. Give a copy of “Animal Farm” or a video of “Brazil” or “Farenheit 451,” or “The Insider,” or “Judgment at Nuremberg,” (or any number of films) to all parents and teachers and formal discuss in terms of our present issues. Have regular meetings at school and online. Build issue-relationships with your community churches–who have a great stake in what’s going on.
It’s not just another form of “propaganda;” it’s rather exposure of it and its horrible influence on truth and on the body-culture. Where is superman when you need him?
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Doug has a belief in a bad public school that is false. Public schools with highly challenged populations need good people to work with them. Pick a public school n volunteer to help. You cannot imagine all you can learn, Doug.
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Simple response for me. When I was hired many years ago I was told by the A.P. (Social Studies) that if more than 30% of students received a failing grade I would get a rating of “unsatisfactory”. So much for high standards.
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And your experience definitely defines the experience of all other public school teachers? What if more than 30% of your students did not “pass” the AP tests? Not to dismiss your comment, grade inflation seems to be a problem when someone feels they are under attack from administrators on down. I did hear teachers complain about being called on the carpet by administrators for having too many failures. Of course, they were typically teaching classes of 35+ students many of whom faced major challenges outside the classroom.
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I think there is more than one reason that many people want to dismantle public education and non of them is because schools are failing the children. This is a distraction to the real reasons.
Many Evangelicals want children to be tutored in their beliefs and no other. They see public education as having a left bent and is godless.
Many people believe that schools are indoctrinating children to lean to the left and are teaching them the wrong values for our country.
Many people do not want a highly educated population. Educated people, by and large, tend to think about issues and cannot be easily controlled.
One of the biggest reasons is ‘follow the money”. Privatizing education is a huge cash cow for many people. They don’t care if children come out of their schools educated. They care how much money they can get from the government and line their pockets at the expense of the children.
The testing is an enormous cash cow-you test children beyond their ability, you say teachers are not teaching and children are not learning so they create curricula and test prep books. It’s a circular pattern.
Teachers are expensive. Teachers teach students to think. If students think they may realize that they are being duped by the people in power.
No one gives up power willingly.
The public has been tricked into thinking that the schools and teachers are the source of all the problems of the United States.
Religious institutions are happy about vouchers. They have been paying privately for their children to go to school. With vouchers taxes will pay for their children to go to a private school on the governments’ dime.
We are, in essence, a third world country where a small percentage of people at the top are controlling the population.
I am sure there are more reasons people want to privatize public education but at the moment, I can’t think of any others.
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YEP!
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I never had the opportunities afforded the Obama daughters. My parents were not Ivy League law school graduates. My father was not president of the United States and he was a UAW factory worker. My mother was a school librarian and belonged to the NEA. I attended public schools and a public university. I am very grateful for the education my state and my country have afforded me. The notion that poor children will be given the opportunities of the Trump children, for example, is beyond ludicrous.
For over twenty-five years, I have taught English as a Second Language in poor, urban New Jersey communities. Some of the parents of my students are illiterate in their native languages. A father of a first grader recently shared that he has no idea if his son is doing his homework correctly because he never went to school. We are able to communicate due to his rudimentary knowledge of English and my broken Spanish. A mother of another first grader inquired as to whether the red scribble her daughter presented instead of a picture was what I had assigned. She also did not attend school. In contrast, my parents sat with me at the kitchen table night after night to ensure that my homework was completed correctly.
Some students are hungry and others do not have winter jackets. The older sister of the girl mentioned above last year asked me if she could take a crayon home in order to finish her picture. She was prepared to return the crayon the next day.
The notion that schools and teachers are the most crucial factors in a child’s development has repeatedly been disproven. Some children manage to rise above their circumstances, but others do not. The high rates of incarceration, the easy accessibility to drugs and guns must be added to the equation. Inadequate health care and wretched housing conditions are commonplace. The failing teachers, failing schools meme should be retired. In its place, a dose of reality would be welcome.
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Abigail,
Thank you for adding another piece of the lies that are being touted in order to destroy public education; that vouchers alone will level the playing fields of education.
Your post highlighted many of the inequities that have nothing to do with teachers and schools; unbalance of wealth of opportunities are very significant.
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Thank you, Abigail, for your candid comments. I walked in your shoes with my ELLs for thirty-six years in a diverse suburban NYC district. About on third of the students, mostly ELLs and some African Americans were poor, but the remaining students were middle class. It was a well funded and resourced school. My poor students benefited tremendously from attending safe, positive schools with high expectations. Over time, many of my ELLs became good students, and many of them went to college on grants and scholarships. The district supported these students with homework centers and summer programs that included trips to museums. We did everything we could to be inclusive. What I am saying, with proper support, many things are possible for these students.
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Abigail, If you know of any students who lack winter coats, or do not have adequate food, or need school supplies (Crayons to computers) please contact the Masonic angel fund see
http://www.masonicangelfund.org/
The Freemasons were responsible for establishing some of the first tax-supported schools in the American colonies. The great reformer Horace Mann, was a Freemason.
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Neither were Michelle or Barack Obama from that same pedigree as their daughters have grown up in. They earned it, by studying hard and working hard!
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True of Michelle Obama; not true about the president. He attended private schools.
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This writer does not acknowledge that the motivation to support charter schools and vouchers has been largely political and religious. Trace the history of charters and vouchers, and you will not find many parents from challenged schools involved in their inception. Rather, you will find mainly politicians wanting to destroy teacher’s unions behind the effort, and then representatives of religious schools who saw a way to save their inner city schools, which were closing in droves. These partisans have never acknowledged that poverty is at the root of inner city school failure. Rather, they have disgracefully blamed teachers, who are among the most gentle and giving people in our society, and proceeded to try and destroy our public schools, which has been impacting schools beyond the inner cities for some time. Public schools make up a significant part of the glue that holds communities together. Do we want to lose that?
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I actually think a discussion about what a ‘bad’ school is should be discussed. I personally have asked the same questions about certain schools that I know well enough to make at least modestly informed judgments.
There is no question that a poor principal who plays favorites with teachers and is dismissive with struggling students should find another calling. Where I am having problems relates more to schools that are isolated in areas where the school climate is simply destructive. These schools ‘implode’ in my view in part because there is such a concentration of children whose lives are frequently disrupted. No single principal or teacher can solve the problems these children bring.
Charters reject these kids, and public school teachers often simply leave them behind. These are ‘turn around’ schools in Florida. We give 300 of them an extra hour of tutoring paid for by the state, and the districts try to allocate social services funding. Our lowest performing schools receive twice the per student funding than for higher achieving schools. We celebrate if the school grade increases from an ‘F’ to a ‘D’, but we also know that the change was mostly due to the latest revision of the formula for calculating growth in achievement. These kids start out behind and stay behind.
So what is to be done? As our local community has made some zoning changes to create a better socio-economic balance, there has been some disruption in previously stable schools, but after a year, the ‘new’ children tend to adjust to the norms. Struggling children see different models of behavior, and teachers are not so stressed by the enormity of the problems. Children may not ‘catch up’, but for some it may be possible because their former peers do not hold them behind.
Rezoning and magnet schools help, but in Florida more than half of school age children qualify for free and reduced lunch. Federal housing, moreover, often concentrates families with the lowest incomes into specific locations. So, choice policies now allow families to transfer to any school with space. Our most severely disadvantaged school lost 100 children this year. They moved to three other low performing schools that had seats, leaving behind a core group of children ‘without choice’. Is this a positive step? The alternative of closing the schools solves nothing.
Our community is at least trying to find comprehensive solutions:
*A group of citizens persuaded the city and county commissions to work toward a living wage. They are lobbying the colleges and universities to do the same.
*Another group has established a health and resource clinic for children in an area identified by its social and economic problems. They now are gearing up along with the university for a referendum to support birth to age five quality childcare.
*The school district, the police, and the behavioral resource centers are collaborating on a ‘system of care’ in schools to target children with behavioral and family problems.
*The local newspaper has organized community discussions about short and longer term goals to improve health, jobs, transportation, education, juvenile justice and housing availability.
With all of this happening, we still had a gang related brawl at a local high school last week. Thirty students were involved and fourteen were arrested. This may not seem unusual for some, but it is for us.
So, it is a complicated social problem that is reflected in how our communities and schools are organized. Some schools are failing simply because of where they are located.
Choice offers a ‘breaking away’ from what is. It is simply the continuation of suburban sprawl that began years ago. Yet, there is a glimmer of hope as ‘infill’ into cities increases. It is a chance to embrace the benefits of diversity in a practical and manageable way if communities make that commitment.
After all is said and done, what is a ‘bad’ school? It is one set up to fail.
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Thank you for your comments. The problem with Florida schools is that many policymakers are dedicated to destroying public education. They jump from one bad idea to another, and they are unwilling to spend the money on students. They refuse to regulate or oversee charters while they test the public students ad nauseam.
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And it is a bad school when it does not work with families to help the neediest of it’s students to close academic gapsl It is such when it stonewalls families and refuses to help their child learn how to read and write and do math with a level of proficiency; it is such when it chooses to allow them to get left behind at no fault of their own other than to blame it on their demographics or lack of attention, while not looking in the mirror at the methods they are using or the ineffectiveness to teach those that struggle more with learning due to learning differences that are quite obvious if you ask them to read or write or do math that other students might be able to do much more easily and proficiently!
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M,
Since the achievement gap troubles you, you should demand the elimination of standardized tests. They are designed to show gaps. The gaps never close.
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Wrong dianeravitch, students can and do close gaps if provided with the proper instrucstional remediation early enough and with fidelity! Less than 5% of LD students will fail to make progress or close gaps! Hence why it so very important to get the proper instructional methods into place early with these at risk students vs the wait to fail status quo protocols that are typically used!
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Wrong, M.
Standardized tests are designed to create gaps. They are carefully crafted to have a range of questions that are easy, and questions that differentiate from easy to hard, and a few are very hard. The gaps are built into the tests. I spent seven years on the board of the federal test called NAEP. The testing companies knew precisely how every question would “perform” and what % of students would get the correct answer. There is no such thing as a standardized test that everyone passes or on which everyone is proficient.
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M,
No, wrong, wrong; you are wrong. I’m getting a pretty clear image of who you are, and I’m not liking what I see.
Schools are made up of people and many of those people who work in education go beyond what is asked of them in their job, to help the children in their classrooms. But they are still human, they have a life beyond that classroom after all the long hours until their brains and bodies can’t function anymore and they have to take a break, to rest, to eat, to get away from all the pressure. I’m talking about the 97 to 99 percent that were judged by those two Harvard expert witnesses in the Los Angeles Vergara Trial to not be incompetent teachers.
Because the schools in the U.S. are pressure cookers thanks to the frauds who are pushing this privatization movement that runs on the flawed and fake idea of choice that doesn’t exist anywhere else on the planet like it does in America.
But then there are the parents that are demanding bullies expecting teaches to work like slaves to do everything the parent demands and do it successfully, or else be attacked verbally or in writing because the teachers were unwilling to give up their lives to do the impossible or end up being blamed and accused of being incompetent and uncaring.
That is why teachers burn out and end up with the same PTSD that many combat vets live with. There haven’t been many studies on this but the few that have indicate that at least half of teachers who stay in the classroom suffer from PTSD because of parents, elected officlas, and administrators who are demanding bullies.
The American Society for Ethics in Education says, “post-traumatic stress disorder (or PTSD) appears to impact a significant number of teachers in our schools.”
https://crazynormaltheclassroomexpose.com/tag/teachers-and-ptsd/
I have been face to face with demanding, bully, aggressive parents. More than once, I thought a few of those parents were going to get physical, combative (and with my training that would have been a big mistake on their part because I was more than willing to react in force if they made the first move).
Often other teachers or even an administrator steps int o stop that abuse. Once, even the child stopped their bully of a parent from berating me verbally. He said, “No, mom, he isn’t that teacher. Stop!”
Then there was one parent who yelled at me early in my career for the reading book his son had that the parent felt was too hard, but I wasn’t the teacher who assigned the boy that book. It was his special ed teacher who heard the father screaming at me from several classrooms from mine, threatening me, and the special ed teacher rushed over from his room and told that parent it wasn’t me. There was no apology. Looking confused, the parent left to talk to the special ed teacher about it in his classroom. I didn’t hear any more yelling.
NCLB, RTTT and the Common Core test-rank-and-punish agenda made it clear that public school teachers were to be judged as failures unless they could be successful with 100 percent of the children they worked with, all the time, a goal that no country on the planet has ever achieved in history.
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Lloyd, at this point I’m for homeschooling or any other alternative options provided to students compared to the traditional status quo model. They most likely will not be any farther behind academically even if they were totally unschooled. I doubt it would make a significant difference in the literacy rates as they are so poor as it stands. Students that are motivated to learn, don’t really need a physical building to attend, and those that are struggling are likely not getting what they need from their classroom expereinces either. So how much farther behind would they be if they weren’t physically attending each day?
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To M who writes probably the most ignorant note I’ve read on this blog to date: “Students that are motivated to learn, don’t really need a physical building to attend, and those that are struggling are likely not getting what they need from their classroom expereinces either. So how much farther behind would they be if they weren’t physically attending each day?”
You need a good set of courses in child development and cognitional theory.
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Doug says it in the last paragraph: he wants a system of good schools with high standards, etc. So do I, so does Diane, so do all teachers and all parents. What he is willfully ignoring is that charter operators don’t want a SYSTEM of great schools: they want to create their own (presumably great) school, but don’t care what effect that has on anyone else. The privatizers are very much a “What is in it for me?” crowd. So, if taking a few high-test-score students out of regular public school hurts that public school, they simply don’t care. When teachers, public-school advocates, etc. speak, we speak with the perspective of what is best for ALL the kids, ALL the parents, and the WHOLE community. That is the fundamental difference, and no amount of explanation is going to change that.
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John Havlicek: much said in few words.
Another way to put it: it comes out of worst business/management practices that are grounded in the notion that there will always be a few winners and many losers.
And as the heavyweights and chief beneficiaries of corporate education reform have demonstrated time and time again: they consider themselves to be, and want to remain, that few, no matter the cost to the many (aka us).
😎
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KrazyTA: An analogy: Even a good businessperson knows that the quality of raw materials used for their product impinges greatly on the quality of the end-product, for instance, building super-structures on clay is better than on sand; using bad-quality steel makes for bad foundations and structures; and (going up the chain),growing even good seeds in bad soil makes for sometimes worse quality vegetables than growing bad seeds in good soil; and giving chickens chemically-poisoned seed . . . well, you get my drift.
Why then can’t we understand the education of children in (at least) that same way? (BTW, I don’t mean to imply that children are “raw materials”–it’s just an analogy with many differences embedded in kind of each situation.
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Perhaps the biggest indicator of Doug’s influences can be found in the trite, red herring of “. . . should have the same opportunities that the Clinton and Obama children had.” This bit of “reform” propaganda is – well I can’t think of another word – crap.
“Clinton and Obama children” attended highly selective private schools (like the one I head, with some ambivalence) that serve less than 6% of America’s children. They are expensive beyond the scope of any voucher or choice scheme and they have absolutely no capacity to absorb significant numbers of the poor children (primarily of color) targeted by voucher and choice schemes. The reform movement can only drive children to charter chains or religious schools. Charter chains are not better – arguably worse (read my book) – than even mediocre public schools. And diverting tax dollars to religious schools is unconstitutional.
Either Doug doesn’t know anything about this issue, or he’s simply spouting the same disingenuous nonsense about poor kids having the same “choices” as privileged kids.
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When I hear that someone says, “I want good schools” and has a T shirt that says “parents for excellent schools” I always laugh. Is there anyone who says, I want lousy schools” I often think I should make a T shirt that says “Parents for Lousy Schools”
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Unfortuantely there are those that are living that second scenario… Not that they want lousy schools nor are they for lousy schools, but they are stuck with lousy schools!!!
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A school is a building. Now, I like poetic devices, but not not when they’re abused. That’s enough wrongful personification, Doug1943 and reformsters. A school is a building, and there are people who go there to work or study. Some of those people stay there for many years, and some for just a short time. The work people do in a school and the quality thereof belongs to them, not to the building. In other words, a Teach for America amateur or some other edu-tourist might come in and do some really bad work one year, then leave and go on to mess up a city councilwoman’s office somewhere else. Don’t blame the school building. The Class of 2017 might outperform the Class of 2016. The building did not improve. Schools do not perform better or worse than one another. They do not perform at all. Schools do not fail. Schools do not pass. Schools are buildings, and buildings are inanimate. If, Doug and reformsters, you wish to call individual people or neighbors failing, not schools, go ahead. But, then, I will call you racist and you won’t like it. So, stop.
P.S. Diane, on a personal note, I do not believe I deserve to be in moderation for bringing up superdelegates a couple days ago. I’m very sorry I stressed you out during our vacations. I didn’t mean to. I’m still very much on your side, and would like you to see me (or at least my online persona) as such. You are a hero to me.
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LeftCoastTeacher,
You were never in moderation. WordPress puts some comments in moderation even when they are submitted by regular contributors. I don’t know why. Sometimes it is because the comment contains links, other times for no discernible reason.
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Oh. Thank you, Diane. I understand why tech apps don’t like me. That’s mutual. I’ve been limited to two comments a day for the last couple days.
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I’ve been in moderation again all day today, Diane. I think WordPress is sanctioning me and I didn’t even have anything to do with hacking the DNC.
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LCT,
WordPress is putting everyone in moderation. I don’t know why
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“WordPress is putting everyone in moderation. I don’t know why.”
Russkies.
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That would be “Putin” everyone in moderation.
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Funny! You might not be Putin me on with that one. Could’ve been Moscow. I don’t think it was the butler with a knife in the kitchen. It was probably Gates, Zuckerberg and Hastings with a laptop and a paid troll in the basement. I’m mostly kidding.
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This is in response to Catherine Blanche King, 1:11 PM, after she responded to my response to her comment.
I apologize, but not too heartily, for this long excerpt from the beginning of Jamie Vollmer’s “The Blueberry Story: the teacher gives the businessman a lesson”:
[start]
“If I ran my business the way you people operate your schools, I wouldn’t be in business very long!”
I stood before an auditorium filled with outraged teachers who were becoming angrier by the minute. My speech had entirely consumed their precious 90 minutes of inservice. Their initial icy glares had turned to restless agitation. You could cut the hostility with a knife.
I represented a group of business people dedicated to improving public schools. I was an executive at an ice cream company that had become famous in the middle1980s when People magazine chose our blueberry as the “Best Ice Cream in America.”
I was convinced of two things. First, public schools needed to change; they were archaic selecting and sorting mechanisms designed for the industrial age and out of step with the needs of our emerging “knowledge society.” Second, educators were a major part of the problem: they resisted change, hunkered down in their feathered nests, protected by tenure, and shielded by a bureaucratic monopoly. They needed to look to business. We knew how to produce quality. Zero defects! TQM! Continuous improvement!
In retrospect, the speech was perfectly balanced — equal parts ignorance and arrogance.
As soon as I finished, a woman’s hand shot up. She appeared polite, pleasant. She was, in fact, a razor-edged, veteran, high school English teacher who had been waiting to unload.
She began quietly, “We are told, sir, that you manage a company that makes good ice cream.”
I smugly replied, “Best ice cream in America, Ma’am.”
“How nice,” she said. “Is it rich and smooth?”
“Sixteen percent butterfat,” I crowed.
“Premium ingredients?” she inquired.
“Super-premium! Nothing but triple A.” I was on a roll. I never saw the next line coming.
“Mr. Vollmer,” she said, leaning forward with a wicked eyebrow raised to the sky, “when you are standing on your receiving dock and you see an inferior shipment of blueberries arrive, what do you do?”
In the silence of that room, I could hear the trap snap…. I was dead meat, but I wasn’t going to lie.
“I send them back.”
She jumped to her feet. “That’s right!” she barked, “and we can never send back our blueberries. We take them big, small, rich, poor, gifted, exceptional, abused, frightened, confident, homeless, rude, and brilliant. We take them with ADHD, junior rheumatoid arthritis, and English as their second language. We take them all! Every one! And that, Mr. Vollmer, is why it’s not a business. It’s school!”
In an explosion, all 290 teachers, principals, bus drivers, aides, custodians, and secretaries jumped to their feet and yelled, “Yeah! Blueberries! Blueberries!”
And so began my long transformation.
[end]
Link: http://www.jamievollmer.com/blueberries.html
😎
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Thank you for posting this.
I find it appalling that faux reformers always ignore the elephant in the room — the fact that charters teach only the kids they want to teach and can send the rest away. Every time a privatizer has tried to take over an entire school, they have failed. And run away as fast as possible. Because how can they “succeed” by their standards if they can’t choose the kids (or at least, drum out the ones who they don’t want).
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NYC public school parent,
The data in Camden, NJ looks very promising so far. Stay tuned.
http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/16/08/18/some-improvement-seen-in-camden-schools-blip-or-new-beginning/
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KrazyTA–Yes–I love your story.
If we could just get that set of insights across to those “others” who are trying to make schools on a business model; and who have zero respect for the work teachers do in all but a very few cases. It’s no wonder they are so defensive. Who could claim even a small error for themselves (in a self-critical way) when there are so many slick business-people who are ready and willing to put you down at every turn and blame you for all of the problems that are much more systematic and pervasive than what occurs just the classroom itself. I love your story.
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So many responses I just did not read them all, but did anyone else question Doug1943’s sincerity? I do. Too many snarky comments that others have pointed out. I think conservatives like to goad liberals into tying ourselves in knots trying to get across something to them they know only all too well: that society must cooperate to prosper and they intend to be the only ones prospering. A tide that lifts all boats is of no use to them since it fails to elevate them above the rest of us.
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pbarret–WHAT YOU SAID.
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Doug,
Thank you for posing your questions and for admitting you are coming from an “outsider perspective”. I’m a bit disappointed by some of the responses you’ve received, which seem to ignore the latter fact. I agree with you that talking within our bubbles will not get us to the solutions we need as a nation . . . and that’s about in everything that divides –race, faith, name it.
You make good points that we should not dismiss carelessly:
Now hear us out, Doug:
Doug stated, “By the way, I personally would prefer there to be a system of state schools that had high standards, and educated all children to the limits of their inherent capabilities, so that the issue of ‘charter schools’ and vouchers wouldn’t even arise..”
We all can agree on that.
Peace.
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(1) “from bubbled tests to…robust assessments.” Ohio’s law requires the tests be administered by computer. I was surprised, but shouldn’t have been, to see a means of testing, spelled out in Ohio law.
(2) Adoption was “bribed”, which relates but is, a more direct statement of politicization.
(3) The only time a subset of Ohio voters was asked if they wanted charter schools, they voted “no”. Even, the National Alliance of Charter Schools was quoted as saying about the charter system in Ohio, “Ohioans should be outraged.”
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No, seriously, Linda,
(1)Have you had a chance to look at the PARRC tests? I shared PISA or TIMMS assessments with teachers, and they were stunned at the level of critical thinking and problem solving entailed. Importance of core knowledge has been stressed by many in this discussion.
(2)Substance over politics. The standards and content required in CC are necessary.
(3)The same Ohio voters that . . . we can’t always depend on, you know — non-educators, parents, school boards, outsiders — to tell us what’s good in education?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for involvement of voters, parents and other stakeholders in education, but in what aspects and to what extent?
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If you discuss the matter of standardized testing with a talking pineapple he will say the tests are good because they get eaten by the hare after the race to the top of the, oh let’s say kittens.
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Why aren’t the Mass. standards shared with teachers? Why aren’t the states bribed to adopt them? Is it because public education materials can’t be copyrighted? A plan to sell proprietary schools-in-a-box (Gates/Pearson/Z-berg investment) would be jeopardized if the product isn’t copyrighted?
Melinda and Bill’s own kids, attend schools that reject the Aspen Institute education plot. (Bill Gates provided financing for New Schools Venture Fund, Aspen Pahara Institute, Bellwether, TFA, Senior Congressional Education Staff Network and $1 bil. more, on other tactics, that can tap the $1 tril. market in education.) When the philanthro-barons OWN our kids, our schools and our communities, they can implement PARCC….wait….
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drrosarie- The selling technique, “others felt, then found”, is over-used but, it’s a welcome replacement, for the heavy-handed, “teachers have to shift or, get off of the pot” (quote from a Microsoft Canada employee, self-described as an “education partner”, in an interview in Entrepreneur magazine.
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One big bubble…..
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…is what the charter market is. One big, financial bubble waiting to burst.
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Apparently those that voice alternatives to the status quo public school model – which has been repeatedly documented as failing significant populations of students – not because those students are cognitively disabled and unable to learn either, but because they continue to stick to the failed status quo traditions. Yet that is the model that the majority is in lock step with.
And when anyone speaks up against this broken, failing, current status quo model, they are attacked, stoned and shunned…
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Thou hath not been stoned, M. Thy sackcloth should not be donned by thee with such aggrandizement. Wear instead American public education and democracy with pride.
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M,
Is your real name Betsy DeVos? Scott Walker? ALEC?
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The status quo today is the standardized testing craziness that has gone on for 20 years. THOSE are the “failed status quo traditions,” now. And you and other “deformers” can’t acknowledge that it is YOUR status quo that is failing.
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Threatened Out West,
“The status quo today is the standardized testing craziness that has gone on for 20 years. THOSE are the “failed status quo traditions,” now. And you and other “deformers” can’t acknowledge that it is YOUR status quo that is failing.”
I disagree completely. The vast majority of what happens in classrooms today has more in common with 20 years ago that not. This is especially true if you look at the larger picture of school hours, pedagogy, professional development, etc. There have been changes (and many not for the better), but one can hardly say that they define the status quo.
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John, the point is that the magical gains of corporate edu-production that should be evident by now are not. ‘Attacking the status quo’ is a corporate catch phrase from the last decade, and in education a practice that has done much more harm than good. It’s getting old. As far as pedagogy etc. goes, you don’t have answers. You have creaming and the like. Let me teach.
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status quo…failed status quo…current status quo…repeatedly documented as failing…
The problem with bringing up the “studies show” argument is that one is then obligated—by decency, fair play and courtesy—to name the studies and their authors.
Citations please…
😎
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Doug, I’m interested to also hear your opinion on how to cure pancreatic cancer. The current 5 year survival rate is less than 7%. We must admit that these doctors are failing at alarming rates. For comparison purposes, most dermatologists (who are also doctors) have survival rates well past 90%. The cancer doctors only talk among themselves and don’t seem to be open to the opinions of the general public.
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And as I expected, here comes the diversions that are apples and oranges and has nothing to do with the actual issues.
(The analogy of doctors and different areas of specialty where you try to divert by comparing success of treatments between different specialties of medicine.)
As noted, there isn’t really a successful course of treatment for pancreatic cancer, but there is a proven method for teaching Dyslexics and others that struggle with reading and spelling and literacy struggles. (I’m relatively informed of this statement because Dyslexia runs in my extended bio family as well as in my foster/adopted son’s family; as well as the fact that I was a science major and nursing student, plus I have experienced first hand the struggles parents are put through when attempting to obtain effective instructional methods, which the school offered, but just not to my foster/adopted child.) But I digressed.
There are proven and effective methods that are not being used to combat illiteracy in public schools.
Are you saying that teachers and school staff are not to be held accountable for their lack of success when educating those that need more expertise in treating their specific learning needs?
Or are you admitting that most educators do not have the expertise that is necessary to help close the gaps for these struggling learners?
(Which is obviously is the case for the parents I have met on this journey of trying to obtain effective literacy (and numeracy) instructional methods for a child that is 1 of every 5 students in the traditional classrooms across this country, and has a classification that is much more typical in the classrooms of this nation (for example, Autism impacts ~ only 1% of the population vs 20% of the population, which Dyslexia spectrum LDs do; yet Autism and other disabilities all combined together still don’t reach the same high statistical frequencies of Dyslexia in a classroom setting, yet they get more coverage and money and assistance and help than do those with Dyslexia, which occurs at a higher frequency in the public school classrooms!)
Also, doctors are held accountable for not providing proper treatment to their patients. They would never be able to keep practicing year after year if they continued to use outdated treatment methods that resulted in significant levels of injury or long term impacts that kept their patients sick when there were better methods known and used and with better success rates and more positive long term impacts.
For instance, they would not continue to use LLI when OG or LMB were recognized as better treatments for their disease specialty area.
(It would be like using Penicillin to treat a multi drug resistant strain of TB. Nobody would choose that drug to treat a MDR TB patient’s disease. Yet teachers and schools first drug to use is LLI (ie, F&P, RAZ A-Z, etc…)
Teachers do it all the time in schools across the country, because that is the status quo and they don’t want to be bothered with learning anything different …. as well as there is no accountability board that will pull their licenses …. and they obviously don’t have to worry about being sued for malpractice!
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M says: “There are proven and effective methods that are not being used to combat illiteracy in public schools.”
That’s a pretty general statement, but I’ll pass on commenting on it. On the other hand, if we follow the dots to the causes of illiteracy, you will find a good number of them taking us back to parents and caregivers and the poverty they live in. This again points to the difference between, but also intimate relationship between, the institution of the family/neighborhood and the institution of education.
Two questions are: What is going on with the bridges of communications between institutions; and also what is going on with adult education programs in any single community? The inter-generational movement of education, especially where the mother is involved, is a well-researched and documented given.
Again, schools are not an abstraction where their qualities or failures are unrelated to the multi-layered context that their students come out of.
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Dyslexia again. Knew that was coming. Surprised it didn’t come sooner. Reading M just gave me dyslexia. That was a joke, M; we all know it’s not contagious.
Diane, you really do deserve to take a couple days off. Heh, heh, even defenders of status quo take a weekend now and then. Again, M, just a joke, not calling public education hum drum — take it easy.
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So LCT- Would you even be able to recognize a Dyslexic student if they were sitting in your classroom? Or are you one of those that doesn’t “believe” that Dyslexia exists? What do you so for struggling learners in your classroom? Better question though is, what do you do to help them close the gaps in their foundational skills and what are you doing to support them at learning grade level standardards? Or are your “IEP kids” beyond ever reaching the same levels as their GenEd or Honors or Gifted “academic motivated students”?
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This is not apples and oranges. If doctors were judged and evaluated based on mortality rates, then no one would treat pancreatic cancer. Our current system of penalizing educators who are trying to solve the most complex challenges is akin to judging doctors based on death rates.
“Successful” charter schools refuse treatment to kids with the greatest needs. Our current systems penalizes educators who take risks and work in the most challenging circumstances.
There is no cause-effect in medicine and there is no cause-effect in learning. There is no 100% proven treatment for anything. Your experience with dyslexia may be interesting to you but it cannot be generalized to the rest of the world population. Human beings are complex and kids can’t be standardized.
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M,
We’ve done this dance before. It ends with repetition of an argument that destroying teacher’s unions with charter scams and computer based testing is the cure for dyslexia. (Cynical of me, I know.) You get overtaken by cynicism by the end of the dance. Let’s not together disrupt the decorum of the living room this time. Learning disabilities, language barriers, and even growing pains are not to be taken lightly or dismissed. Education is a vital public service. We agree.
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You’re going to make me believe in genius and laugh at the same time. Brilliant.
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Let’s presume for John’s sake that “bad schools” or “failure factories” do exist and what makes them “bad” is the fault of “ineffective” teachers, administrators, counsellors and support staff. Maybe John would even admit that such schools struggle in part to underfunding, sub-standard facilities, and limited course offerings.
Now John, imagine if a “good” school from an affluent district, complete with high test scores, AP or IB course offerings, state of the art facilities, and stacked with highly effective teachers magically replaced the failing school in the same crime ridden, impoverished community surrounded by urban blight and family dysfunction. According to your “bad” school theory, those struggling students formerly trapped in their “failure factory” would no longer need to escape because academic success would become the status quo – they now attend a “good” school after all.
After several years of conducting this experiment, John might be surprised to discover that the “good” had somehow been transformed into a “bad” school.. So John, was it the school or the teachers after all?
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RageAgainstTheTetsocracy,
Re “bad schools”, you put quite a few words in my mouth. But, data clearly shows that urban schools get the least experienced teachers and those who did less well in teacher prep programs. There’s a lot of circular stuff that contributes, along with poverty, to a school becoming ineffective.
Measuring a school by absolute measures is nonsense, and I don’t know any reformer who pretends it isn’t. That is a straw man created by anti-reform folks (show me otherwise?). On the other hand, comparing growth scores between schools with similar populations is definitely appropriate and can show schools that are more or less effective with those students.
Regarding swapping suburban and urbans schools, I think the challenges are completely different, and I don’t expect that most suburban teachers would last in urban classrooms, especially the ones that I’ve observed. Just start with lack of attendance and disorder before you even get to the huge range of attainment in a given grade, lack of parental support, etc.
My point is that we’re not doing a good enough job with low income students, and that we can do better. Sure, that will take more money, and property tax-funded schools work against that. But, I also think we have largely dysfunctional and adversarial relationship between leadership and teachers, and that collectively, it is not a system that fosters self-improvement.
Also, you mention humiliation that teachers feel, which I think is legitimate. IMO, this top down, micromanaged accountability has resulted from the lack of a true profession focused on continuous improvement. It is a backlash to protected jobs and lack of progress (or at least any visual evidence of trying to improve). Not a popular opinion here, but I stand by it.
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It takes a village, something many here seem to overlook! 😦
There needs to be accountability. If a kid is attending class each day and families come into a school looking for support and help and expecting high expectations, from their child as well as their school, yet are stonewalled, then who is at fault and being unaccountable?
Is it the school or the student or the family?
If this student is engaged and yet it is obvious that they are struggling with literacy or numeracy skills, who is responsible to help them???
Especially if their family has been struggling as well and never was provided with the skills to help their child who is struggling???
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Just because a child attends class doesn’t mean they are making an effort to learn what the teachers are teaching. Teachers must not be punished for children who show up to warm a seat and refuse to make an effort to learn or who show up and disrupt the learning environment.
For instance, when my daughter was in 3rd grade, I told her she was responsible to learn and teachers were responsible to teach. If she didn’t learn, it was her fault and not the teachers. If a teacher is boring, too bad. Learn anyway. If a teacher is incompetent, too bad, learn anyway. If you have trouble, then take advantage of the teachers office hours for help. She did.
When our daughter graduated from high school she had a 4.65 GPA, and was honored as a scholar athlete. She was accepted to Stanford where she graduated in June 2014.
While she was in her second year at Stanford, I asked her how many incompetent teachers she had K-12. She thought about it for an hour or so and then said, “Two!”
Too many parents tell their children if they don’t learn, it’s the teachers fault. That is BS.
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“Too many parents tell their children if they don’t learn, it’s the teachers fault. That is BS.”
Might surprise you to hear that I wholeheartedly agree with this.
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The BS part, or the part where parents blame teachers when their child doesn’t learn and it’s never the child’s fault?
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Lloyd,
The BS part. Too many parents blame teachers for issues that they or their children are responsible for. I still think we have an obligation to do the best for the child in that situation, but there’s no doubt that some parents can be a hindrance to their children.
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Thank you, but NCLB, RTTT and the Common core test-rank-and-punish agenda of the last few decades made it clear that teachers/schools were failures if they could not be successful with 100 percent of the students all of the time, and no excuses were allowed.
No other country on the planet in history has ever treated all of its teachers so deplorably.
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Lloyd,
Your daughter did not come from a broken family, correct, nor did she have any risk factors, correct (she did not grow up as a Title 1 family or have any classifications to classify her as SpecEd, correct?)
And as you have noted more than once, you did everything right from the start (read to her from the start, fed her properly, housed her properly, picture perfect 2 parent family, correct?)
And you had all of the supports to draw upon being an educator yourself, correct?
Therefore, if your daughter struggled academically, it would be shocking and an anomaly, correct?
So again, apples to oranges.
I am talking about our families personal experience raising one of those students that you all say will not, cannot, do not, benefit from appropriate instruction, therefore why bother to change it up for them?
A student in foster care… with an IEP…. but which chose to identify the student with the classification that schools like to use because then they can blame the student (along with their family) for the students continued learning struggles (OHI/ADHD) versus actually classifying a student as one with LD’s in Reading/Writing/Math… (even though they noted the reading, writing and math struggles in all of the triennial psycho-ed evaluations that they were required to give the student on a minimum 3 yr basis.
Nor did they bother to provide effective instructional methods nor did they write subjective or measurable goals that would be effective to close those identified, known, quite obvious and far from hidden areas of academic weakness and struggles!!!
Yet, that is what we did. We found VOLUNTEERS that provided this young man with the OG programming they offered to others but refused him to have, on our own time and dime! Just your average foster family that advocated so fiercely that we became that PITA family that the school decided they would stonewall while accumulating the annual ~ $28,000 in tuition and transportation reimbursement along with the $1,800 in Title 1 funding for having a foster child in their district!
But now the jokes on those school ” admins & professionals”; because this one experiment proved that they were in deed denying this young man the appropriate methods and technology to achieve to his ability level vs his level of disability!
He graduated with an ADVANCED Regent diploma at 16 with 33 college credits followed by an associate degree the following year at 17 and now as a first semester Junior, he made President List at 18!
So please don’t tell me that these at risk and struggling learners cannot close the gaps academically and achieve to a higher potential!
But it does take adults stepping up to the plate and doing the right thing by them. And if schools don’t start stepping up to the plate for these kids and using proven and effective methods to teach them how to read and write and do math proficiently, nothing will ever change and you will keep feeding the school to prison pipeline and repeating the cycles of perpetuating generational illiteracy!
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M said, “So please don’t tell me that these at risk and struggling learners cannot close the gaps academically and achieve to a higher potential!
“But it does take adults stepping up to the plate and doing the right thing by them. And if schools don’t start stepping up to the plate for these kids and using proven and effective methods to teach them how to read and write and do math proficiently, nothing will ever change and you will keep feeding the school to prison pipeline and repeating the cycles of perpetuating generational illiteracy!”
Yes it does take adults stepping up to the plate, like my mother when I was 7 and she was told by a so-called expert/administrator that I was retarded and would never learn to read. Of course that was before anyone knew what dyslexia was and special ed didn’t exist. When I was labeled retarded, it was in the early 1950s. The special education laws didn’t come into affect until and after 1973. That was the year I graduated from college with a BA in Journalism. After Vietnam and the U.S. Marines I went to college on the GI Bill and the first two years in a community colelge were not easy, but I graduated from college on the dean’s list. Learning got easier for my last two years.
It is too easy for legislators to pass laws but not that easy for schools and teachers to implement those laws.
For me, my mother went to my 1st grade teacher and asked for her advice. That teacher didn’t have the time to “step up to the plate” because she had a classroom full of children she was responsible to teach, but she had time to tell my mother what she had to do at home. It was my mother, following that advice, who was the adult that “stepped up to the plate” and taught me how to read and then I became an avid reader as a child.
To learn to read, I needed one-on-one instruction that’s very difficult for a teacher working with a couple of hundred students daily.
Most teachers do not have the time to “step up to the plate,” because their plate is overflowing with legislation and demands that often are underfunded, and being human, they do have to sleep, eat, etc.
http://www.understandingspecialeducation.com/special-education-funding.html
During the 30 years I taught my class loads started at 34 students and went up from there, and I was teaching 6 sections for the first few years and then 5 after the teachers’ unions fought for a planning period so teachers could have time during the workday to call parents, plan lessons, do grades, attend department meetings, get work done, etc., besides teaching back-to-back classes with a seven minute passing period, classes often packed with kids. Sometimes it was a challenge to find room for all the desks as the walking space between the rows shrunk to make room for more until you had to walk sideways between the rows.
M, I did NOT say that “at risk and struggling learners cannot close the gaps academically and achieve to a higher potential!”
Do NOT put words in my mouth.
These children who have learning challenges, like I did as a child with severe dyslexia and probably more, can achieve a lot when they cooperate with their teachers, but too many do NOT!
For instance, I had one 9th grade girl in an English class I taught who wanted out of special ed. She felt that being in special-ed meant she was stupid. She asked me what she could do.
I told her to turn off the TV and start reading books every night for the same amount of time. The more she read on her own, I said, the better the odds were that she’d get out of the special ed classes she didn’t want too be in. That worked for me when I was her age.
Why couldn’t it work for her.
She was one of the very few students who even asked for that kind of advice, and then she did it.
At the start of her 10th grade year, she dropped by my class to let me know she made it, and she was going to keep reading books on her own and stay away from the TV and video games. That was before texting joined the parade of activities that teachers compete against for a child’s learning/reading time.
Being a pushy, belligerent parents is not going to change the reality that special-ed is underfunded and teachers are overworked.
The corporate charters schools are living proof of that. Too many of them push and bully their underpaid teachers to work longer hours demanding better results, or else, and this has caused a larger turnover than public schools as burned-out teachers told to work beyond human endurance without the proper support flee the education profession.
http://www.in-perspective.org/pages/teachers-and-teaching-at-charter-schools
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Oh PS Lloyd-
Ask my son who’s responsibilty learning is… He will inform you it’s the students responsibility in conjuntion with an instructor that cares about his success along with him, because he’s experienced first-hand that it’s obviously teachers will get paid if they are great at their job or not! They will still get a paycheck, and benefits and retirement checks, whether or not they were successful in teaching those that struggled or those that learning came easier too!!!
It will be the student who has to learn the skills they will need to make it long after they are out of school and after the adults in their life have passed on or moved on!!!!
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It’s good that your child understands this, that it is his responsibility to learn, but your blanket statement heaping blame on teachers “who” you allege ” just cash that check and work until they can retire” is deplorable.
According to a report in The Washington Post, “teachers work 53 hours per week on average”
I knew many teachers who worked more hours than 53 and I was one of them. Teachers are paid a salary with no overtime.
“These numbers are indicative of teachers’ dedication to the profession and their willingness to go above and beyond to meet students’ needs. It never was, and certainly isn’t now, a bell-to-bell job.
“The 7.5 hours in the classroom are just the starting point. On average, teachers are at school an additional 90 minutes beyond the school day for mentoring, providing after-school help for students, attending staff meetings and collaborating with peers. Teachers then spend another 95 minutes at home grading, preparing classroom activities, and doing other job-related tasks. The workday is even longer for teachers who advise extracurricular clubs and coach sports —11 hours and 20 minutes, on average. As one Kentucky teacher surveyed put it, “Our work is never done. We take grading home, stay late, answer phone calls constantly, and lay awake thinking about how to change things to meet student needs.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/survey-teachers-work-53-hours-per-week-on-average/2012/03/16/gIQAqGxYGS_blog.html?utm_term=.b8cbc85edcf1
That last paragraph sums up what teaching was like for me for thirty years and all the teachers I worked with. Often, I arrived at school one to two hours early before school started and left a few hours after school ended and most of the children were gone. And when I left, there were still many teachers’ cars in the staff parking lot.
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Well Lloyd,
Our schools and district is not one with large classes, there is a really low student to teacher ratio. Including paras and co-teaching sections, the ratio is less than 1:9 staff to student ratio!
School days are only 6 hrs and teachers only have to teach 3 classes, in order for them to have free periods for prep and grading and those sorts of routine tasks.
And, it’s hard to respect school staff and teachers who did nothing for this student, when they ADVERTISED THE METHOD HE NEEDED as AVAILABLE TO STUDENTS IN THE DISTRICT!
How is asking for what the IEE by a highly regarded neuro-psychologist who came not once but twice to meet with the CSE chair to implore that they provide this programming due to his testing results on top of his advanced age and the very limited time left to get through the program, since it can take 2 or more years to get through and complete in full? Especially since their own testing results shown that he needed this instruction…. why do you assume that a parent is then being “pushy & beligerent”? Seriously?
Maybe they should provide it because it was not coming out of their budget and they were making money off this child’s placement in their district! To the tune of $28,000 for tuition and transportation and an additional $1,800 in Title 1 funding added as well for having a foster child placed in their district?!?!?!
Why should parents and child have to be pushed outside of the school on their own time and dimes to get what is supposed to be available to identified students because that is what the student needs and this is the school they are being told they need to attend? What about Child Find, Special Ed, ADA, 504 and NCLB, aside from meeting literacy and proficiency standards?!?!?!
So very sorry to have touched a raw nerve for stating the painfully obvious truthful statement, that teachers and school personnel will indeed get paid whether they are successful at providing students FAPE and teaching students to their level of academic ability and potential… or totally the opposite.
They will collect a paycheck and they will get paid for school holidays, short work days, summers off and a retirement check if they remain in the teacher retirement system.
Reality is that schools are not being held accountable for those students that are struggling and they and their parents are doing the best they can, yet it obviously is still not enough, at which point, it is indeed the school’s responsibility along with the educational professionals employed there, to step up and do what is needed to try to help them close gaps. Especially when it’s a foster child that is in custody of the public to do so, whether you like it or not or totally disagree with it!
PS- I’m pretty sure in the past, you have been one of those that have “blamed” demographics as being the reason that children are struggling learners and implied it’s their parents faults….and that they therefore aren’t the school’s problem to teach them to become proficient students….
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There you go again, putting words in my mouth. I disagree. Who are you to decide how many parents are going all they can? Are you all powerful and you know everything about everyone all the chem?
Do you have any idea how many hours parents allow their children to watch TV, play video games, send text messages, and not read books?
Probably not, and to discover the answers to that you have to leave education and look for demographic data collected by the media, by corporations.
When we look at all that data they keep collecting on us, the average parent in the United States doesn’t come out looking all that great.
Television and Children
“TV viewing among kids is at an eight-year high. On average, children ages 2-5 spend 32 hours a week in front of a TV—watching television, DVDs, DVR and videos, and using a game console. Kids ages 6-11 spend about 28 hours a week in front of the TV. The vast majority of this viewing (97%) is of live TV [1].”
http://www.med.umich.edu/yourchild/topics/tv.htm
Sugar consumption also impacts a child’s ability to learn.
“Using brain-scanning technology, scientists at the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse were among the first to show that sugar causes changes in peoples’ brains similar to those in people addicted to drugs such as cocaine and alcohol.”
http://www.sugarscience.org/the-growing-concern-of-overconsumption/#.WGSTw_krKUk
President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition
“Only one in three children are physically active every day.”
“More than 23 million Americans, including 6.5 million children, live in food deserts – areas that are more than a mile away from a supermarket.”
“In 2008, an estimated 49.1 million people, including 16.7 million children, experienced food insecurity (limited availability to safe and nutritionally adequate foods) multiple times throughout the year.”
https://www.fitness.gov/resource-center/facts-and-statistics/
Kids send a Mind Boggling Number of Texts Every Month
http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-number-of-texts-sent-2013-3
Even sleep plays a vital role in a child’s ability to learn.
In U.S., 40 percent Get Less than Recommended Amount of Sleep
http://www.gallup.com/poll/166553/less-recommended-amount-sleep.aspx
Here’s How Much Time People spend Playing Video Games
http://time.com/120476/nielsen-video-games/
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Non Sequitur the Minor comes to mind when I think of this paragraph on p. 3 of THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEM: HOW TESTING AND CHOICE ARE UNDERMINING EDUCATION (2016 edition, revised and expanded:
[start]
School reforms sometimes resemble the characters in Dr. Seuss’s I had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, who are always searching for that mythical land “where they never have troubles, at least very few.” Or, like Dumbo, they are convinced they could fly if only they had a magic feather. In my writings, I have consistently warned that, in education, there are no shortcuts,no utopias, and no silver bullets. For certain, there are no magic feathers that enable elephants to fly.
[end]
Author: the owner of this blog.
Who, BTW, actually has the sheer audacity—imagine!—to provide all sorts of citations and references. Go figure…
Whilst Non Sequitur the Minor suggests that there exists a BIGLY YUUUUUGE corpus that “repeatedly documents as failing” public schools—but nary a citation or title or author’s name.
Corey Lewandowski and Anthony Scaramucci would be so so pleased that just like their boss Donald Trump, someone thinks he can get away with not “literally” having to prove assertions because all that’s required is “symbolically” providing support for outrageous statements.
“Studies show.”
Sure. And I’m the crazy one?
😎
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RaceAgainsttheTest,
Thank you [sarcasm]. You have just provided Doug the answer to why students must “escape” out of their “failing” schools and neighborhood! If all the ingredients of a “good” school, all the desirable factors we claim we want for public schools [money, resources, highly effective teachers] will not change this inner city school, then we as educators all need to be fired. What a dismal picture. What a complete lack of confidence in ourselves as educators. I guess the only problem are the students, with their crime-ridden neighborhood and any other deficits we can find to slap on them. It is this very mindset that stymied traditional public schools to not do enough to end drop out factories. Catherine Blanche with her analogies of raw material, bad seed, and good soil, etc. obviously agrees with you.
Of course I was being unnecessarily indignant. :)Part of the sin of public education was refusing to engage with exactly those factors–community, parents, etc–that some charters have taken on more directly. It was and is still not okay for public schools to just identify that there is a different set of issues they’re dealing with. What were they willing to do? Again, this is not to indict individual teachers who as we know were doing their very best from feeding kids to parenting them. But they were also the cadre that were all too willing to throw their hands up in the air and give up on kids as “unteachable”. Thankfully, school district systems are now more willing to tackle those challenges more innovatively, not limited to empowering teachers and collaborating with community partners.
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KrazyTA –
Our personal experiences –
along with observing the change in trajectory for a dyslexic foster/adopted at risk x2 (Title 1 & SpecialEd) teenager, who experienced significant success (and due to lack of time, did not get the opportunity for reinforcement afterwards for multiple years that would have been provided a much more solid foundation which Wilson Reading (provided with fideiity by an uncertified, unlicensed foster adopted parent who was paying it forward) along with Alphabetic Phonics (by a disillusioned Special Ed teacher who left to start a not for profit Reading Center to help students like him who struggle to learn using LLI (or Reading Recovery!)) –
And the studies of others who use Barton, Linda Mood Bell, Wilson Reading, Alphabetic Phonics, and other OG based methods with much more success with students who have met with significant success after using these methods with fidelity!
If a child with our teen’s profile could have met with the successes he’s obtained, then it is pretty obvious that other’s with such profiles could be helped as well!
Yet not one school nor teacher with the opportunity to do so, stepped up to the plate and provided him with it over the course of 12 yrs under the umbrella of Special Ed!!! Intead they chose to lower the bar and consider him unworthy of closing gaps, because of predetermination and lack of interest.
And in the end, his trajectory is so much more than even his GenEd cohorts now!
He’s skipped 2 yrs ahead of them!!! And made the President List this semester!
This is a kid who would have been on a much different path with a very different trajectory if it had been left up to a school to provide him thier status quo education!!!
So if first hand experience is not good enough for you, nothing else will be either!
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Public schools are “repeatedly documented as failing” [12-28-16, 5:23 PM]—
Your words.
“Repeatedly”: “over and over again; constantly.”
“Document”: “record (something) in written, photographic, or other form” & “support or accompany with documentation.”
Quite obviously plural [meaning “more than one in number”].
Titles. Authors.
There is nothing tricky or unusual or complicated about providing the sources for your bold assertion.
Titles. Authors.
I humbly suggest your very next comment should include said info.
Your credibility and honor are in your own hands. I hope you make the right call.
😎
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KrazyTA (and “M”): I think “M” takes his/her own experience (of education in this case) as the grand measure of all things, and then acts like a reformed smoker when others don’t see their view of things.
It’s like being born in a prison and then assuming that the entire world looks like the inside of a prison. Another term for it: “silo-thinking.” Another term from logic: hasty generalization. Another reference for “M” to read that gives treatment to the problem is the section in Plato’s Republic that talks about the prisoner in the cave. One prisoner breaks through to the light and then comes back to tell the other prisoners about it, and they proceeded to kill him.
I could go on, but you get the picture.
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Again, trying to enlighten you all on the reason others are not enamored by the status quo called traditional public education in this country, is as useless as trying to enlighten our school admins and supposedly educational professionals about our children’s educational struggles and trying to get them to work together with the families of their students, because who are they to think they can ask for different and more effective instructional methods and scaffolding technology so that their children can achive to their potential versus their levels of disability and learning struggles and differences!!!!
The majority of you choose to live and work in a bubble where nobody is accountable to changing the literacy & numeracy statistics in the schools across this nation!
But keep on living in this bubble and all you will have left are families who send their children to schools because it’s tax funded day care and recreational centers, and if incidental learning happens to occur, great and if not, nobody will notice anyways, right?
More and more familiels of those with Dyslexia leave your public schools and choose to homeschool or turn to private schools that are more willing to work with families.
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“You keep using that term–‘status quo.’ I do not think it means what you think it means.”
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Really ThreatenedOut West?
Please enlighten me as to whay you think it means to me!
Could status quo mean to me that schools and teachers on the front lines do not seem to care about the illiteracy issue facing a significant population of students in their classrooms and classrooms across the nation? And how their repeated lack of interest when families come to them begging for their help and instead they CHOOSE dto o nothing to help parents help their children to close these identified and not so hidden struggles with reading and writing and math who come to them asking them for help when they have a struggling learner and when the families are pulling their weight in the equation, while the school is not?
Could status quo mean seeing first hand how schools and teachers are CHOOSING to DENY students the appropriate instruction and supports and services their classification as LD entitles them to be provided in order to close the gaps they have and which any LD specialist with experience in Dyslexia and Dysgraphia would consider to be the proper and effective treatment regime to help treat those to progress to a level of success versus to the lowest rung on the ladder of their disabilty?
Could status quo mean just classifying them as SpecEd and then equating their learning ability and potential to the equivalent of a cognitively disabled student?
Because those are some of the examples of status quo that I am referring!
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A reminder to the “citation challenged”—
Titles and names of works that “repeatedly document as failing” public schools.
You brought it up. You back it up with specifics.
Silence is compliance with the notion that you have nothing to prove your assertions.
Perhaps it would be wise on your part to heed the words of a very old and very dead and very Greek guy:
“Words empty as the wind are best left unsaid.”
Hint for all you Kommon Korsters: that’s Homer, the Greek bard, not Homer SIMPSON.
Or shall we dub thee Non Sequitur the Minor?
😎
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The status quo in Newark is twenty years of state control. The goal is to create New Orleans on the Passaic River. They have made great gains in silencing a once feisty community.
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I am a high school math teacher with 19 years experience. I thought about my response. This what I came up with. http://www.ginonapoli.com
Fact: the correlation between student responses on multiple choice standardized tests against various sociological parameters is very high. Above 90 percent R squared (Coefficient of Determination) – which is the percentage of variation accounted for by only the two factors of data being analyzed.
• Scores versus Family yearly income.
• Scores versus Parental Level of Education.
• Scores versus amount of vocabulary attained by age 5 or 6.
• Scores versus Zip Code.
All of these factors are so highly correlated that they are borderline predictive.
In many schools, the location of the school indicates the sociological factors of which that school will have to become associated. These factors are independent of the school itself, because they are based upon the sociological and economic background of the location — not the ability or functionality of the school. Hence separating the school from it’s inherent sociological environment is very difficult to do. Not all failures are a result of the school system when the resulting society ignores community and social investments which can make a palpable difference beyond anything school personnel can do. After and before school programs, school lunch, breakfast and dinner programs, parental education programs, subsidizing community sponsoring events, investing in pre-K education, subsidizing child care, insuring a viable nationalized retirement system, and single-payer nationalized health care would all go a long way towards alleviating the other factors that cause issues with the scores of our pre-18 year old youth. When these other factors are not addressed, or become exacerbated, the more relevant issues of why students do not achieve their potential cannot really be separated from what is measurable at school.
Granted, correlation does not mean causation. This is precisely why statistics alone cannot completely capture what it is that we call the phenomenon of prerequisite knowledge, because the results are too dependent upon too many various factors and indicators to be indicative of anything beyond the specific issues of the individual child upon which each individual assessment is taken. We cannot average out these individual assessments to attain anything meaningful, other than what it is that might be dominant characteristics of the overall population from which such individual statistical slices come. However every average is always somewhere in between the maximum and minimal values of the data set, and not representative of any individual in the group.
This is why charter schools in the same districts as the public school do not make a measureable difference when the students come from the same population of students without separating the population based on various beneficial statistics. The best charter schools actually separate the better students using various tactics, often kicking out the lesser endowed, so their success rates compared to the public school is more a result of these mechanisms of subtraction, a result that comes from removing the students who are more difficult to teach. Schools who are said to be failing are largely suffering from being overwhelmed by social factors not being addressed by the government and the local community
Schools provide a service called education. This service involves a teacher who creates and enhances whatever curriculum or spectra of topics are desired to whatever course a student becomes attached. This teacher, under the most efficient and beneficial assumptions, gets to know each student, adjusts and caters the overall curriculum design to meet the various needs of the incoming students. Students who have less cognitive dissonance move far beyond their own expectations, while at the same time students who are cognitively inhibited (for whatever reason) do not fall farther beyond. At best it is assumed that these low-end students actually rise above their prior level, so that we give credit to the best teachers those who rise the level of all their students across the spectrum.
Under certain stable conditions, this is possible. The Bell curve of the classroom all shifts to the right an equal amount. In practice however, this bell curve of the incoming students represents not just one group, but many different groups; each of whom respond differently to different situations and have their education affected by different factors throughout the measurable time frame (semester, quarter, tri-mester, or year-to-year). These students have erratic learning habits, and are highly affected by their non-school related events.
Students who live with single parents
Students going through a parental divorce
Students who live step parents
Students who have had a history of mobile over a five year period
Students who live in poverty
Students who have poor dietary habits
Students who come from a poor educational background.
Adolescent Psychology
Students responding to computer programs that are meant to address their individual needs cannot address the seven issues above. Removing the teacher-student relationship alone is not an effective means of addressing the education phenomenon that appears to be “broken” and in need of “reform”. Assuming the reason why students lack success in only related to their pace of learning, is it a good idea to place impressionable, possible highly ignorant young people responding to a computer program with little or no interference from a teacher or any other human being? Learning is not a passive experience, involving mere pressing of buttons on a computer, quietly answering questions using simple words without interacting with other persons during the experience. Students watch videos and then respond or click boxes based upon how much they remembered. This is called a Quiz. Students do not interact based upon watching the same video. Students do not analyze their opinions or reflections of the video. Students do not get differing viewpoints from other students, or the even feedback from the teacher. The experience is solitary. The answers to such questions are thus not referencing a dynamic involving various reactions with the learning environment, but responses to a script. Hence the phrase “catering to the individual needs” of the student is really a means of disconnecting the individual from group and the peers where the learning environment is organic. It doesn’t guarantee long-term or developmental memory because it depends upon inferential solitary integration with the dissemination of knowledge. Most people need to be engaged with the learning experience. Discussing and sharing knowledge also enhances an individual’s understanding. Linkages are created whenever there is some sort of group socialization around knowledge that do not occur when knowledge acquisition is solitary.
Think of this like reading a book. Reading a book is solitary knowledge acquisition. You learned something by reading the book. When you discuss the book with someone else, you attach your information to what you have already learn, in addition to reflecting on what it means in relation to what you have already learned. If you then write a paper explaining the book or what you have gained by reading the book, you are doing regurgitating that information and then putting it in a context that you feel expresses the knowledge that you have. All of which creates a deeper, longer lasting learning experience. You would not get the same development or understanding, if you just skimmed a few chapters of the book, watched a five minute video that summarized the book, or just looked up some references on Google that gave you some solid paragraphs – to which you answered ten multiple choice questions that assessed your learning. That is called learning by proxy.
The idea that we can rescue dysfuctional communities by removing qualifying students to different schools is just another way of ignoring and not investing in the issues that affect dysfunctional communities. Syphoning these funds to a private or for-profit institution at the behest of the individual assumes the individual alone can be plucked away from the community as a way of “saving” the community. But what merely happens is that such individuals who are “saved” eventually leave the community, leaving the community unchanged, a community that continues to languish because it never got any benefit from the investment that “elevated” the student and moved the individual somewhere else to become more successful. The coasts and urban cities are filled with migrants who relocated, without making a difference at all in the communities from where they left.
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This is a brilliant analysis ginardo.
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thank you Abigail. I hope my love of teaching shines through. 🙂
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Where is Doug? Has anybody seen Doug? We are busy arguing amongst ourselves as per usual.
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Wrong again Lloyd… you don’t have a clue! In our beligerent school district the average student to teacher ratio is 1:10 and less than that if you add in para’s and co-teaching sections!
There is such a thing as an informed parent who knows what the school is supposed to be be providing to certain groups of students under the IDEA, 504, ADA and NCLB and “professionals” seem to get bent out of shape when you start providing them the evidence of where they are being non-compliant, or where they are turning a blind eye to students academic instructional needs – and then they call in their bully lawyers and paly the string them out financially and stonewall them game!
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It isn’t going to be easy for you to prove I’m wrong, because you are an anonymous commenter on this blog; could be a troll (biased and/or a bully) who deliberately spreads misinformation for whatever reason (a troll and/or a shill).
As far as we know, you could be a hacker in Russia that goes by “M”.
Of course, Diane has access to your IP address and if it isn’t masked to hide its location, she has an 85 percent chance of pinging that IP address and discovering the state you live in to within 25 miles of the location where the computer you are using is located.
https://www.iplocation.net/
There is no way to check anything you claim because we don’t know who you are, where you live, and the state or school district you are referring to. If you revealed this on this blog in another thread, I didn’t see it so you are a faceless nobody to me.
There are about 15,000 community based, mostly democratically run, transparent, non-profit traditional public school districts in the Untied States operating out of 50 states and each state is in charge of funding and passing laws for the public schools in that state.
For instance, California had the highest number of students enrolled per teacher in public elementary and secondary schools at 24.9 while Vermont, with the lowest average, was 9.2.
California has a population of 38.8 million with the highest child poverty rate in the nation at 27 percent.
http://www.kpbs.org/news/2015/feb/25/california-has-nations-highest-child-poverty-rate/
Do you live in Vermont (population 626.5k with a 15 percent child poverty rate) or Nebraska (population of 1.882 million and about 18 percent child poverty rate), both states with less than 10 students on average in a classroom?
94.8 percent of the population of Vermont is white
89.1 percent of the population of Nebraska is white
72.9 percent of the population of California is white
California has 20x the population of Nebraska and 62 times the population of Vermont.
http://www.nea.org/home/rankings-and-estimates-2013-2014.html
California has more than 6.6 million students in its k-12 schools and 3.9 percent have a disability; that is more than 257k students.
Nebraska has 191,411 students with 10,335 students that have disabilities.
Vermont has 32,408 students with 1,685 that have disabilities.
Click to access acsbr10-12.pdf
California has more teachers, almost 272k than the combined number of K-12 students in both Vermont and Nebraska.
Since I base my comments on what I know best, California where I taught for thirty years, that means my perception and facts will be different than someone who lives in Vermont or Nebraska, but we still don’t know who you are, where you live, and the name of your district. You are just another nameless, faceless person and that basically counts for nothing.
I’m transparent. You are opaque. Until you transparent, you have no credibility to allege anything and prove it.
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Lloyd,
I’m not sure where you got your special ed data from but I’m a special educator and your 3.9% figure for kids with disabilities in California sounded much too low to me, because the national average is 13%. So, I looked it up and in CA, it was 10.8% in 2013-14: http://eddataexpress.ed.gov/data-element-explorer.cfm/tab/data/deid/5/
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The link was there. I think it led to a US Census report.
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Lloyd,
I think the discrepancy is due to the fact that the census data you referred to is regarding percentages in metro areas, not entire states.
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P.S. If you add the two columns, it’s 3.9% for metro and 5.7% for outside metro areas, and that was in 2010, so there were 9.6% with disabilities then.
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A huge problem in USA is Secondary teachers r giving up on teaching remedial reading/math to the students who need it. Half the public school students should be secondary. Half the reading/math budget should go to teaching developmental reading/math to secondary students who need it. Respectfully, Paul Paul J. Smith, Ed.D. pjsmith44@yahoo.com
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I think people here have to cede that, regardless of community income, no school district is perfect or doesn’t make mistakes, so unfortunately, some students do fall through the cracks. In my experience, Special Ed is where that’s most likely to happen. I believe this is primarily because Special Ed is very costly, the feds have never provided enough income support for serving all the kids who have special needs and, to make matters worse, some districts have taken very seriously the 1985 Supreme Court ruling that kids with special needs can get a chevrolet, not a cadillac.
What frustrated parents can do, in public school districts with elected school boards, is run for office on the school board. That’s what happened with my mom, when my family moved to an upper middle income suburb. She became president of the PTA and parents who had kids with special needs asked my mom to advocated for them. Eventually, those families got her to run for school board and she was elected. My mom was more successful advocating as a board member, but since some other school board members were less sympathetic, she encouraged more like-minded parents to run for office. She got a lot more traction advocating for kids with special needs after they were on the board, too.
With charter and voucher schools, which mostly have appointed boards, this is not an option. When there are no democratically elected school boards, parents are encouraged to vote with their feet (i.e., see yourself to the door).
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My foster/adopted teen was in foster care across multiple school districts spread out across hundreds of miles over the course of 12 school years! Some of which were above the radar due to census numbers and some that were under the radar due to census numbers!
It did not matter. Some were urban/city schools, some were rural schools, some were suburban schools, as well as private school for a short time.
It did not make one bit of difference! Not one school or district provide this child over the course of 12 school yrs, with effective literacy instruction, and it was also known that there were gaps in math skills that should have been remediated as well, but were also ignored, even after being pointed out by the neuro-psychologist who attended not one, but TWO, CSE meetings trying to get through their beligerent stonewalls, why this child should be provided with the Wilson Reading program which they offered in that district, as well as remedial instruction in various areas of math too, but to no avail. (They instead totally replaced what she had said at the meeting with totally false information in their CSE summary report, as apparently they forgot that we recorded it!)
Special Ed is not as costly as schools want to make it. Schools get additional funding for those that are identified as special ed students. (What they do not get funding for, are the gen ed kids in AIS programs.)
Lloyd, I’m sure if you paid a little bit of attention to my prior posts, there would be no secrets to what part of the nation I reside. And EVERYONE knows that there is no true anonymity when using a computer and I’m pretty sure Diane has already checked that out. 😉
I could care less if you believe me or not Lloyd. There is no reason for me to lie about my personal experience with my school district. I won’t name them because they seem to be of a similar cloth to you and would rather attempt to stone me or burn me at a stake for challenging your views (by providing you here with an alternative experience and explaining why many parents are not enamored by their local public schools behind and are choosing alternative options more and more each and every year) but you are too beligerent to grasp it! And as has been noted, parents are encouraged to vote with their feet, and they are doing that more and more each year!
Those parents that care about eduction and have been stonewalled, or backed into having to choose between paying for lawyers and advocates or paying for private tutors or schools that will work with them, they are indeed voting with their feet, and leaving public schools behind, in ever greater numbers every year, and choosing those alternatives! They like me have realized that we don’t need public schools that refuse to provide their children with a proper education! Just like our own family experienced, we can get better instruction and get more out of education options, in the private and not for profit sectors! We do not NEED schools that refuse to do their job and accept that they are failing certain groups of students; actually most groups of students are not getting an education that benefits them to their level of ability. It instead is geared to the lowest general denominator.
So keep pushing parents that care and are informed out to the private sector for educational needs and you will find yourself with the students that you don’t want to find a way to help, those with the most needs, from families that don’t have a clue due to their own lack of proper education, generational literacy & numeracy struggles, and other demographics that you all seem to ignore.
And those families with the means and/or the interest in ensuring that their children actually obtain a meaningful education- an education that provides their children with future success in foundational literacy and numeracy skills and shows that they value their input and want to help them help their child achieve to their ability level vs the level of the status quo- they will continue to say adios to their local public schools and choose quality options where their input is valued!
And the students that remain will be those who care primarily about sport and the social aspects of schools (again, the tax funded rec centers) or those that don’t want to worry abot what their children are doing (those that like the tax funded day care) provided by their local schools. And if any sort of knowledge is imparted while they are there, even better! 😉
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M,
I am not sure why you insist on generalizing your personal experience to all of American public schools. That’s inappropriate and I won’t post these personal rants anymore.
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M,
I have a suggestion: why don’t you put your children into charters and let us know how that goes.
By the way, in Russia the study of disabilities is called Defectology
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Hi Doug
If you’re trying to identify thesolution, you need to be more specific. In education, whenever we want to intervene to solve a learning difficulty, we must specifically identify what the problem is and develop practice or interventions that address the problem. The same is true in medicine. If you went to the doctor’s office and said “I am in bad shape”, I’m sure the doctor would subject you to a series of tests and questions to better identify a method of treatment. To say that schools are “in bad shape” or “have problems”, doesn’t really help or add to the discussion at all. It’s like saying the government is bad or the system is rigged. There’s no really substance to this claim.
If we do want to make schools and outcomes for students improve, fleeing the schools or providing more options that take funding away from schools is not beneficial. This was part of the Bush strategy that continued on with Obama. In fact, in PA, where I live, republican governor Tom Corbett provided corporate tax breaks (welfare) for companies if they provided vouchers. He called them opportunity scholarships, but ultimately the took money away from needy schools in the state that has one of the most unequal funding formulae in the country. We can’t expect improvement when needy schools are continuously punished or lose funding. There can’t be progress with less.
I don’t think that many school advocates suggest more taxes, but rather really investigating the issues that plague schools and designing evidence based interventions to address these neeeds, whether they are instructional, leadership based, or systemic. All schools have some type of problem, but not all of the school problems are the same.
One of the best ways to find out what plagues your school system is to get more involved in the issue. Engage with the school board or visit the school to see what the school’s needs are. Volunteer to work with students after school, just like Merick Garland does. Or if time doesn’t allow you to get involved in this way, maybe start reading some books or articles by experts in the field, like Diane. Her most r cent books, Reign of Errror and The Life and Death of the American School, are both excellent studies of problems and potential solutions for current schools. These are just some suggestions to address your feelings of being an “outsider” and becoming more informed about issues in schools.
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I think the simplest response is this…
If you believe that there is such a thing as a bad public school, then please name one that is located in a middle class or affluent neighborhood. You probably can’t which would mean that the problem isn’t the school but rather the community. Rather than focusing on “fixing” the school, perhaps we would be better off helping the surrounding community instead. By giving some students a means of attending a “better” school, you’re essentially abandoning the rest because they don’t have parents who are willing or capable of being as invested in their children as everyone else.
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Court: Yes-well said. And “helping” can include a look at and support of the local library and adult education programs.
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I understand your point, Court, and certainly agree in the sense you intended. But I can name dozens, scores, hundreds of “bad” public schools in affluent neighborhoods. They don’t look “bad” because the kids all have the advantages privilege confers, and therefore do reasonably well in ways our culture defines success.
But they are bad in that they: Create stress; they decrease curiosity through extrinsic systems; they take away other joys by assigning excessive, useless homework; they fall for the hype of the AP curriculum, thus replacing discovery with “credential strategy.” I could go on.
There is a nearly universal assumption that you can assess the quality of a school by the success (or lack thereof) of its students. That assumption is categorically false and distorts this and other discussions.
My high school, for example, was considered one of the “best” in America (albeit in 1964!) because of the conspicuous success of its graduates in college placement and SAT scores. With hindsight, and my current level of understanding, I know that it was not a particularly good school at all. It had a particularly good community. All over this country we think communities have good schools when in fact it is the school that has a good community. Our understanding of this relationship is backwards.
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There is truth in what you write but I’d argue that “bad” schools in affluent neighborhoods are generally bad because they are doing everything the state requires of them. We need to start giving back some control of our schools to the communities they serve.
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Every time the achievement gap between low income and higher income students comes up, people talk about it as if this is an issue that is specific to the United States. It is not. It’s a global problem: “International tests show achievement gaps in all countries, with big gains for U.S. disadvantaged students” http://www.epi.org/blog/international-tests-achievement-gaps-gains-american-students/
The only country I know of that has effectively dealt with this issue is Finland, by focusing on equity, including by providing many parental supports, starting with free pre-natal care, maternity packages and ongoing family benefits for all:
http://www.inhabitots.com/finlands-family-benefits-prove-why-its-ranked-the-number-one-place-in-the-world-to-be-a-parent/
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France shrank the achievement gap before it abandoned its old national curriculum in 1989. Since then the gap has exploded.
In math at least, Japan does a good job of lifting up the vast majority of students to a high level of achievement. At least that’s what I recall from The Learning Gap by Stevenson and Stigler, a great book about Japan’s education system.
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Doug (and John),
Your main thrust seems to be that anti-school choice folks’ position is that the public school system is fine just leave it alone. This could not be further from the truth.
The ed-reform movement– NCLB/ RTTT/ CCSS stds & high-stakes accountability testing/ data-mining for traditional public schools coupled with free-for-all free-market alternatives– is a one-two punch aimed directly at the nation’s democratically-run public schools. The mandates for traditionally-run publics have been applied top-down by executive fiat from DC for 15 yrs. State charter and voucher laws are encouraged by fed DOEd, legislated in by states, circumventing referendums and even state constitutions. Both sets of laws enacted courtesy of corporate lobbies/ campaign-funding, without consulting the taxpayers who pick up the tab. Local school districts find themselves squeezed between reduced state ed budgets, increased govtl reqts which interfere w/ delivering a decent education, & a steady draining of enrollment monies to quasi- & outright private entities which are not run by the municipality, & whose books are not open to taxpayers.
This frontal assault on US public education has effectively halted progress toward & often even public discussion of improvement of our public schools. When you’re taking cannonballs in the hull you can’t focus on adjusting the sails.
This is not to say that there isn’t plenty of research out there on methods that work to deliver higher-quality ed to poor & minority students. [I’m not talking about ‘the math wars’ or ‘phonics vs whole language’– the ‘change-it-up’ attitude driving wholesale curricular changes every couple of years derives, again, from corporate lobbies, not from educators.] This is to say that such studies are & have long been ignored by fed govt. The national conversation on education, since the 1980’s, has been reduced to “more money” vs “less money”. Delivering quality education– among other things– is labor-intensive & requires a talented & well-trained labor pool. Current policy runs in the opposite direction.
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I can’t believe I’ve read every one of these. We have Doug, John, M, and cemab4y taking on the public school teachers. Doug disappeared, as far as I can tell, just kicking the whole thing off. John is a smart fellow determined to undermine public schools and their teachers for, presumably, ideological reasons, M is a damaged person who can only be set aside and given a good experience, and cemab4y is concerned but ignorant beyond remediation. Exactly why is this large group of thoughtful and well-informed people so engaged with these people, none of whom are remotely open to understanding the complex nexus of educating our youth. Doug and John are simply members of the reform movement (GERM, Pasi Sahlberg’s term) who have an agenda. People like cemab4y are like your Uncle Harry who gets ahold of a notion – the world’s problems are reducible to X, if everyone would just get on board with him – and won’t let go in the face of facts and other pesky things.
Not to dismiss the experiences of people like M; my daughter has gone through hell with the public schools in dealing with her two autistic kids. Plenty to work on there, but when you see the underlying theme of these people (MY AGENDA! MY AGENDA!), you see they are impossible to work with (can you imagine M showing up in the front office of your school screaming about dyslexia and the magic bullet she has?) and are simply road blocks to fixing the problems public schools do have.
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Pbarrett,
Thank you for your wise comment. I always debate whether to post the negative comments, and most of the time I do. It would be less interesting if we agreed all the time. But you would be astonished by the ones I don’t post, for reasons usually of vitriol.
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All of my friends who are parents of children with special needs had HUGE fights with their districts to access appropriate instruction for their children. One of my former colleagues has a son with Aspergers and ADD. She was back and forth with his school from Pre-K through 12. Now he is in college and he is still receiving services.
I attended Child Study Team meetings to help a friend advocate for his son. The team leader said that he had a slight learning disability, but his problem was mainly psychological so he didn’t require services. I was livid. I told her that I didn’t care if his problem was psychological. He was in fifth grade and he couldn’t read. The heavens opened up. He received resource room services and he started learning to read.
As a teacher, I have participated in numerous Child Study meetings. Unfortunately, some parents are intimidated by the process, but I have yet to see a parent who was not sincerely trying to get help for the child.
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pbarret,
I could call you “simply an apologist for traditional public schools for ideological reasons.”
I think discussing issues is more productive than labeling people and dismissing their opinions.
My children are in traditional public schools and I support many traditional schools. I just wanted to start a school that focused on teaching and doing whatever possible to get the best results for low income kids.
I don’t view charters as the solution, but the flexibility that a charter offers enables the creation of schools that are getting better results than traditional public schools in urban settings. I find that generally only ideologues are against such schools.
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John,
I oppose privatization of public schools. Does that make me an ideologue? You might say so. I say it is a principled belief that what belongs to the community should not be turned over to entrepreneurs for fun and profit.
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Yes, I think if you support schools based on their structure and without regard for quality, you are an ideologue. It doesn’t make you a bad person ;-), but I think the idea is more important to you than the reality. To me, that’s not different than if I supported all charters regardless of quality because I believed in charters for ideological reasons (e.g. If I were pro-privatization or anti-union) as opposed to just believing that they can be a means for creating more high quality school options.
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Too bad they are not a vehicle for better schools. They are a vehicle for destroying public education. That’s why Betsy DeVos loves them. So does Trump.
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“Yes, I think if you support schools based on their structure and without regard for quality, you are an ideologue.”
Seriously? Supporting the requirement that tax dollars intended for public schools be allocated to public schools makes public school proponents ideologues? I pay my taxes to support public schools. There are not enough public dollars to fund the system we have much less a dual, private system as well.
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Everyone participating in this thread knows or should know that charters were developed by a teacher union head and others to facilitate innovation, thus recognizing the sclerosis that sets in in any institution. Once the money sniffers got wind of how they could scam the public and make a buck off each child, the barn door was wide open. But Diane has pointed out in one of her books the roots of this phase of the charter movement in the White Academies of the South which sought to avoid racial integration. I seem to be the one who introduces this element into discussions, but it’s b/c I have lived through it, starting in Dothan, AL in 1956 as a student.
So, upshot: there are sincere, hard-working charter schools, there are rip-off charters and scam charters, there are White flight charters and there are religious charters. Only the first get my support.
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Pbarrett,
Al Shanker launched the charter idea in 1988. Not because he thought schools were sclerotic, but because he noticed that many students were unmotivated, heads on their desks, not engaged. His idea was that charters would be formed by small groups of teachers, who would get the approval of the local union to create a small experimental school. There they could seek ways to engage the students who were turned off by traditional teaching. They would share whatever they learned with the other teachers, and this approach would be a source of new thinking, feeding into the public schools.
In 1993, he turned against the charter idea because he realized that corporations and rightwing groups were hijacking his idea and turning it into a means to privatize public schools. He was angry about a business named Education Alternatives, Inc., which won a contract to manage schools there. EAI fired union paras and replaced them with recent college graduates, who cost less. Ironically, Michelle Rhee taught in an EAI school in Baltimore. Shanker was also angered by a cybercharters in Michigan called the Noah Webster Academy, designed for homeschoolers.
He wrote an article in 1993 saying that there was no difference between charters and vouchers, and both would lead to privatization and union busting.
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Pbarret,
“there are sincere, hard-working charter schools, there are rip-off charters and scam charters, there are White flight charters and there are religious charters. Only the first get my support”
I agree 100%. Unfortunately, most here lump them all together and denigrate fellow hard working educators in the process.
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John: No–for me (at least), I don’t “lump all charters together” in the sense of their present quality of service as your note suggests–though I would ask questions about curricula or, to the point, what is avoided in curricula, if I were a parent with school age children.
And I distinguish (a) corporate-run charters (new-private) from (b) some long-existing religious schools or, again, Montessori or other similar educational institutions who are NOT–
Involved with destroying the relationship between democratic government and its educational system.
Using public funding while lobbying against accountability for that use.
Making schools into businesses, and so profit-making from children’s education
Systematically denigrating teachers as professionals and teacher-education departments–so that principles of good education and ongoing research can be subsumed under the corporate/capitalist model-there goes the ongoing research that is potential to help public schools develop as they should.
Open to whatever religious zealot, with little education and a fat checkbook, can develop as curricula.
But in the sense that the neo-private schools, ON PRINCIPLE, regardless of their present quality, and intentional or not, are involved in an assault on the relationship between democracy and its educational system–I DO rightly “lump charters together.”
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Thank you, Catherine, well put.
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Diane: You’re welcome. We do live in interesting times.
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John, you are either naive or insincere. First, urban charters are not getting better results in a meaningful way. They are using call and response techniques with easily replaced young teachers who have no meaningful connection to kids. Others on Diane’s blog have cited attrition through suspension and expulsion. Still others have cited low numbers of ESL or learning difference students served by these shiny, highly regimented, branded schools. The disciplinary practices are disgusting, and I’m not alluding only to the well-publicized “no excuses” shaming, shunning and humiliation. They also suppress imagination, kill creativity and insist on conformity and compliance that denies children their individual humanity. They are horrible schools and it wouldn’t be worth the price even if they were “achieving” better test scores, which they are, by and large, not doing.
Most importantly, the reform movement is decimating a public institution of enormous value to our democratic republic. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on propaganda. Sham organizations like Families for Excellent Schools are undermining the democratic process and denigrating the work of thousands of schools and their teachers.
The crisis that reform is supposed to be addressing is a big lie, starting with A Nation at Risk, which drew conclusions based on faulty statistical analysis. This was Reagan administration work and was the beginning of a long assault on education. The money and politics behind it are driven by profit, religion (can you spell DeVos?) and the unsupportable belief that free markets and business whizzes can do everything better than we mere mortals who work in schools.
The repeated argument that “we’re just trying to give those poor kids a better chance” is disingenuous and manipulative. In a particular instance it may seem appealing. But to miss the larger picture is dangerous and . . . I repeat . . . either naiver or insincere.
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stevenelson0248,
Where do you get your information on charters? How many have you visited?
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John: I’ve visited several, including Eva Moskowitz’s flagship Harlem Success. I’ve interviewed scores of teachers who have taught at and been heartbroken by the practices I describe. I have read dozens of first hand accounts of the practices I describe. I’ve consoled students and parents who have felt the abusive practices I describe. I’ve worked directly with a coalition of public school parents who are working with no resources to combat the takeover of public education in New York City by billionaire-funded interests. I’ve read the words of the hedge fund managers who fund the charter chains. I’ve argued pedagogy in my office with one of the founders of the Green Dot schools. (He didn’t have any sophisticated knowledge.) I’ve seen videos of abusive practices leaked to the New York Times. I’ve visited the websites of KIPP, Democracy Prep and Success Academies and seen the language they use to describe children. I’ve heard a leading charter proponent say “they need it” when talking about the harsh discipline meted out on poor children of color.
And most of all, I’ve spent 20 years understanding the emotional, psychological, developmental and neurobiological needs of children. Most charter schools operate in ways that are directly contradictory to these needs.
Now, what are the experiences that inform your support of charters?
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Steve, powerful.
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Sorry about the last post. I got confused by the names. I’m going to go back and read your posts in the context of the information you provided. I respect that you’ve visited many and spoken to many involved. Can I ask if it’s all in NYC? My experience in visiting a similar number of schools and meeting with parents and children is just so different than yours that I’m curious.
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stevenelson0248,
And how many charter schools have you visited to develop your informed opinion? “no meaningful connection to kids” is nonsense, as is most of what you said.
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“Bad” schools are just a symptom of a myriad of diseases.
Generational poverty
Hopelessness
Dependence
Depression
Parental neglect
Fatherless families
Substance Abuse
Violence/Crime
Trauma/Stress
Insecurity/Instability/Chaos
Institutional racism
The cure for “bad” schools/ “bad” families/ “bad” neighborhoods/ “bad” communities
lies in the hope and dignity of meaningful work at a living wage.
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Well-said!
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Did anyone set up a criteria in which to evaluate schools? Goodlad, author of “ A Place Called School?” set up four major areas: successful problem solving; sensitive human relations; self-understanding; and the integration of one’s total life experience.
Caring and having affective teaching skills are essential in working with children. The former accreditation body, TEAC, that grants accreditation for Teachers of Education Programs lists caring as one of their principals/standards.
N.L. Gage, an educational psychologist, lists the four qualities needed by a teacher: cognitive level- knowledge of the subject, indirectness, warmth, and enthusiasm.
Doug stated:
“I think the problem is this: the people opposing allowing people to escape from bad public schools don’t seem to want to acknowledge that there is such a thing as bad public schools. Or, at most, they seem to believe that if we just raised taxes and put more money into these schools, they’d be better. Or, that there is nothing the schools can do, it’s general poverty that is the problem.”
Dr. Ravitch zeroed in on the problem stating, “What you blame on the schools is usually traceable to parents. But that’s an inconvenient truth. ”
James Coleman, (1966, 1975) did an intensive study for the government which revealed that the most important variable in school achievement was the family.
Family living has a lasting influence on children. Parental example is extremely influential in school success. Literacy level of parents is significantly related to that of their children.”
I maintain that unless the parents value education, unless they accept responsibility at home, and until the parents realize that the schools can not do it all, there will always be an “achievement gap.” Attitudes anchored in the home are at the root of children working up to their potential. If all parents/caregivers take an interest in the development of their children’s cognitive skills; realized how important it is to read to their children; provided creative play; engaged in conversation; and provided numerous cognitive experiences, more children would be working up to their potential; there would be less of an achievement gap. Some parent/caregivers need to be shown how to care and work with their children through their various developmental stages before their children begin formal education. This is the goal of a program call PAT- Parents as Teachers.
Schools especially must involve those parents/caregivers who appear indifferent or incapable of parenting and supporting their children’s academic life. Most schools have parent/teacher conferences and invite the parents into the classroom but that is insufficient. Workshops are needed for parent/caregivers on how they can support their children. Refreshments, door prizes, baby sitting, transportation, and translators need to be provided. At the end of the workshop, a packet of educational material for parents/caregivers could serve as an incentive for them to spend quality time with their children. Parents who converse with their children, take an interest in their activities, and above all read to them contribute greatly to their children’s success in school.
Cemab4y stated,”Sadly, many American schools are failing at the task that has been commissioned to them. This is an empirical fact, and not a criticism of any individual or profession.”
But I ask: what is their commission? Is it the same in all school districts? It depends upon your criteria of success. Students’ who score a 99% but hate themselves and those around them, I wouldn’t be successful.
Cemab4y sites Fairfax County in VA and Baytown,TX as having excellent schools?
Again, I ask: why are they considered excellent schools? Are the students sensitive and caring?
Lloyd L states, “There are very few FAILING public schools. There are very few INCOMPETENT public school teachers. Even in the A. Vergara trial the expert witnesses from Harvard for the vigilantes behind that court case said they “estimated” from years of observations that between 1 to 3 percent of teachers were incompetent.”
Again I ask what criteria were they following? Which of Goodlad’s four criteria? Are the teachers incompetent or do too many parents expect the teachers to do it all? Of course if you can check the teacher’s background/education, that could give a clue if the teacher is at fault. TFA can never develop the needed background to teach in five weeks of training. I certainly agree, Lloyd, that there are people in the field of teaching for the wrong reason.
Lloyd states in error in responding to other problems such as “Nebraska with a population of 1.882 million and about 18 percent child poverty rate, …states with less than 10 students on average in a classroom?” There are no classrooms with only 10 students in a classroom – and for sure not less than 10. In the past there was one classroom for all 8 grades but today there are several grades in a room. Some educators are trying to go back to the system with more than one grade in a room where children work with the group functioning on their level – not necessarily their grade level.
Lloyd talks about disabilities, “California has more than 6.6 million students in its k-12 schools and 3.9 percent have a disability; that is more than 257k students.”
From my observation and complaints of parents in numerous districts and states, CC has caused disabilities. Students that I tutor- gratis- are not LD as labeled. They either have a different learning style, need more time to understand new concepts, or don’t have the support from home they need.
I purport one of the best ways to support children at home is for parents/caregivers to read every night to their children. Where there is a will there is a way. Don’t tell me about the parents that can’t read, have no time, or don’t have access to books. Our public libraries not only have phenomenal books but have become and hub for great learning providing countless activities of all kinds- even outdoor learning centers of experimenting with water, musical instruments, gardening, building, water painting …
Dr. Ben Carson’s mother couldn’t read but she still mandated those book reports from her boys.
monicafeffef says:
“That’s why they instituted the Common Core Standards. Those standards would have leveled the playing field between public and private. But guess what, everyone complained about the standards – too hard for some students. Too hard for some teachers. Really bad choices from school district administration. Paying consultants to do their work. Dumbing down the curriculum so everyone can graduate and take remedial classes in college, using local property taxes to fund education. Just saying.”
Thanks to jcgim for a great rebuttal,“Standards, testing and state/federal mandates will never equalize education”
I maintain that the basic philosophy underlining CC is harming our children. It is a modified version of Behaviorism. Common Core’s emphasis is on facts. Students and teachers are being subjected to punishment if scores, grades, evaluations and assessments don’t meet the imposed standards.
Constructivist philosophy allows learners to actively construct meaning by building on background knowledge, experience and reflect on those experiences. Research shows that constructivist learning is congruent with how the brain learns. There is plenty of research to prove, that constructivist education is the best way for learners to learn- contextualized, interactive, anchored in personal experience.
Remember Goodlad’s basic criteria for success that which promotes: successful problem solving; sensitive human relations; self-understanding; and the integration of one’s total life experience.
Ms. Rose Sanders maintains that,“this (CC) is the worst war ever fought on American soil, for neither the civil war, nor the war for civil rights can compare, for the casualties of this war are our precious children.”
Einstein maintained “Education is not the learning of ffacts but the training of the mind to think.”
Leo Buscaglia (1924-1998)argued that the “essence of education is not to stuff you full of facts, but to help you discover your uniqueness, to teach you how to develop it, and then show you how to give it away” (Living, Loving Learning, p.10). He spoke against an education system that aims to ‘make everybody like everybody else’ which can be seen by our rigidity and reward system associated with curriculum in almost every stage of the education system. …” Buscaglia discussed the idea that by treating all learners as the same we are missing the point of education and deprive learners of the joy of learning. The children’s emotional well-being is considered of primary importance over academic development
John and other responders on the blog stated or implied that, “They (teachers) supported CC until it became unpopular.”
But I say: No way! Don’t forget the gag order that was in vogue and still may be in some districts. I know in NY there was a gag order in a district and repercussions included being written up. You know what happens when too many negative reports end up in your file?
Just because Randy Weingarten initially supported CC that doesn’t mean the local unions did- quite the contrary especially here on LI.
Mrobmsu stated “Doug isn’t interested in improving struggling schools–which are struggling due to systemic defunding and destabilizing.”
I question how Mrobmsu would improve our struggling schools. I maintain that funding for more teachers, more pay, and smaller classes are needed in many areas especially in South Carolina, but more technology isn’t the answer. There is no machine that can take the place of an informed, caring, and supportive teacher.
If you want to improve schools, first work with the parents/caregivers and show them how to help their children. I have observed it first hand in teaching when I helped develop workshops for parents; sent home backpacks of books to read at home along with a recorder, when necessary, in lieu of homework. The parent who told me he couldn’t read – I gave him a read along tape to listen to with his child; for the parents who couldn’t speak English much less read a book in English I told them to read books written in their native tongue or tell a story via a picture book; the pictures tell the story. “Nook” and the “Kindle” which the libraries loan out. They display the text and pictures. The reader can read it independently or it can listen to it being read. Many libraries have available the Nook even provides the option to record the child reading of the story. For a parent who said she had no time- she must also resort to read along tapes or CD.
According to Susan B Neuman and David K Dicinso in Early Literacy Research,access to books is essential to reading development: the only variable that directly correlates with reading scores is the number of books in the home. However, most recent data describes a profound, even shocking gap: while the ratio of books to children in middle-income neighborhoods is approximately 13 books to 1 child, the ratio in low-income neighborhoods is 1 book to 300 children.* In addition, over 80 percent of childcare centers serving low-income children lack age-appropriate books. Together, The Literacy Site and its domestic partner, First Book, provide children from low-income families in the U.S. with books they can take home and keep.*
Thorndike, after studying reading comprehension in 15 countries, discovered two conditions that prevailed in strong readers. All had been read to from an early age and had come from homes that respected education.
Retired teacher maintained, “…I have taught many students in public schools that beat the odds out of poverty and have carved out a middle class life….” You had to be one of those giving people students will never forget.
It is interesting that the gallup reveals that most parents approve of the way their schools are functioning.
Rebecca Riffkin in “Americans’ Satisfaction With Education System Increase “states: Three in Four Parents Are Satisfied With Their Child’s Education
“Parents’ tendency to be more positive than the general public about education is vividly evident when Gallup asks parents with a child in grades K-12 about their satisfaction with their own child’s education. Three in four parents say they are satisfied with the quality of education their oldest child is receiving in 2014, significantly higher than the 48% of Americans who are satisfied with U.S. K-12 education in general.”
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Lloyd says he provided most if not all of the links to the data he mentioned in his comment. Don’t call Lloyd wrong. Call the sources he got the facts from wrong if you can prove the sources wrong with sources of your own and links to those sources. Opinions and allegations without facts and links to reliable sources count as nothing.
Those two Harvard (so-called) experts were brought in by the oligarchs funding the Vergara trial, and those two witnesses for the prosecution said that 1 to 3 percent was a guesstimate based on years of observations. Who knows how many are actually burned out and/or incompetent.
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Mary DeFalco,
I agree with a lot of what you said, but would go one critical step further. Where we are unable to engage parents, let’s do as much as we can to compensate for what they lack for their students.
I agree with Diane that family situations and parents bear a big responsibility for achievement gaps, but keep in mind that those parents were frequently students in the same school 20 years ago.
I would say that most of the “extra” work in my charter school, including longer days and years, completing homework in school when it’s not done, rewards for hard work and good behavior and consequences for lack of it, consistent discipline, huge focus on reading and writing, etc are to compensate for the lack of these things at home.
I’m not saying that traditional schools and many teachers don’t do thes things, but I’ve heard many say that it isn’t the job of schools to do this. I disagree. I think it wasn’t the job of schools in the past, but has to be now for urban schools. To do that, we need more money, the best, most motivated teachers, and more flexibility to adapt to this new challenge.
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John, getting parents into school from the “fringe” – parents who can’t be bothered, is a challenge. One of our schools used Title I money to take two teachers into those homes, like PAT, and help the parents/caregivers help their child and inform the parents/caregivers what is happening in school. Sometimes they just need a special invitation because they either don’t feel comfortable or feel like a spectacle. “Home Visiting Evidence of Effectiveness” http://homvee.acf.hhs.gov/Model/1/Parents-as-Teachers-PAT–In-Brief/16
In the public school, too -before CC, remediation classes were held before other students arrived. Pulling students out is problematic but the push-in program is worse. Scheduling needs the cooperation of everyone. A dedicated faculty and staff find solutions to their problems. The old adage: where there is a will there is a way. Long before we heard of the “Achievement Gap” Mary Ruth Dieter of Arkansas was delivering books via horseback to children in remote areas. Horse Back Librarian – Eastern Kentucky.
Click to access WPA-Project-pack-horse-librarians-in-kentucky-1936-43.pdf
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Mary DeFalco,
All true. Home visits are a big part of what we do too.
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John: First, from a larger, systematic, and longer view (not just your school, but educational institutions in general in a vibrant democracy), your “compensations” for family failures in educating their children are well-meaning, may work sometimes for individuals, but are spotty at most. That is, it shifts what should be a shared responsibility for that child’s education to the school and leaves the major and probably complex problems in the institution of family to fester–now with the help of the school. (It would be like an alcoholic co-dependent, if it weren’t so self-aware on other levels of thought and intention.)
Whereas, from that systematic larger view, adult education and other programs as cultural supports in any given community where families need help (not to mention higher wages from employers), will lessen the need for the school to provide such help to “compensate for the lack of these things at home.”
From that larger view, we don’t want to “compensate” for families as a systematic treatment of a socio-cultural problem; but rather through policy to do what it takes to make families and communities stronger. Policy flowing directly from a government with our Constitutional mandates is about this larger view. Your note reveals that, even though much of what you are doing is good for individual students, your view is siloed so that nothing else matters about the long-term effects of what you are doing–and to accept (to not question) and perhaps even to endorse the dismantling of the families that need systematic help.
Second, there is the foundational view (which has been explained several times here in several threads–where NOT destroying the connection of education to democracy is the fundamental point of maintaining public schools). From that view, the better a singular charter (profit or not) becomes (as you suggest is the case in your school), the better a pimp it is–from the oligarchic view where take-over control of education in our nation is the goal.
So rave on about (1) how good your or any particular charter is; and (2) how bad particular public schools are.<–In the later, from the foundational viewpoint, the recognition is not of “bad public schools,” but of a public school in need of help, and always in the frame of its socio-cultural situation as a whole. Such recognition just points to the fact that not enough is being done, or the right things are not being done, to make it and its situation better–and we need to do that. If you believe in a vibrant democracy understood from a larger view, there is no question that public schools need to become better to take their place in the community, and as an intimate partner with the institution of family.
And as a relevant aside, teachers cannot do for us or our students what policy can and should do. Teacher-bashing is the biggest farce going in education–blaming teachers for what only policy can fix. So keep on helping your students–it’s an honorable thing to do, like the horses in Animal Farm–but know what the situation is from a larger view. In other words, know what it is to be a “useful idiot” to those who wouldn’t know “a teaching moment” if it bit them in the . . . ankle.
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Catherine,
IMO, interventions to compensate for parents are much more cost effective then solving adult problems. It would be great to do both, but we’ve been trying for years without moving the needle.
At this point, if a child has a single parent with two jobs, or is being raised by a grandparent, etc., “fixing” the home environment is a huge undertaking, but compensating for it is (relatively) easier.
As to the rest of your post, I don’t believe I raved about anything in my posts, especially not my school or charters in general maybe you read that into me saying something my school was doing, but we need to be talking about ideas without turning everything into a battle.
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I hate putting myself on line like this, but I am pretty sure I have access to a report on a study I first heard about on NPR quite a few years ago, about 10. A massive study – and I may have reported it on this blog before – was on-going with school kids suffering from all sorts of pathologies. In the course of the study, a casino went in – most of the kids in the study were Native American – and all the parents got jobs. The study had to be suspended in the face of disappearing pathologies. Lesson here? Of course not (sarcasm alert). We must continue blaming families, blaming teachers, blaming politicians, etc. if charters can solve the problem, fine. But report what they do honestly and forgo the hype. Too many people in this country think PR = information.
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Choice is not the answer. Not one country with top ranked schools on the international PISA test offers choice like the U.S. is doing.
In fact, when a publicly funded, private sector choice is offered in any of those top scoring countries, and that offer is rare around the world, the private sector schools that get public money must follow the same rules and regulations the public schools do. Those publicly funded private sector schools must teach the same subjects the public schools teach and be transparent in everything they do.
In addition, these top scoring countries have strong teachers’ unions and offer strong, respectable, un-abusive support for teachers.
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John: You say: “IMO, interventions to compensate for parents are much more cost effective then solving adult problems,”
What don’t you understand about “long-term,” “foundations,” and the difference between teacher responsibility and policy responsibility? Did you miss my points entirely, or are you just playing at being obtuse?
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Post-script/correction to my note: :The better the pimp you are.
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So, please tell how you are all dealing with struggling learners in your classrooms?
If you just want to bash those that disagree or have a different feeling about school choice you can.
But how about including some basis for how it affects you personally and the families of the students you teach?
As a professional educator, what would you personally do to HELP these kids close academic gaps so that they would not need to needlessly struggle as well as help them to graduate with the skills to be able to read and write and figure out basic math skills (such as calculating sales tax or hourly rates of pay, etc) which is not happening in most classrooms where you have kids on IEPs for LDs?
What if you had a middle class parent who’s done everything right and yet comes to you begging for help for their child?
What does it look like in your school and your own classroom?
Would you help them and how?
What would your school do to ensure they were not continuing to be left behind?
Please enlighten me.
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Books have been this but for a starter, M,we must work to get rid of CC . NY Learning Standards that were in place prior to CC are far superior.
Be guided by the Constructivists approach, beginning with the students and ending with the students. Provide a happy environment; give them freedom to explore; develop confidence; find something positive to say about their efforts and give them a feeling of success; give them challenges that the students can meet; provide hands on activities; model new concepts; and utilize all senses.
Encourage active learners by connecting new learning to the students’ experience – background. Passive learners just memorize facts as the teacher gives them. Provide for a lot of interaction and discussion.
Use narratives to teach the reading process in lieu of 50% of informational. Love of reading and in turn the love of learning is developed more easily through narratives which children can relate to. Narratives have a problem/challenge to be solved or met which captures and maintains the readers’ attention. Some informational text is important but not 50%. Too often informational text does not stimulate the imagination, creativity, and sustain interests like the narrative. Furthermore, narratives provide human experiences with an ethical component. Good writers help the readers to understand: an experience, themselves, other people, themselves in the world in relation to nature, to God, and to themselves.
It is the narratives that develop the skill of reading. With the narratives, sight vocabulary is constantly being reinforced; rich vocabulary is developed- not just proper nouns; varied sentences and narrative structure are reinforced but above all the children are learning what it means to be human. Narratives also lend themselves to the development of all the higher order thinking skills instead of just a few developed by CC with the expository text.
Contrary to what CC advocates “…students (grades 2- 12)should be given text that they will likely struggle with in order to expand their knowledge. ”
Oh the damage that will be done if teachers adhere to that directive. The text that the teacher gives the students for guided reading in order to develop skills, strategies, and higher order thinking skills must be on their instructional level. Students should not struggle, should not be forced to try and read on a frustration level. Students will regress if they are forced to read on a level that is too difficult for them and worse can cause a disability say nothing about squelching the desire to read.
Confidence is essential to learning. Without confidence students won’t even try for fear of being ridiculed. Develop confidence by starting with easy material and gradually challenge them to more difficult material. At all cost preserve a good self-image; never retain. Do assessing but not testing. And I have just scratched the surface.
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I disagree that the majority of private schools are cherry picking students. Especially parochial schools who many times parents are turning to because historically their mission has been to work with families in their communities who value education and most likely do not have the financial means for a more affluent private college prep school.
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Private schools in your definition are far outnumbered by an increasing number of charters and vouchers schools that use the same label(and some, if not all, are using the name “public” as the shelter for tax dodging purpose.). Trump and Devos are not going to revive parochial schools whatsoever. They are more interested in privatizing an entire body of national education system.
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In 25 years of teaching and another 20 years of consulting with public and parochial schools, I have seen many teachers and administrators, some good, some bad, just like in every profession and business. Yet you, M, have made us all into unfeeling, uncaring, selfish, incompetent monsters. How does that serve you? or kids?
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Personal experiences needs no citations 🙂
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M,
You think that your personal experience makes you an authority on all schools and all teachers. Enough. You are insulting and boring. Same thing, over and over.
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M
Come back when you have something new to say.
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Hello Diane: “M” says that personal experience need no citations. Then you responded by saying: “You think that your personal experience makes you an authority on all schools and all teachers.”
As an (I think relevant) aside, I’ve noticed over the years that many Congresspeople think this way too. If X doesn’t meet with their experience, they are not interested, giving it little or no play in their awareness of policy decisions.
It’s a common problem–from seeing it emerge again and again in my students and particularly in religious ideologues (and cited below as a general attitude).
The underlying assumption is certainly not necessary, but common: “My experience is the measure of all things.” That mindset commonly (but not always) accompanies an anti-intellectual, anti-theoretical frame of mind. “Who needs others’ experience or their theoretical expertise when my experience covers all in universal fashion?” Makes perfect sense–inside the silo.
But as “M” says, “I don’t have to provide a citation for “my experience.” Some truth to that–but it also carries with it a way of ending the questions about true generalizations and universals–questions that can come from a deeper plane in anyone’s spirit and that ask for answers that often lay far beyond my experience. Instead of having otherwise-authentic experience that often can be accounted for in generalizations of some sort, such thinking jumps to “my experience is universal” making a potentially good thinker into a dogmatist.
So to “M” if you are listening, FWIW–you are not alone; and Diane’s work is exceptional and will broaden your thought on the specific educational issues for this site. On the other hand, the citation for the more general/theoretical suggested above comes from the field of philosophy and its cognitional theory:
Lonergan, Bernard J. F. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan 3: Insight. Ed. Frederick E. Crowe
and Robert M. Doran. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.
Piscitelli, Emile J. “The Fundamental Attitudes of the Liberally Educated Person: Foundational Dialectics.”
The Lonergan Workshop 5. (1985): 289-342.
______. Philosophy: A Passion for Wisdom. Frederick MD: PublishAmerica LLLP, 2010.
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It was your personal opinion on this thread that public schools are “repeatedly documented as failing” [12-28-16, 5:23 PM].
“Personal experiences needs no citations” but the above sweeping assertion (if made with a genuine desire for dialogue) requires multiple titles and authors.
If you cannot provide such then you devalue both your own opinions and your own assertions.
Your call.
😎
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“Personal experiences” “repeatedly documented”
Point KrazyTA 🙂
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My barometer of a good school is foundational literacy, numeracy skills appropriate for grade and age level and how they work with families that value EDUCATION.
Not just talking the talk but walking the walk with the neediest of their students, not just those that excel but what they do to help the neediest and struggling students excel to their academic potential versus to their levels of deficit or disability.
Do they go above and beyond to raise these students out of generational illiteracy? Do they work with involved parents to help their children reach their potentials or do they just take the easy route and ignore their struggles?
You all state stats on parental involvement being the driving factor of a students success, but when they come to you begging them to help them get there do you stonewall them or do you help them?
What is the culture of your school and your classrooms? Is it one of inclusion or is it one of building walls versus bridges?
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M,
As pbarrett said in a comment, why do you condemn all teachers and all schools because you had a bad experience? That is an -ism, because you are blinded by hatred
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For every new idea, policy, program, product, technology. or methodology designed to improve teaching and learning, teachers always have the same question:
When do we get the TIME we so desperately need to make it work?
The answer from administrators, consultants, reps, and reformers
is always the same: a shrug of the shoulders and a curl of the lip and
rise of an eyebrow – all suggesting that they just don’t get it.
I what rational world can management or SEDs continue to demand more and more and more – and all without an extra minute of TIME to carry it out? And outsiders wonder why teachers stuck on a treadmill rarely move forward.
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M
In a perfect school, every teacher and every counsellor and every administrator would have all of the TIME necessary to address all of the individual problems and concerns of every stakeholder imaginable. And they would do so with complete professionalism and thoroughness and in a perfectly timey manner – and of course, to the complete satisfaction of every parent and student and taxpayer and citizen.
Now no school is perfect, and the biggest flaw in the system is the lack of sufficient TIME to do everything we want to do to help children and parents have the most meaningful experience possible. However, the logistics and complexity of running a school force us to leave too many children behind. Until the political will ($) is summoned, nothing close to that perfect school can be offered. This explanation cannot make you feel any better but at least it is an honest one.
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Since it’s not quite 2017, I’ll throw in one more response: when I entered high school teaching I was 45 years old, kids grown, etc. I worked evenings and week-ends b/c I could and b/c I was entranced with the immense challenge of getting teenagers in our culture to actually function in a second language. I did that for 25 years and loved it but was struck from the first by the dearth of time, and I don’t know how my colleagues with kids at home and a second job to supplement the meager salary managed. The reformers and complainers ignore this and do not care about public school teachers. They are not our opponents, they are our enemies.
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Reformers and complainers and the witch (teacher) hunters and the politicians who demand “accountability” are simply clueless. Their ignorance is our undoing.
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Rage Against TheTetsocracy.
You stated, “However, the logistics and complexity of running a school force us to leave too many children behind.”
Ouch! No! No! No! We must fight for what is right- get rid of the CC which was designed by business people -not expert educators or early childhood experts. CC’s standards are hurting too many students.
No school system should leave children behind! That only destroys their self-image! They will only regress with a poor self-image. You have to come up with a better means of meeting the needs of ALL children. I maintain that the schools must get off the race track which CC put the schools on and move at a slower pace. Slow up! Don’t expect the at risk students (slow students as you may call them) to keep up the pace of the gifted. What does it profit to race ahead? Is that going to make children better human beings? Information we need is at our fingertips via the Internet. Students need to learn how to think and problem solve. Students need to learn how to communicate and get along with others.
For students who have a problem keeping up with the fast pace in math, give them extra support. After the teacher presents a new concept, pair off the slow student with a student who does well in math. Some students need more time to think; they need to work with manipulatives – illustrating a math concept. Don’t waste a student’s time memorizing something he/she doesn’t understand. There needs to be a support team to give extra help to the floundering individuals. Gifted students should have their needs met in another way. In the past in some areas, gifted students went to a center once a week to be challenged.
The same goes for those students who are not functioning on grade level in literacy. Have a gifted program available where some students go to another classroom for reading– modified Joplin Program. There has to be a support team to help them. Evaluate your reading program. Get rid of the program if is anchored in Behaviorism. Get rid of those terrible Pearson reading books. Purchase books written and illustrated by our award winning authors and illustrators. If you are adhering to the Behaviorist approach of CC, well for sure you are going to have students that are going to fall behind.
No child should struggle; no child should be forced to try and cope with reading material that is on a frustration level. They will only regress and “shut down”. And you will never capture their interest with contrived stories which give practice in a specific phonetic element. They are a waste of time and only kill real interest. Phonics instruction should never dominate reading instruction. At least half the time devoted to reading should be spent reading connected text -stories, poems, plays, trade books etc. No more than 25% of the time should be spent on phonics instruction. Children should read some text daily, preferably a complete story, with the teacher guiding their thinking. They should illustrate, dramatize, and respond in writing to their stories.
We need to get back to guided reading in groups where teachers can guide students in higher order thinking skills. At-Risk students are entitled to 30-40 min. of small group instruction on their instructional level by classroom teacher and again with the reading specialist each day. Forget about the worksheets- poor use of precious time Forget about memorizing lists of words. Words have no meaning out of context. Forget about the phonics based program.
No program is going to bring all children – children with a true learning disability, those with emotional and physical problems- on par with the students who were ahead before they began for obvious reasons. However, educators must create an environment that is based upon every child’s instructional level, where children feel safe enough to learn with all the mistakes that are part of learning, where they can achieve and feel good about themselves. Schools should not infringe on music, art, gym, or play time so vital to developing all aspects of a student.
School administrators and faculty should do some creative thinking; bring in experts anchored in Constructivism to guide them in understanding what real learning is about.
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School choice should be allowed when parent feel that what is offered by public schools is inadequate, unsafe or contrary to their teachings, And yes, I read both of Diane’s books ( i bought them after seeing her on Democracy Now, after the announcement of DeVos as Ed/sec) I found them wanting in perspective unless you come from the progressive side of politics and in fact had little to offer to middle America and nothing to families of faith, lip-service in effect. The only thing that I gleaned from the books, that I agree with, was something that I observed when I was in high school. Larger schools had more to offer, my high school was a total of less then 200 students so our classes were smaller but more limited in scope.(This is just an observation and not meant to support forced busing, schools should remain local and responsive to the parents and the region).
I don’t blame teachers for the current state of public schools. They are on the front lines and the real problem is the changes in our society along with the regulations and red tape that is so prevalent in modern times. Students aren’t prepared/supported in the home along with discipline issues, and politicians/administrations require more paperwork. Teachers are a mixture of good and bad just like regular people and subject to the limitations we were born with. Society has become so diverse that I don’t see public schools as being able to cope irregardless of how much money was transferred to them. Do we kill public schools because they can’t cope? No, but it’s hard to get excited about expanding them
Be it charters or vouchers, parochial public or home schooled, the parents and the students should be served and treated fairly. ( and I use that term loosely)
Peace and good health to you and yours in 2017
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Do you think those publicly funded, private sector, autocratic, often fraudulent and inferior, cherry picking, often child abusive, lying and misleading, corporate charter schools should be allowed to be secretive and operate outside the same regulations that govern traditional public schools?
One is for profit opaque/secretive, and the other transparent and non profit.
One is autocratic and the other is community based and democratic.
In the few countries that do offer publicly funded school choice, the private sector schools must operate under the same regulations and guidance that the public schools must follow. There is no double standard.
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Public education is a public good, paid for by EVERYBODY, and available to anyone who CHOOSES to send their children there. We fund public schools as a public good with public funds. IT IS NOT A CONSUMER GOOD.
I know you get it, Lloyd. My almost tirade is for Jenkins.
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That’s quite a chip you carry there… Several of those charges apply to local public schools, districts and teachers I might add and ‘non-profit’ doesn’t imply sainthood. I would go as far to suggest that it really doesn’t apply to public schools. The term public institution sure, but non-profit, not…
I’m all for transparency, but mostly to the parents. No I don’t think that the “for-profit” (as portrayed in Diane books) is a good model but there should be some mechanism by which alternatives to the public schools can survive and hopefully grow, there is a great desire for better in our country.
Some schools don’t want the strings attached to Fed/State funds and so it would appear that they are on their own, but a voucher should allow some flexibility to families that want something deeper then what the public sector can offer. Vouchers would only represent a modest portion of the cost of instruction/tuition, leaving families to cover the rest. It wouldn’t be done on a whim.
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You ignored many of the facts in my comment.
For instance, the fact that the countries in the world with the best education systems don’t offer choice/vouchers; teachers are respected and treated like professionals and teachers have strong teachers’ unions. These countries do not use tests to rank teachers/schools and then fire teachers or close schools based on test scores that show nothing, mean nothing.
What these countries do is support their teachers and trust them not knock them down and kick them.
The nations report card, the NAEP test clearly shows that America’s public schools never got worse but only got better until the frauds behind the privatization movement started out with NCLB, then RTTT, then the Common Core Crap that tests, ranks and punishes teachers and public schools while ignoring the autocratic, opaque/secretive corporate charters that are often the same or worse.
If there was ever a golden age for public education it was before NAEP and the rest of the garbage coming out of corrupt libertarian, neo-liberal, neocon land.
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt_2012/
Your response is usually a sign of a paid minion and/or a troll.
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Lloyd, the apologists for the Global Ed Reform Movement know these facts very well. They want to do to everything in the society just what you said: privatize, to destroy the public place and replace it with the market place. They are completely insincere and manipulative. They excuse their immoral behavior b/c they feel it is in the pursuit of a higher goal: in some cases, religious domination, in others, economic, in others, class, in others, nationalist. So for them it is OK to lie, omit, ignore, distort, and fudge b/c it’s all in the name of a higher goal. Arguing with them just exhausts us when we should be fighting FOR our values, not fighting against them. Laying out facts like Diane and others of you do is fine for the uncommitted people, but the GERM folks are committed to privatization…… of everything.
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It’s not a chip. It is called anger because of the lies, misinformation, manipulation, and fraud that is clearly being used to destroy the public sector in the U.S.
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No, that’s clearly a chip… Lies, misinformation and fraud are not the sole property of the angry white guys that “stole” democracy, it is in fact the currency of the day especially in politics and I wish it wasn’t so in the schools either but it has been that way for decades. there is plenty enough blame to go around.
How does the rush to support “all children” sudden dry up when somebody else gets the control, or they have a belief that we don’t value? Rather then assume that admin/politicians know what is best for my child (g-kids now) why doesn’t the parent get the final say? I can tell you honestly, mine, and my children’s public schooling wasn’t all that bad but I was an attentive student and an active father.
I’m just a lay person and not a troll but i’m surprised that you didn’t see that I did respond to your charges by pointing out that public schools suffer from much the same type problems and ” Best” is a highly subjective term. In case you missed it the first time I did read Diane’s books, and I don’t lay all the blame at the teachers doorstep, they are just a mix of society after all.
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R Jenkins: I don’t know what Lloyd is going to say, but yours one of the most specious arguments I’ve seen in a long time. I won’t take it line by line, but only one of your points holds the same vacuous meaning as the rest of your post. that is, you ask: “How does the rush to support ‘all children’ sudden dry up when somebody else gets the control, or they have a belief that we don’t value?”
The first part of that sentence is about WHO supports children, instead of WHAT those people or groups are doing to support or to marginalize if not eliminate, many of those children and their access to a good education. I suspect you are smart enough to know that the “rush” to support children doesn’t dry up (at least on our side) merely because of WHO is in charge. Rather, WHAT reformers are up to neither supports ALL children, nor does it support the democratic principles that would sustain that support–as I and others here have argued again and again.
Then the second part of your sentence not only uses the same WHO/WHAT distortion as above, but adds to it a relativism of beliefs and values. It’s just “reformers'” beliefs and values against those who support public education (and more comprehensively the commonweal)–as if there were no difference of quality on principle. That works both ways, however–so I don’t even think YOU believe that there is no qualitative difference.
But to take you at you word, Diane’s movement in this blog (as I understand it), at the very least, is to provide a place where the detailed and nuanced evidence (the WHY) for anyone reading it to come to their own conclusions about WHY public education is so important to democracy (ALL of us), and WHY the neo-privatization and market-ization of education is no choice for parents (what a con-job THAT is) but is aimed at exclusiveness and is so destructive of that democracy.
We don’t need specious arguments and logical fallacies to make our case–those are the property of trolls whose Queen is Kelly Ann Conway.
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What you said (and I couldn’t possibly articulate).
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” Vouchers would only represent a modest portion of the cost of instruction/tuition, leaving families to cover the rest. It wouldn’t be done on a whim.”
Which means that the only ones who could afford it are those who could probably come up with the cash on their own. A modest portion of the cost would be of no use to the impoverished who are most likely to need alternatives. Much better to use the resources to beef up the public schools in those under-resourced communities. Remember, a sizeable majority of people like THEIR public schools. They have just been convinced that everyone else’s stink.
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CBK,,, once again I’m just an average person here, middle America. I support the idea of the institution but the whole start of this post was why can’t the promoters of “public school ONLY” admit there are real problems with the system?
Yes there is indeed a move to defund public schools .Would you like the term “redistribute public funds” better? People, real people, are unhappy over the offerings of public schools and want more. they don’t get it and so they are willing to tear down the old brick and mortar in hopes that they can rebuild something more suitable later.
Trying to convince mom and dad that they should be happy with what public schools have to offer isn’t working.
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R Jenkins,
Mom and pop haven’t sought destruction of public education. Billionaires have. Gates is not my pop.
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To R Jenkins who responded to my note. I’m going to respond with the assumption that you are genuine in your concerns and in your argument–such as it is. However, I’m also looking at a “desk” full of “stuff” than needs to be done. I will respond later, however.
But let me say this now: I can see you either (a) haven’t read the very clear responses to all of the points in your post that have been posted here (at least) over the past month or so; OR you don’t agree–but, if you don’t agree with those narratives and arguments, I see nothing in your current posts to respond to THOSE arguments. Again, they read as if you aren’t aware of the substance of those arguments.
That’s one of the reasons “troll” keeps coming up–for a troll, such repetitive arguments are really just an empty din by mean-spirited people (paid or not) bent on destruction of an important debate specifically meant to exhaust those who are sincere and who have skin in the game, not to mention who are well-informed about the health of education in our democracy. They cannot do that an be a patriot at the same time.
Regardless, I’ll respond later, however, to your note as will others here, I hope.
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R Jenkins writes: (1) “People, real people, are unhappy over the offerings of public schools and want more. they don’t get it and so they are willing to tear down the old brick and mortar in hopes that they can rebuild something more suitable later.” And, (2) “Equal access and support sure, but let families have the choice, not politicians and admins.”
So for (1), let’s actually reform public schools. I don’t know anyone here or elsewhere who doesn’t understand that real problems need real solutions. However, that leads us to (2): “politicians and administrators” which is a “bashing” cover for schools that remain connected with the political ground that informs the entire culture–a constitutional democracy. Take that away and you have, as Diane says, Gates, Devos, and the Koch brothers. Corporate heads are about making money and very little, if any, about educating children in a democracy.
Also, they have a GREAT STAKE in getting rid of public schools–they see them as an unequal competitor. So even the idea of “choice” is a scam. Choice becomes “which corporate entity?” Or worse, “which ideological silo?” The irony is that they ARE unequal–precisely because “public” is about only education and not about making money for stock holders or seeing students as more or less money drains.
But all this has been said here before, and more. There’s something to “get” here that has long-term implications. Stick around and maybe you’ll get it.
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Yep, paper work that was the bulk of my week too, next week back to the real work. And thank you for a fair hearing even though I may not be able to communicate my thoughts clearly, only CC here no four year school.
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Without options to public schools I afraid we’ll continue down the same road that led us to the current mess that we have in Washington, gridlock or a bloodbath. It is an important issue (the future and very lives of our children) and if you didn’t notice the opposition has just as many books, blogs and charts, probably as accurate and certainly as valid (after all it;s their children too)
They have as much heart as you and it’s not all about the money, although that does provide leverage. Are your hands and hearts pure over the money/power issue?
So yes, teach the illiterate and close the gap but what about the all children that maybe don’t belong in public school? Saying that they are on their own isn’t right either. Where are we going to find true equity and stop pounding square pegs into round holes to make us “feel” better.
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R Jenkins,
If I am unhappy with police and fire services, should I get public money to pay for private services? If I don’t like the community pool, paid for by public funds, because it is crowded and attracts the “wrong” people, should the public pay to build a private pool for me?
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There are options for swimming at other locations such as the Y or other rec areas or gyms, etc.
Many people wish they had alternatives to their Police Departments as they feel the current one don’t represent their interests (and that’s been in the news quite a lot about such needed reforms as well); plus most people that have paid fire services usually have no complaints (I’ve never heard anyone complain about their firemen unless it’s regarding consolidation of fire departments but again not about the individual fire men.
Why is only one side able to speak up and be heard on this site?
If you want real discussion and debate and open dialogue you have to give others the opportunity to voice a dissenting opinion.
How about LISTENING to the unhappiness that real people have regarding the current models?
It might not be what you WANT to hear, but maybe that is the problem- Those that like he status quo rather than the unknown and possibility of change.
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M,
This site is not public. No one pays for it but me. I read what I want and I write what I want. The site exists to offer a place for supporters of public education to learn and exchange ideas. It exists because billionaires have many other sites to attack teachers and public schools. This is one of the few sites where public schools are a priority. That’s why I don’t welcome your attacks on ALL teachers and ALL public schools because of your own personal experience. I suggest you go to Education Post or the 74.
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Dr Ravitch/Diane, Putting posts in moderation and not posting them is just a way to stifle dissenting opinions and is equivalent to censorship…. But it’s your blog and you can do whatever you want… Still there’s no doubt that it is indeed the equivalent of censorship and no different than what occurred under McCarthyism …. and is also what you all complain about from the other side of the aisle… Just saying… 😉
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M,
You are in moderation because you use your alleged personal situation to attack all teachers and all public schools. Your shrill tone is offensive. I will block you completely if you keep up the teacher-bashing. You don’t come to a blog that supports dedicated, undervalued professionals to whine about how all teachers are bad because your child didn’t get the services you think he needed. You are posting in the wrong place. Either write with civility or go away. I am not under any obligation to post your vicious comments.
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Jenkins,
Why will the preservation of public schools lead to either “gridlock or a bloodbath” in Washington? Schools belong to local communities and states, not the federal government.
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Ha, ha,ha, ha! I know there are public school teachers and/or administrators who enjoy their little fiefdoms, but I can’t say I know anyone with half a brain that would choose education/teaching in the public school system as the best way to make money or gain power. As to your square peg problem, there will always be people who struggle (or don’t) to fit the public school “mold.” I would argue that we were moving toward finding ways to meet the needs of outlier kids when we were overtaken by the standardization craze. There really is no need to create a dual, parasitic system. As a former special ed teacher, I am very aware of kids who do not fit; It was not always easy to get my students the support they needed. All the evidence is that charters in general may be even less flexible than public schools generally have been. Why not spend as much energy creating public programs rather then funding a private system that is frequently responsive only to those who stand to profit from them? Hey if money were no object, I might endorse charters, but public schools have only been losing funding and cannot afford the further drain from charters.
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“or gain power”
I always told those who attacked teachers, “Remember, I have your children.”
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