Mercedes Schneider has listened to Betsy DeVos’s complaints about the public schools, the most common of which is that it is time to change. Big change. Real change.
DeVos recently complained that students were sitting around in desks, watching the teacher, and that is so old-timey. She wants something new, really new.
Of course, the classes in the religious schools she loves are also sitting at desks watching the teacher, but let’s put that aside.
Mercedes says she doesn’t mind the desks all that much.
She writes:
As DeVos continues, one senses that she believes desks in rows preclude education being “organized around the needs of students.” Of course, if rows of desks were the result of a pervasive voucher program, then they would be parent-empowered rows of desks, and that would surely vindicate that desk configuration.
I was in my desks-in-rows classroom today, even though it is a Saturday, because I needed to input grades in my computer in order to begin next week without being swamped. Last weekend, much of this past week, and some of this weekend I have spent and will spend time grading essays.
I teach English. Time-consuming essay grading is part of my responsibility to my students, just as it was 100 years ago. (I’m fairly certain that the computerized grading component emerged at least a decade or two later.)
I also spent hours meeting with each student individually to discuss each student’s grade on that essay assignment and to strategize improvements for the next essay, which will be even longer and more complex. I’m not sure if such consultation happened 100 years ago. I do know that my father (born 99 years ago) and my aunt (born 108 years ago) finished school at the eighth grade, which was common in the 1920s-1930s in New Orleans.
Indeed, the amount of time and effort it takes for me to grade a set of essays for my 141 high school seniors does have me siding with DeVos to rethink schools.
But now she is thinking that DeVos is on to something big with that desk issue.
Schneider wants a Harkness table in her classroom. She thinks there should be a Harness table in every high school classroom.
What is a Harkness table?
That is a table where a teacher sits with 12 students and discusses issues. This innovation began at the exclusive Exeter Academy, where Chester Finn Jr. was a student.
Schneider recalls a letter she wrote Finn in 2013:
Yes, Betsy, I would willingly surrender my 28 student desks for one Harkness table.
A wonderful byproduct of this desk-surrendering plan would be the reduced class size that would, in turn, cut my essay-grading burden by more than half.
We are on our way to solving multiple problems.
In my 2013 post, I called my plan the Exeter Plan, named for Finn’s multi-generational, exclusive private school alma mater, Phillips Exeter Academy, which started using the Harkness method in 1930.
(DeVos would surely forgive the multi-generational aspect of Finn attendance at a school with the same seating configuration across those generations since the school is a private school, which she prefers above all.)
Still, there are some complications, not the least of which is what would become of the students who don’t secure a seat at the table. That’s one of those old-fashioned hang-ups of traditional public schools: They have an obligation to educate all students– the public. They’ve been doing so for generations, just as private schools have been operating via selective admissions for generations.
So what if it is expensive? It would be a very productive change! Why should we teach 28 (or 35 or more) students in old-fashioned desks when it is so much more innovative to teach 12 students at one table?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Why use a harkness table when you can use a harness table like the one Nurse Ratched used on Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when he was undergoing electroshock and lobotomy?
Not incidentally, I bet schools could pick up harness tables from now shuttered mental hospitals for next to nothing.
Or better yet, just move their operations, since the tables are probably still arranged in nice neat rows in those places.
I just got home and read to bottom. But I have to comment back up here. The table Nurse Ratched used…. Touché!
Desks? Desks! Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy Charter Schools have desks in rows. Very regimented desks at that.
Try having 38 kids at a harkness table. My first year, 38 kids. I had 4 reading groups, about 8 or 7 children per group. The other children, would have to be assigned work as I met with each reading group. Needless to say, I had a mountain of papers to grade and sift through by the end of the week.
In other words, some high school teachers see the value in setting up a class the way many elementary teachers teachers have set up their classrooms in order to promote interaction. Elementary teachers have known this for years as they often have students working together on collaborative projects.
When I taught ESL in high school, I got into trouble for rearranging the seating in the classroom that I shared with a math teacher, a former nun who was elderly. I set up the desks in two rows facing two rows on the other side of the room with a space in the middle where I often stood in order to promote language, an essential for beginning language learners. Under this design, students could look at each other when they conversed in a natural way. In the math teacher’s view, it encouraged “bad behavior.” I compromised by having the students turn their desks back to rows facing the front when the math teacher would hold her class after mine. It was a bit disruptive, but it helped to keep the peace.
Betsy DeVos doesn’t care about Mercede’s classroom.
It would have to be a classroom in a Mandarin immersion- STEM focused- personalized learning academy for Betsy DeVos to care.
They have absolutely no interest in ordinary public schools in ed reform. Tell Mercedes she’s gonna have to jazz that school up a little if she wants their attention. Brand it better.
If Mercedes hung “charter” on the school sign, Betsy would be there in a heartbeat.
But of course, Betsy would then just use that school as an example to make her case that charters are better than public schools.
Branding is everything, doncha know?
Put the school on a barge.
Better yet, get rid of the school completely, send the kids out to get minimum wage jobs and call it “experiential learning”
BONUS- much cheaper! No more expensive, meddlesome “teachers” to worry about. We can still test them periodically- online, of course.
Yeah, I suspect the “desk in rows” criticism is completely unfelt. It looked like an effective bludgeon, so she picked it up.
Wait a minute. Teachers, sitting down? I thought students couldn’t learn unless the teach was standing or walking around the room. This ed reform is confusing. lol.
“The Harkness Table”
From Harkness to Oval
Progression is clear
The method is novel
And outcome is tier
My son’s going to his first school dance this weekend.
I told him to stop being so 19th century – I went to high school dances a hundred years ago- and focus on his career in a “job that hasn’t been invented yet” but he ignored me.
Like!
For me this is so VERY ignorant and yes stupid.
In our school district when we had a VERY enlightened superintendent we thought – how ignorant of us – that the best way to improve education was to work with teachers to help them become better teachers, bottom up philosophy. As administrators our job was to do exactly that, to work with them with the best ideas available to us at the time. Teachers were urged to tape their classes, then to listen to themselves. THEY were smart and could objectively view and learn from their failings. We tried to build on their successes, build on their individual strengths and where possible help them overcome any weaknesses. Usually when they taped their classes and later, even better, video taped themselves many things became obvious to them. They did not need for us to point out weaknesses or ways to improve the quality of their teaching. We Worked together to build a great school system. We had a educational library of the latest in education which interestingly was used even by many students in our local colleges. Our job was to encourage them. Yes we got rid of poor teachers but that was secondary, after all else failed. I did. It was something that I found extremely distasteful. it was not easy but despite what politicians said, it could be done.
NOW it is all top down. :”WE”, the politicians who mostly have never taught a day in our lives intrude. Once they are elected, school boards to the president suddenly become experts.
In so many ways, especially with the Trump administration; they do not listen to experts who have devoted their lives in study. Why do that? They already know what is best.
Not just in education, in schools but in diplomacy ad nauseum.
I taught English, and yes, grading essays devours a lot of time. In one day, five or six periods/classes of students writing one essay each can generate more than 40 hours of work for a teacher outside of teaching hours.
If your students write an essay on Monday, count on grading those essays for the rest of that week and into the following weekend while all the work your students do Tuesday through Friday piles up waiting for the essays to get graded. That’s why I looked forward to longer holidays during the school year. Those holidays helped me catch up with my correcting. While the schools were closed and the students were off, I was correcting student work a dining table piled high with student work.
My average class load was 34 and up. Seldom less than 34. But even with 34 individual desks in rows, it was easy to arrange those desks into groups of four or five for my students to work together cooperatively where I became a monitor and they created projects and learned in small groups.
I even organized my students into read-around groups so they could read the essays another class wrote and comment on them in positive ways to help improve the essays. By the time I was correcting student essays, they had been edited and revised by other students and what I ended up with was a much improved, easier to grade essay.
There are times when desks in rows works best and then times when grouping students together works best.
My first class started soon after 8 AM. I often arrived soon after 6 AM to get the classroom ready for the student group work – moving desks, etc. That was the cooperative work that followed teacher-led lessons where the desks were in rows.
One led to the other and technology of any kind was only used when I, the teacher, decided it would enhance the lesson.
Sometimes students must work individually and sometimes they work together in groups. Every lesson requires different strategies to opt9ijkmze the learning for those students that are engaged.
Diane the giveaway point is that Devos doesn’t want to live in the house and improve it. She rather wants to buy the house and rent it back to those who, by her long-term machinations, will have NO CHOICE but to live in it, or one like it, the way she wants them to. Here arrogance knows no bounds. And speaking of arrogance:
I received an unsolicited e-mail from “Dreambox Learning” to download a new paper about teacher PD. Apparently, the Gates Foundation now has the mailing list of all EdWeek subscribers.
I haven’t downloaded the paper yet but will, just to see where they are going with this (as If I didn’t know). Below is the brief narrative in the e-mail. CBK
ALL QUOTED BELOW:
Explore the revolutionary model of professional development that empowers teachers.
Despite its critical importance to student achievement, you know there are significant challenges to successfully implementing and scaling in-service professional learning that improves K-8 teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching. In a recent study backed by a research grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, an innovative PD prototype environment was tested. END QUOTED MATERIAL
They make me sick.
If you download anything that is directly or indirectly linked to the top-down corporate reformers of public education, I suggest you cleanse your digital device/s as soon as you have done it.
The odds are high that they will plant cookies or other virus software on your system to monitor your activity and that info will flow into a fact-gathering site that sells that information to businesses, political parties, etc.
I use three, free programs to cleanse my desktop more than once a month.
Malware bytes FREE
The FREE version of SuperAntiSpyware
CCleaner FREE
These three programs were recommended and installed by the computer geeks I hired to clean up my system and save my files after my desktop was taken over by ransomware earlier this year or was that late last year – I can’t remember?
The geeks said I didn’t need to buy the costly versions of these three. That using all three together would do the job. #2 is the slowest one.
Once you visit, they have your IP address and if they have the money of a Gates, they can certainly find out to whom it belongs. From there it’s just a matter of deciding whom they want to pass that information to.
And of course, the government can readily find out your IP address even if you don’t visit their sites.
I’ve read before that there is a way to change our IP addresses on a regular basis.
How to change your IP address:
http://www.iprivacytools.com/change-ip-address/
But be warned, if you do this, you will have to input your passwords for every site you belong to when you want to visit any of those sites, because those sites know you by your IP address so it becomes an automatic process making it easy to log on to your Facebook or Twitter page, for instance, without having to type in a password every time.
Lloyd,
Many people post here with fake ip addresses
I wish everyone would use their own name but I understand why some can’t, for fear of losing their jobs
But no reason to hide your ip
Lloyd Lofthouse Good grief . . . that’s all I can say.
Yes, “Good Grief” … this is the world we live in today brought to us by oligarchs like Bill Gates.
Lloyd Lofthouse Yes–we just now started paying BY THE MONTH, for Word software, where we used to buy it once and then get upgrades as time went on. What we can draw from that is the METHOD of bait-and-switch that’s going on in education as we speak. The carrot always comes first, and the propaganda is commonly front-loaded with reason-ability and truth. But often with selected omissions and ONLY front-loaded.
That’s one reason why linking to Gates Foundation or other reformer sites is a bad idea because they can associate the link with your IP and if you said anything they do not like, they can retaliate
That assumes you post the link right after visiting, which allows them to compare the time the link was posted to the time of visit to their site.
If you wait some time before posting the link, chances are they probably won’t be able to narrow it down
And actually, if you use a pc with Windows that is configured for updates and patches, Gates already has access to your computer.
That,’s a new one to me.
But I don’t visit Deformer sites anyway, so it’s moot.😁
I work hard not to visit them.
Lloyd
I guess my question would be who controls that site?
Whoever does has a record of the IP address chain.
Or at least CAN have a record.
SomeDAM poet Doesn’t matter. These are positivist salespeople. If they have something someone will pay for, they’ll sell it.
DeVoodoo is such a DITZ.
I teach a multiage K-2 class (which is part of a K-6 vertical team) in a diverse in every way public title 1 elementary school which has 6 tables that we sometimes use. Students are doers, there is not much watching of the teacher. We have deep, often student led, conversations about big ideas multiple times a day. If you were to glance around the room during our 90 minute state mandated uninterrupted literacy block you would find a couple of students working on research projects (which every student presents/teaches to the whole class), a few making books, some reading books that they chose to read, some doing readers’ theater, some working on learning letter sounds, a more experienced student leading a group in a book club, one or two working on writing a song (which we put a guitar part to and write on chart paper for the whole class to learn to sing together), and many other similar activities. I am a facilitator and supporter of all of this. I work with individuals, small groups that I put together and small groups that are brought together by common interest, and the whole class. This is nothing like my own “old-timey” 1980s educational experience. I doubt it is what Secretary DeVos has in mind when she thinks of school. Can she think of school? What images fill her imagination when she pictures school? As a teacher working with kids every day and having students for 3 years (as well as an ongoing connection with them until 6th grade), I hope to see engaged students who are learning that learning is theirs.