A highly experienced, very successful high school English teacher clung to her favorite literature textbooks.she preferred them to the digital textbooks adopted by the district. One day recently, she arrived in her class to discover that all her textbooks were gone. Her defiance was unacceptable to the state, the district and the principal. The state wants all children using digital material. It is de-emphasizing fiction and literature, replacing them with “informational text.” In short, the Common Core strikes again.
Audrey Silverman arrived at Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High last week ready to finish “The Necklace,” the English class staple short story about the deceptiveness of appearances and the dangers of martyrdom with her gifted, honors ninth-grade students.
But when the literature teacher entered her classroom Thursday morning, 50 textbooks, including the teacher’s edition with years of annotations Silverman said she personally purchased, were missing from the baskets beneath the students’ desks. A student told Silverman she saw the books carted away the prior evening.
“They’re gone,” said Silverman. “Nobody knows where they are.
What happened next has culminated into a tussle between teacher autonomy and embracing new, digital curriculum. Silverman filed a pre-grievance with the teachers’ union against her principal, Allison Harley, for breached academic freedom. Harley, Silverman says, launched an internal investigation with Miami-Dade County Public Schools against her for improper use of email.
Silverman, a 30-year veteran teacher whose scores deem her one of the best teachers in the state, has been using a textbook called “McDougal-Littell Literature” for a decade, although students were using an edition from four years ago. It’s got poems, essays, short stories, Edgar Allan Poe and Shakespeare — a curriculum she says challenges and rivets her students.
But the Florida Department of Education phased out that textbook five years ago and introduced new titles that districts could use. A committee of teachers picked “Collections“ by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a digital textbook that aligns with new Florida standardized tests that heavily emphasize nonfiction and informational texts.
That digital book was adopted by the district in 2015 while rolling out a tablet-based program for high school freshmen, who could bring their own device or check one out from the school.
“It makes the learning a lot more interactive,” than using just a static book, said Lisette Alves, the assistant superintendent over academics.
Silverman had been quietly hanging on to her hardcover books until last week, when a group of district officials stopped by her classroom. District spokeswoman Jackie Calzadilla said an instructional review of all subjects took place at Krop on Sept. 26 and determined that the material Silverman was using “was not aligned with the Florida Standard” and was outdated.
The next morning, the books were gone. Not in the closed cabinets where she kept the spares, not under desks, not in her own desk.
“I felt that this may happen one day,” Silverman said.
Alves and Sylvia Diaz, assistant superintendent over innovation and school choice, say the district does not make the call to remove books. That decision was made by the principal.
“We do occasionally hear about a teacher using older materials,” Diaz said. “We advise the principal.”
“If we see it as we’re doing reviews, then we advise the principal to make sure they’re using [the adopted books],” Alves said.
Harley, the principal at Krop, would not comment and referred a reporter’s questions to the district. The district said Harley repeatedly asked Silverman to use the approved material and she refused.
Spokeswoman Daisy Gonzalez-Diego said books were removed from Silverman’s class two summers ago, “but the teacher retrieved them and brought them back into the classroom.”
“So, they had to be removed again,” Gonzalez-Diego wrote in an email.
Silverman said this incident has been the first and only time books have been removed from her classroom. She said she’s kept these books in her cabinet for three years.
“That is an outright lie,” she said.
The district also said all other language arts teachers at Krop were using the approved material.
Ceresta Smith, a 10th-grade intensive reading teacher who returned to Krop after a decade at John A. Ferguson Senior High, said she doesn’t use any of the approved material. She uses a collection of materials she’s put together over her 30-year teaching career.
“I said to the principal when I … came back to Krop, I said, ‘Don’t expect me to follow the pacing guide. I’m a veteran and I’m a professional and I know what I’m doing.’ ”
Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article219197755.html#storylink=cpy
The story goes on with more horrifying detail.
Celesta Smith, be it noted, is a National Board Certified Teacher, a founder of United Opt Out, and a BAT. Nobody dares to tell her what to teach.
No one should tell Audrey Silverman what to teach. She is a professional.
LEAVE HER ALONE.
Ms. Silverman, google the literary selections and forget about the textbook.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If they took Silverman’s copy, purchased by her, that’s theft.
We had a cuckoo principle for a time at one of our middle schools. He spent Saturdays at school, scouring through teachers’ closets and desks and confiscating their property. If I remember correctly, it was an assault on a teacher that got him fired.
I once had a principal who was a neatness freak and who also had a Napoleon complex. He would dump the pupils’ desks which were messy or stuffed to overflowing, while we were at lunch and without informing the teachers. So we would return from lunch to find this mess in the classroom with five or more dumped desks. The kids were upset, I was fuming because I would have to calm the kids down and explain to them what happened and why. The principal was later transferred to another school, years later, because of possible nepotism allegations. It did not occur to the principal to first meet with the class and explain to the kids what would happen if they did not straighten out their desks. He would engage in unannounced shock and awe attacks on the classrooms.
The Common Core says students should read nonfiction/fiction at the percentages of 70% to 30% (I have no idea how they devised that proportion). It also states that this proportion covers all four years of high school in all subjects. That is because there is supposed to be reading and writing across the curriculum, and it is assumed that the other disciplines will assign their own “expository reading,” as it is called these days. Clearly, the educrats have not read the Common Core themselves, and fiction is being pulled out of English classrooms everywhere. I am not a huge fan of CC: the emphasis on online testing is ridiculous, for one thing. But reading and writing across the curriculum was appealing to me, a now-retired English teacher. It didn’t happen at my school.
In addition to not understanding the Common Core, the bureaucrats have not read the research that shows that students retain more from print text than they do from online materials.
I hope Silverman’s union supports her. All mine ever said was, “The union does not determine curriculum.” Grrr.
Maybe they’re afraid that fiction books will give the students radical ideas. Animal Farm, 1984, Brave New World, even Catcher in the Rye might cause questioning.
I hope one of the nonfiction is Thomas Paine’s Common Sense – a pamphlet which stirred the colonists to rise up for the American Revolution.
In Math class, 100% ‘informational’ non-fiction (I guess, based upon your definition of ‘fiction’). In Biology, 100% non-fiction, same in Chemistry, Earth Science, History, Social Studies.
Therefore, it seems the English class could have nothing but fiction being read by the students and still not push the school’s curriculum above the 30% limit.
I don’t know how much reading they do in the STEM area, but Flatland by Edwin Abbott is a fictional Math story which could be included in the curriculum. There’s also a lot of science fiction which would lead to interesting discussions from Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island to The Martian or Artemis by Andy Weir.
I was introduced to and read every one of the works you cite in high school and early college. Couldn’t imagine having a well-rounded education without them. That knowledge and experience makes stories like this one even more tragic to read.
“The Common Core says students should read nonfiction/fiction at the percentages of 70% to 30%” – could you point to the specific requirement? This page, for example: http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/introduction/key-design-consideration/ mentions Distribution of Literary and Informational Passages by Grade in the 2009 NAEP Reading Framework, which is indeed 30/70.
ThecNAEP reading framework was written as instructions to test developers, not teachers.
Yes, the CCSS lays out specific percentages of fiction vs informational text, based on instructions to test developers.
Google and you can find it. I can’t do research for you.
Teaching of literature has declined significantly since adoption of CC.
Diane, despite that this is your blog, not every question is addressed to you. I asked Cindy Claymore Watter, who posted these numbers.
The article “The Common Core’s 70 percent nonfiction standards and the end of reading?” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2012/12/07/the-common-cores-70-percent-nonfiction-standards-and-the-end-of-reading/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.7f393d84e9e4) that I googled, links two sources when claiming about 30/70 share, and neither of the linked document contain a requirement by Common Core to have as much as 70% of non-fiction text: http://www.corestandards.org/assets/Appendix_B.pdf and http://www.corestandards.org/assets/CCSSI_ELA%20Standards.pdf
If someone lacks reading comprehension and comes up with fake “information”, well, this is exactly what Common Core has identified as a problem. As I have already supported earlier, 80% of high school graduates are functionally illiterate.
The CCSS ELA standards say:
“Part of the motivation behind the interdisciplinary approach to literacy
promulgated by the Standards is extensive research establishing the need for college and career ready students to be proficient in reading complex informational text independently in a variety of content areas. Most of the required reading in college and workforce training programs is informational in structure and challenging in content; postsecondary education programs typically provide students with both a higher volume of such reading than is generally required in K–12 schools and comparatively little scaffolding.
The Standards are not alone in calling for a special emphasis on informational text. The 2009 reading framework of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) requires a high and increasing proportion of informational text on its assessment as students advance through the grades.”
Then it quotes NAEP percentages, which are 70/30 for 12th grade. This is it.
I just responded yo you that the Common Core documents lay out specific percentages which are guidelines or handcuffs for teachers.
The NAEP guidelines were written for test makers, not for teachers.
David Coleman arbitrarily adopted them. They have no basis in research or practice.
A teacher of English could choose to teach all-literature or all-informational text. It should be the teacher’s decision, not a faceless committee of unaccountable people.
Ok, found an official document: http://www.corestandards.org/assets/Publishers_Criteria_for_K-2.pdf It simply “calls for” 50/50 for elementary. It does not require it, nor there is 30/70 percentage spelled out.
Similarly, Stotsky’s claim “Common Core expects English teachers to spend at least half of their reading instructional time at every grade level on informational texts” has been found false by Politifact: https://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2013/oct/21/sandra-stotsky/common-core-expects-english-teachers-spend-half-th/
Wrong, BA.
You forced me to do the research for you. It took 10 seconds (but then I am a professional researcher and I assume you are not).
The percentages are spelled out here:
http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/introduction/key-design-consideration/
Distribution of Literary and Informational Passages by Grade in the 2009 NAEP Reading Framework
Grade Literary Information
4 50% 50%
8 45% 55%
12 30% 70%
(2008). Reading framework for the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
The NAEP Reading framework is instructions for test developers. It is NOT instructions for teachers.
These percentages have no basis in research or practice.
They are totally arbitrary.
It takes as much critical thinking to read fiction and literature as to read informational text. No one should tell teachers what percentage of their assignment should be one or the other.
“The percentages are spelled out here” – these are NAEP percentages quoted in CCSS, I mentioned these earlier. These are not CCSS percentages.
CCSS recommends the NAEP percentages. They are cited in CCSS promotional material as guidelines for teachers.
There is ZERO evidence for these percentages. They are meant for test developers, not teachers.
“It makes the learning a lot more interactive,” than using just a static book, said Lisette Alves, the assistant superintendent over academics.
Good grief. The computer sits on a desk, it is not inherently more interactive than a book on a desk.
The Florida Department of Education is determined to support computer-mediated anything over the live interaction of a human teacher in a classroom.
Time to require that superintendent of “academics” to read and discuss with students Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451.
We should all be warned that the Zuckerberg Chan Initiative (Common Sense) is involved in research that is promoted as determining the harm from “immersive exposure to screens”. Consumer Reports has joined in. How involved CR will be in validating the research remains to be seen. It wasn’t promising to see CR report a statistic from Common Sense that claimed kids as old as 8 were only spending 48 min. a day on mobile devices. The statistic isolated one component of
screen time.
There is an ever increasing body of research from doctors and psychologists finding that too much screen time is harmful to developing brains. One study linked screen time to depression in adolescents. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2018/04/16/how-too-much-screen-time-affects-kids-bodies-and-brains/#5d1bc5731549
The studies you reference, retired teacher, may be a thorn in the oligarchs’ side that they want eliminated with new studies.
It’s suspect that they are so late to the game.
Google has created a generation of “Chromebook Kids”. These silicon babysitters allow students to waste the day away, happily staring at screen after screen, without a bit of conscious thought.
Like 20 million Trojan Horses, the Chromebook give-away has surreptitiously undermined the need for certified teachers, indoctrinated a generation of googlers, while surreptitiously mining zettabytes of data.
The post describes the way authoritarian oligarchies operate. Education has been experiencing the tech and richest 0.1%’s tyranny for years.
I recall the Entrepreneur interview with a Microsoft affiliated manager who said, “teachers have to shift or get…” She thought she was so clever in service to her master.
Frederick Hess wrote at Philanthropy Roundtable that reformers said, “We’ve got to blow up the ed schools.” In the article, AEI then laid out a plan for oligarchy.
Teachers should start wearing buttons saying, “Stop the Tech Tyranny.”
Agree.
My principal told a fellow teacher to throw out everything in my file cabinet. I’m still not sure why, but he did it to other teachers so they wouldn’t rely on old ideas fir their lessons. I was not only livid, but heartbroken, because there were some things on that cabinet which were personal and irreplaceable.
He also made me threw out all my Reader’s Guide to Literature which I used to teach the high school students about indexes – I was The librarian. His argument was that all the magazines were online – not realizing that they were behind a pay wall.
I feel for this teacher. My principal was basically a good guy who sometimes got bizarre ideas in his head, but this as all pre-CC. Who knows what is happening now.
One summer a fellow teacher threw out everything in my two drawer file cabinet and she also weeded out my books. Included were student ESL placement tests, which are considered official records for federal compliance purposes. She also threw out a large number of items belonging to another teacher. Since he did not confront her, she discarded more of his things at the next opportunity. The custodian reported that he voiced his opposition when she threw out my file cabinet.
Insane and power-mad. I had in my file cabinet a lifetime’s worth of carefully prepared study materials–an enormous amount of intellectual property. If my principal had done such a thing, I would have sued.
He never would have done it to you. He seemed to have a better respect for the male teachers. Females were fair game in subtle but still noteworthy ways. I’m not even sure he was aware of his sexist, sometimes bullying, behaviors. In many ways he was a good principal, but he often lacked an empathy towards issues affecting the women on his staff. I worked for worse.
Aie yie yie. Awful. There is so much of this!!!
However, he could be very kind. Such is the varieties of our human behaviors.
Oh, imagine being back in “pre-CC” sanity.
Silverman is right. The action taken by the District and the Principal speaks volumes about their shameful lack of understanding. The collection of poetry, essays, and short stories in Silverman’s McDougal literature text will never grow old. They are classics in American literature and every student should read them.
It’s a damn shame that educators in this district have embraced the political correctness trap. I recommend sending them back to community college to repeat American Literature 101.
Hang in there, Silverman!
One of the majoroversights in the “reform” movements, especially those so enamored with technology, is that education from birth is essentially an interpersonal affair. It’s only after a child is far along the spectrum of their educational development–and I mean by that not only knowledge accumulation as such, but of their intellectual, moral, and social maturing–when they become mature enough to self-direct their own education WELL–that tech-ed can play its authentic part in education without the presence of adult care and guidance and care.
A smiley-face or a frown on a computer screen doesn’t do it. Children have great “fake-and-truth radar” …. they know when care and guidance are pictures of indifference and falsity.
BTW, and speaking of stupid, below is a forwarded narrative answering the question, “Why do liberals think Trump supporters are stupid.” CBK
BEGIN QUOTE
Karin Wells
October 3 at 9:40 AM ·
An anguished question from a Trump supporter: “Why do liberals think Trump supporters are stupid?”
The serious answer: Here’s what we really think about Trump supporters – the rich, the poor, the malignant and the innocently well-meaning, the ones who think and the ones who don’t…
That when you saw a man who had owned a fraudulent University, intent on scamming poor people, you thought “Fine.”
That when you saw a man who had made it his business practice to stiff his creditors, you said, “Okay.”
That when you heard him proudly brag about his own history of sexual abuse, you said, “No problem.”
That when he made up stories about seeing muslim-Americans in the thousands cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center, you said, “Not an issue.”
That when you saw him brag that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and you wouldn’t care, you chirped, “He sure knows me.”
That when you heard him illustrate his own character by telling that cute story about the elderly guest bleeding on the floor at his country club, the story about how he turned his back and how it was all an imposition on him, you said, “That’s cool!”
That when you saw him mock the disabled, you thought it was the funniest thing you ever saw.
That when you heard him brag that he doesn’t read books, you said, “Well, who has time?”
That when the Central Park Five were compensated as innocent men convicted of a crime they didn’t commit, and he angrily said that they should still be in prison, you said, “That makes sense.”
That when you heard him tell his supporters to beat up protesters and that he would hire attorneys, you thought, “Yes!”
That when you heard him tell one rally to confiscate a man’s coat before throwing him out into the freezing cold, you said, “What a great guy!”
That you have watched the parade of neo-Nazis and white supremacists with whom he curries favor, while refusing to condemn outright Nazis, and you have said, “Thumbs up!”
That you hear him unable to talk to foreign dignitaries without insulting their countries and demanding that they praise his electoral win, you said, “That’s the way I want my President to be.”
That you have watched him remove expertise from all layers of government in favor of people who make money off of eliminating protections in the industries they’re supposed to be regulating and you have said, “What a genius!”
That you have heard him continue to profit from his businesses, in part by leveraging his position as President, to the point of overcharging the Secret Service for space in the properties he owns, and you have said, “That’s smart!”
That you have heard him say that it was difficult to help Puerto Rico because it was the middle of water and you have said, “That makes sense.”
That you have seen him start fights with every country from Canada to New Zealand while praising Russia and quote, “falling in love” with the dictator of North Korea, and you have said, “That’s statesmanship!”
That Trump separated children from their families and put them in cages, managed to lose track of 1500 kids. has opened a tent city incarceration camp in the desert in Texas – he explains that they’re just “animals” – and you say, “well, ok then.”
That you have witnessed all the thousand and one other manifestations of corruption and low moral character and outright animalistic rudeness and contempt for you, the working American voter, and you still show up grinning and wearing your MAGA hats and threatening to beat up anybody who says otherwise.
What you don’t get, Trump supporters in 2018, is that succumbing to frustration and thinking of you as stupid may be wrong and unhelpful, but it’s also…hear me…charitable.
Because if you’re NOT stupid, we must turn to other explanations, and most of them are less flattering.
END QUOTE
https://www.facebook.com/karin.wells.7?tn=%2CdCH-R-R&eid=ARAv0fuge0L3Zlj2Aenj4Q9K_jadrSfWMfKmE_lDVcBP-AnL1X9J_v48fl9sMYEGNH3Znd7Z-OrPOedo&hc_ref=ARTy4GcZpZ6Z-rymxtS37pHVidt3j7Lj_vj_hmqOBvqtisL3FpsdWSnNuNreEemU3v4&fref=nf
This is maddening! Kas Winters Author, Illustrator, Publisher
Years ago, when I was a manager in a publishing house, I had a bit of a tussle when I insisted that my staff do their final copyediting and proofreading on hardcopy. Now, why would I have done that? Well, there was a lot of research showing that editors make far fewer errors when dealing with hardcopy than when editing on screen. It’s pretty clear that text read in digital formats is typically attended to less closely and read more superficially.
At my last school, we were told that we had to start using a new online literature program from one of the big ed-book publishers. I opened it at random and made a list of more than thirty errors in fact, logic, grammar, usage, and mechanics on a single two-page spread. So, the stuff was inaccurate and very, very sloppy. But that wasn’t the biggest issue. The two biggest, I thought, were that
a) the text appeared to have been put together by gerbils on methamphetamine because it bounced around from one thing to another as though it had taken its formal impetus from the news updates that scroll at the bottom of a television screen. There was no continuity or development within a lesson. Instead, every few lines, whatever was going on would be interrupted by a “special feature.” And now for something completely different!!!! I was reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s story “Harrison Bergeron,” in which people with high IQs are forced by the government to wear earphones that blast noise into both ears every few minutes.
b) all the exercises and question formats in the text were based on the puerile Common Core State Standards and on the ridiculous state test question formats–the hair on the tail wagging the dog. So, the attention was never on the period or the text or the genre, or whatever. It was always on checking off a list of standards [sic] that had been covered [sic]. The emphasis was all on vague, abstract “skills,” and there was precious little content–almost none. No student encountering a piece of writing in this text by an American Puritan or Transcendentalists would leave the text having any clue what Puritans and Transcendentalists actually thought. Rarely did a student leave a lesson knowing something that he or she didn’t know before.
I refused to use this crap. I assigned plays and novels and used tons of handouts of poems and short stories and essays. Why? Because I knew what the hell I was doing.
A friend has just retires after a 30 year career as a public school teacher in Florida. In the last couple of years, she has become much more likely to do what she knows works, without feeling hindered by dicta from on high.
Of course, she was protected by her tenure, a protection afforded to no new teachers in Florida under Governor Rick Scott. Younger teachers who hope to build a career are always running scared and do pretty much what they’re told. Which seems to be the purpose.
Alas, this is so.
…editors make far fewer errors when dealing with hardcopy than when editing on screen….
My brother, an engineer and draftsman, had to migrate to computers. He bought a 36″ printer to proofread his drawings. He said that his ability to “see” errors in the reflected light ( paper version) was much better than seeing these on screens with the emitted light. I also think he underestimated the element of care required to make his engineering drawings on paper, first in several pencil drafts, then in ink with precision drafting tools–no computer.
Bob, your textbook description exactly matches the series of French/ Spanish I-II texts being used in midsch/ hisch around here (NJ). As a PreK FL enrichment teacher I wouldn’t be privy, but I also have long tutored a couple of older students & their moms. The books are simply impossible to follow & as you allude, like watching a Monty Python show. We finally were able to make progress when I got my hands on the “teacher’s guide” versions. They contain detailed indexes mapping out what is being “taught” on which pp of each chapter, w/connections to prev & foll chaps. For all the world as tho they’d started w/a straightforward text, then snipped it into bits & threw them in the air– providing teachers only w/key to mystery!
In one of his last acts on the Senate floor before his death, Senator Byrd read a page from a contemporary textbook into the record and commented on this very issue–how it’s no wonder that so many kids, now, suffer from attention-deficit disorder when their textbooks are compilations of non sequiturs. The teaching materials may attempt to tie the mess together, but explaining that the bits and pieces in the local dump represent parts of connected wholes doesn’t draw them together into functioning units again.
Bethree5 –
Your description seems to be of the last Spanish text my school purchased. We had been 12 !!! years without new texts and finally were authorized to purchase this series.
They were precisely as described – snippets of this and that mashed up into an incoherent mess. The “construct” was that material would be recycled into a “spiral” of knowledge, each snippet reinforcing some previously presented “concept”. Never was there enough in depth presentation of vocabulary or grammatical structures for kids to practice enough to gain mastery.
In addition, there were many typos and grammatical errors, as well as many cultural items that were bogus or stereotypical.
What we teachers did was go through the texts and make our own guide for our use, so that you could jump back and forth through the pages and actually build a coherent curriculum. That was a lot of work and such a disappointment after waiting so long for new books for our kids.
Yup. ¡Exacto!
Christine, “spiraling” is how I do my PreK lessons, of necessity, as they are only weekly. But hardly unique. I’m sure teachers of all ages and subjects have been doing it from time immemorial– review yesterday/ develop further/ practice new devpt. Did anyone ever expect a textbook to spell out the details? How clumsy and counterproductive! Only works if every kid in every class advances at exactly the same rate every day! Now try it for world lang, where every lesson includes multiple “tracks” [like CD tracks – e.g., phrases for listening/ repetition, colors/ numbers/ etc descriptors, verb role-play in various conjugation, etc]: spirals interspersed among spirals, all as dictated by textbook? It’s as if the editors imagined they could teach how to juggle via a stop-motion cartoon. Why are editors trying to teach teachers how to teach?
“It’s pretty clear that text read in digital formats is typically attended to less closely and read more superficially.” – do you have a research to support this position?
There are indeed studies to support this claim. I don’t do research for others.
I’ll point you to a book that contains reviews of a lot of this: Baron, Naomi S. Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World. New York: Oxford UP, 2015.
During my thirty years as a public school teacher, I worked under several principals and a few of them were super micro-managers, Mini-Trump-Hitlers.
Since school is paid for by tax payers, the tax payers can demand to know where the copys the tax payers paid for went. If the district tax payers don’t care, there’s not much else you can do.
I wonder what will happen to the books. If this principal wants to destroy them, I gather they burn at 451 degrees Fahrenheit.
Excellent suggestion: 451 degrees F.
Pretty much sums this up!
“It makes the learning a lot more interactive,” than using just a static book, said Lisette Alves, the assistant superintendent over academics.
Two comments and I will refrain from the documenting the profanity that first came to my mind: I always considered reading something and discussing it with the class as being interactive. No electricity or passwords needed. Her definition of “interactive” is closer to my definition of depersonalized, not human or perhaps inhuman.
And note to “just a static book” assistant superintendent: you have no business being anywhere near a classroom. I literally screamed and yelled at my screen, something I’ve never done, as I read this the first time. It takes effort to hold back every time I reread it, which I will never do again after I hit the “Post Comment” tab. Infuriating.
As you often do, GregB, you’ve gone to the heart of the matter. They are replacing human interaction with interaction with a stupid, inflexible machine product.
Disgusting. Is nothing sacred? Not even a teachers’ materials?
This is CENSORSHIP, even if this word is not said out loud.
I am more than disgusted. I worry for he future of his country.
Seems the Hunger Games is more than well and alive.
Our district also replaced the McDougal-Littell texts with “Collections” by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. I found many issues with the tenth grade “Collections” selections, including poor presentation of grammar concepts (starting with difficult concepts and jumping back to lower-level concepts), low-level student essay samples, inaccurate non-fiction texts, ethno-centric short story selections, the absence of American Indian texts–and that doesn’t even include the absence of some of the finest short stories in American literature, such as those by Ray Bradbury.
“Later, Silverman told the Miami Herald she had vision issues and could not teach with a tablet.” — If it is an iPad, it has resolution as good as a printed book. Too bad she had to resort to lame arguments like this instead of confronting the principal and the district.
On the other hand, when one thinks that smoking weed is less harmful than smoking tobacco, but smoking weed is unlawful, then this person is breaking the law. What he is supposed to do? Right, rally to change the law, which has been done in a number of states. Isn’t it how this country works? But what Silverman did? She broke the rules instead of pushing to change them.
Silverman is an experienced and successful teacher. No one should tell her which materials are best for her students. The state should get out of her way. It’s not her responsibility to change the state standards. It’s her responsibility to teach her students, which apparently she does very well.
She works in a system funded and controlled by state. She is being paid by this system to do work that the system trusts her to do. If she is a bright professional who does not need to be told what to do, she should start a private practice like doctors do, or prep courses or join a private school that would give her enough leeway. It is crystal clear that teachers like her cannot thrive in the confines of rigid state education system. Ideally, vouchers would help teachers like her to start their private educational practice without help of venture capitalists. Ironic, isn’t it?
Nonsense. States should not dictate which books are allowed, nor should they mandate how to teach.
BA,
Any comment you make that is insulting will be deleted.
I repeat what Diane already said, “NONSENSE!”
Most teachers are highly educated and they are professionals and professionals are not managed from often stupid, politically motivated and often corrupted by power micro-managers from the top.
Finland’s leaders know this and Finland’s leaders treat their teachers like the professionals they are, and trust them to do the job they were educated to do.
But what are the ignorant, corrupted micro-mangers in the US doing, the exact opposite.
Instead of supporting the teaching profession by requiring the education it takes to become a professional teacher, those ignorant, power hungry micro-managers at the top who are often the minions of billionaires are destroying the teaching profession by supporting organizations like TFA and using high stakes tests to rank and punish public schools and public school teachers while not using the same flawed methods to judge publicly funded, private sector corporate charter schools that are allowed to fail and continue to stay in business while more corrupt frauds that micromanage skim off every public dollar they can to boost profits while abusing children, starving the education of children, and abusing teachers by demanding more work hours for less pay and no benefits.
Even China doesn’t use its high stakes tests results to close China’s public schools and punish China’s public school teachers.
“States should not dictate which books are allowed, nor should they mandate how to teach.” – should they simply give money to anyone who wants to teach, no questions asked? Ah, you will say, they should give money to real teachers, who know what and how teach. Ok, how the states will know who is a real teacher? Should they require higher education in the related field? Require certification? Half of North Carolina teachers failed certification test. Only 19% of Indiana teachers passed certification test. Suggesting to simply give them money and not mandate how to teach is wasting taxpayers money and students’ future.
BA,
Do you think that the bureaucrats in the state department of education are qualified to tell every teacher how to teach and to choose their books for them?
Do you think so little of teachers?
No one “simply gives money to teachers” and leaves them alone. Please let me know where that happens except in charter schools and voucher schools.
I’m starting to think that BA is an ignorant fool.
In the U.S. there is no standard for how teachers earn their teaching credential. Those standards are set by each state and vary from state to state.
In “The Teacher Wars” by Dana Goldstein there is a chapter that compares the programs teachers go through to earn a teaching credential and the best, according to the evidence she gathered was Urban Residency teaching programs. The worst was TFA.
I went through and Urban Residency teaching program through Cal Poly Pomona back in 1975-76. I’d already earned my BA in journalism back in 1973.
The Urban Residency program I went through was an entire school year. I was assigned to a master teacher in a school with a high rate of child poverty in a barrio that had multi generational street gangs. I was paid a stipend to learn in her classroom full time for an entire school year while attending classes at Cal Poly in the evening.
After that year with the guidance of my master teacher, I was ready to teach my own students in my own classroom.
Goldstein reports in her book that the retention rate of teachers that went through Urban Residencies was more than 80-percent.
The most important factor for a teacher is classroom management and no idiot that micromanages from the top down will be able to “tell” a teacher how to manage a classroom so they can teach.
Teachers must be allowed flexibility to decide how they manage their classrooms, what they teach and how they teach similar to how Finland allows that country’s teachers to work.
But what are those top down ignorant, power hungry idiots that micromanage teachers in the U.S. doing?
They are doing everything they can to destroy public education. They are doing it all wrong, totally wrong.
The teachers work in the system. They get paid by this system. Unless you have some kind of anarcho-communism in mind, they should abide by the rules of the system.
Yes, the system is flawed, I will be the first to say that. But behaving as an outlaw works out only in movies. There are two legal ways: either to change the system, or to leave it.
“Do you think so little of teachers?” – of which ones? Of the bright ones? Or of those who failed a certification test having high school problems in it? There are more than 3 million teachers in the country, not everyone is bright, and not everyone can be given the freedom to built their lessons the way they like. Are you suggesting that the schools should separate wheat from chaff, and give some teachers more freedom than others? Based on what criteria? On tests? Aren’t you against tests? This is catch 22.
BA,
Have you ever heard of the concept of academic freedom?
Teachers should teach using the methods they think best using the materials that they think best.
If they are “bad” teachers, they should be disciplined.
If they are successful, they should be left to do their work.
BA clearly shows that BA does not believe in Freedom. Instead, BA must support Trump’s love of dictators.
BA shouts between the lines of BA’s comments that “Long Live Trump, the King of Kings. Only Trump and other autocrats (with too much money but little or no common sense) know what the rest of us should be doing.”
“ ‘Do you think so little of teachers?’ – of which ones? Of the bright ones? Or of those who failed a certification test having high school problems in it? There are more than 3 million teachers in the country, not everyone is bright, and not everyone can be given the freedom to built their lessons the way they like. Are you suggesting that the schools should separate wheat from chaff, and give some teachers more freedom than others? Based on what criteria? On tests? Aren’t you against tests? This is catch 22.”
Those who failed certification tests aren’t certified teachers, are they? So they aren’t in classes.
The tests are no guarantee of anything, anyway. We had a French teacher – who was excellent – teach on a waiver for a couple of years. She repeatedly came close, but could not pass the English section of the test because Bulgarian was her first language. Her oral English was fine with just a trace of an accent and the kids had no problem understanding her. She was teaching in FRENCH all day anyway, but could not achieve certification because she couldn’t jump a useless roadblock.
Yes, some teachers should have more freedom than others. Experienced teachers do not need to be dictated to by some curriculum developed by a textbook company.
Based on direct observations of qualified supervisory personnel (a person with a degree and experience in the same field – math for a math teacher, elementary ed for an elementary teacher) a teacher will learn how to deliver effective instruction well. That what a principal’s (or department head, etc.) role is supposed to be – mentoring teachers for whom they are responsible and supporting their growth into independent, experienced professionals.
None of this is new. It’s worked well for a very long time.
“Have you ever heard of the concept of academic freedom?” – Yes, in universities. Which is why students are given syllabus, not a curriculum, and it is up to their educator – hopefully, an esteemed professor – to build the course loosely based on the syllabus and using textbooks and tools that the professor deem appropriate.
Elementary and secondary school is not university, and curriculum that has to be closely followed is not syllabus.
BA,
That is sheer nonsense. No school district or state should tell teachers how to teach or which books are mandatory.
BA’s ignorance is astronomical. He has no idea how a child learns and retains knowledge.
The primary goal of K – 12 should be, and was before NCLB, to educate life-long learners with critical thinking and problem solving skills — not following a script determined by some idiot who floats like a turd to the top of a plugged up administrative toilet.
Ok, off thread, but your remark about turds reminded me of a comment made by Vicente Fox, former President of Mexico:
Trump is such a total failure at being a human that he can’t even wipe his ass after he takes a dump. The only things he is good at: hater, racist, liar, fraud, traitor to his country, con man, repeatedly failing at business, and manipulating easy to fool people who want to be fooled.
No.
The central purpose of public education, beginning at the beginning, is to raise citizens suited for life in a democracy (for as long as we may have one). The people students meet outside of the classroom come from divergent backgrounds, religions, ethnic groups and beliefs. To ready kids for productive citizenship, they must be exposed to a variety of teachings too.
Teachers are humans with interests and passions and joyful, authentic learning takes place when human beings share these. One teacher whose passion is music may use the American songbook in their US history class while another, interested in visual arts, emphasizes The Hudson River School artists, for example. The kids experiences are all the richer and more meaningful for these variations. Exposing kids to a multitude of instructional pathways leads them to discover there are many ways to be in the world.
These people like BA have no sense of teachers being professionals, like psychiatrists or animators, no idea that taking away a professional’s texts and handing him or her some state-mandated crap is like going onto that motion-picture animator’s desk and removing the computer and the 3D modeling programs and so on and replacing them with some sheets of paper and some number 2 pencils.
If a teacher does NOT have the ability, like any other professional, to choose more wisely than do others the materials that they should use in order to do his or her job, then that person shouldn’t be teaching. That’s what expertise means. You know what’s needed in order to do your job. If the state mandated what materials a luthier must use in order to make a violin or a guitar, there wouldn’t be many great guitars and violins made.
“The kids experiences are all the richer and more meaningful for these variations. Exposing kids to a multitude of instructional pathways leads them to discover there are many ways to be in the world.” — Sure, one kid studies music, another learns touch typing. One learns straight algebra, another is taught from a project-based perspective without any clear structure, it is all good if the teacher is nice.
In the result there is no rhyme or reason, and the only unifying way for colleges to figure out who is college-ready is SAT/ACT, but these are being made optional, so anyone can go to college. And with remedial courses thrown away, everyone can go on and study calculus or physics or industrial design or – god forbid – medicine. There is no wonder that companies like Toyota and Volkswagen created their own high school cum colleges to train their workforce, it is because they cannot find workers educated at some coherent and decent enough level. 80% of high school graduates are functionally illiterate.
But this is fine, let us sing songs to learn history or draw pretty tables instead of learning real algebra – this is because the teacher knows best, all three million of them. We’ll just pay them, they are professionals. Really, just the single issue of whole language vs phonics make me laugh at all these “professionals” still pushing discredited whole language junk. NCLB made it clear that phonics is the way to go, but what to they know, Washington bureaucrats.
I fail to understand your bitterness.
It is a fact that the SAT/ACT and all standardized tests are highly correlated with family income. Check the College Board release displaying scores and family income. The more money your family has, the higher your scores.
In addition to their built-in advantage, rich families hire tutors. The richer the family, the more they spend on tutors, like those who charge hundreds of dollars an hour because they have “proven results.”
Why do you want to measure family income?
BA alleges that “… In the result there is no rhyme or reason, and the only unifying way for colleges to figure out who is college-ready is SAT/ACT”
BA is overflowing with BS
My daughter got into Stanford not on her SAT/ACT scores but her GPA. GPA is the primary indicator for colleges to determine if students are ready for college or not. She was stressed out because of her mediocre SAT/ACT score and thought she’d enver be accepted to one the colleges she wanted to attend.
I called Stanford admissions and asked them how important the SAT/ACT was. They said it was only one indicator they looked at. What was important to Stanford was the “WHOLE” person and not the score on a test. I understood that the SAT/ACT was only used to break a tie between two students who appeared equal in every other way.
Why did Stanford accept her? She had a 4.65 GPA out of HS and graduated HS as a recognized scholar athlete who was heavily involved in extra curricular activities through high school. Sometimes it felt like she lived at the high school and only slept at home and that included the weekends.
“In general, your child’s GPA is the most important factor when applying to college. … Every student applying to competitive universities already has a high GPA. Therefore, for students applying specifically to competitive colleges, their SAT or ACT scores are more important.Oct 12, 2015.” But according to Stanford, only as a tie breaker.
https://prepexpert.com/is-your-childs-satact-score-or-gpa-more-important-to-college-admissions/
Stanford also required the student to write an essay.
Take note that the #1 item listed for Stanford’s Requirements for Admissions is GPA. For every 100 applicants, only five are admitted.
What are Stanford’s admission requirements? While there are a lot of pieces that go into a college application, you should focus on only a few critical things:
Stanford says, “If you’re currently a junior or senior, your GPA is hard to change in time for college applications. If your GPA is at or below the school average of 3.95, you’ll need a higher SAT or ACT score to compensate. This will help you compete effectively against other applicants who have higher GPAs than you.”
http://www.prepscholar.com/sat/s/colleges/Stanford-admission-requirements
BA I have this driverless car you can buy. . . it works on the same principle that you convey in your note:
. . . that the intersection between general rules and the unknown of actual historical events is not delicate like actually driving down a real road (or like teachers “intersecting” with their different students in real-time);
. . . that no conscious mediation by a licensed careful driver (or caring professional teacher) is needed;
. . . that bureaucratic oversight and control can replace the intelligent functioning of a trained on-the-spot driver (or teacher); or
. . . that there is not a huge range of persons and materials that can teach the same things well, and in different ways.
I think you know nothing about how children learn, not to mention about what whole language is and does. CBK
BA is consistently snarky and takes pot shots at teachers collectively (I don’t post all of his nasty comments, I delete the nastiest) and at me personally. My patience with BA has worn very thin.
dianeravitch It takes a hero these days to become public about anything the least bit controversial (think of what Ford is going through with death threats–she cannot even go home); but this is especially true when in a form maintained over long period of time–like yours. CBK
Thank you. I ignore the insults. I can’t compare what I do to Ford. She is a hero beyond compare. She risked her life to tell the story of a trauma she has lived with many years, only to be publicly shamed by the president, jeering crowds and his enablers like McConnell and Graham.
The following book contains some reviews of research showing that when people read online, they read less carefully and with less comprehension and retention than when they read printed materials:
Baron, Naomi S. Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World. New York: Oxford UP, 2015.
But this is a much, much bigger issue. There is room for both. One advantage of online materials is that you can make a lot of them readily available. So, for example, Gutenberg and the Internet Archive are wonderful resources for rare and out-of-print books, Pegasus for classical texts, and sacred-texts.com for religious scriptures from around the world and throughout history. And having vast libraries online is great for research purposes. But for careful study of texts, nothing beats sitting in a coffeeshop or on a university campus lawn with a printed book.
And online materials encourage not sustained attention but surfing–flitting about with the attention span of a mosquito on meth or of, say, Donald Trump listening to an intelligence briefing.