Bob Shepherd is teaching in Florida after a career in education publishing. He left this comment on the blog about his teaching experience in Florida. His contributions to the blog are consistently brilliant. On a personal note, Bob reached out to me and offered to edit my new book. We have never met. Knowing how amazing he is, I happily accepted his offer. For weeks, Bob and I exchanged chapters and emails, sometimes in the middle of the night. His edits were excellent. His sensibility, his deep knowledge of education, and his feel for language are incomparable. He made the book much much better. Publication is scheduled for January. I am in his debt forever and in awe of his knowledge and skill.
Bob Shepherd wrote:
Life as a Teacher in the Age of the Ed Deform Hamster Wheel
Many years ago, I got a degree in English from Indiana University (Phi Beta Kappa, with High Honors) and completed the education requirements, including student teaching, to get my certification to teach English in that state. I also took the Graduate Record Examination in English and received a perfect score on this. I was awarded a “Lifetime Certificate” to teach English in Grades 6-12. I taught high-school English for three years.
When I started a family, the pay simply wasn’t enough, so I took a job in educational publishing. In the course of a 25-year career in educational publishing, I planned, wrote, and edited over 50 highly successful textbooks and online instructional programs in reading, 6-12 literature, grammar and composition, and African-American literature. I also wrote a widely used book on writing the research paper, designed standardized tests, and wrote tests in ELA for many of the large textbook houses. I worked for a while as educational director for a major foundation and ended my publishing career as Executive Vice President for Development at one of the country’s largest textbook houses. At one time, it was almost impossible to find a K-12 English program, anywhere in the country, that wasn’t using one or more of my books. Throughout my career, I immersed myself in studies in my field. When I wasn’t working at my job, I was studying linguistics, rhetoric, literature and literary criticism, prosody, stylistics, educational statistics, assessment theory, the cognitive psychology of learning, pedagogical approaches, the history of education, and so on.
Then, at the end of my career, I decided that I wanted to go back to teaching, my first love, for a few years. I had spent a lifetime designing, writing, and editing materials for teachers, and deepening my knowledge of my subject, and I wanted to finish my working life sharing the accumulated knowledge of that lifetime with kids in class. So, I decided to renew my certification, in Florida this time, and go back into the classroom. Little did I know the insane hurdles I would have to go through to make this happen.
In order to get my certification in Florida, I had to pay $750 to Pearson and take seven different tests:
General Knowledge Test, Essay
General Knowledge Test, English Language Skills
General Knowledge Test, Reading
General Knowledge Test, Mathematics
Professional Education Test
English 6-12 Test, Multiple Choice
English 6-12 Test, Written
The Professional Education Test, in particular, was an obscenity. Basically, it was written from the point of Ed Deformers, and to get a good score on it, I had to adopt the Ed Deform point of view and pretend that the Common Core wasn’t a puerile joke and that standardized testing in ELA wasn’t an unreliable, invalid scam. I did that and passed. The reading test was also a complete joke. The questions were so poorly written that one had to choose the answer that the test preparer thought was correct, not one that actually made sense, if there was such a thing.
Then I had to complete 400 pages of documentation, over the course of a year, as part of something called the TIP program, that contained samples from my teaching showing various kinds of compliance (that I diversified my instruction, that my instructional appealed to multiple intelligences, that I used ESOL strategies, that I analyzed my students’ data, and so on. An enormous amount of busy work.
I also had to complete 300 hours of online ESOL instruction. The instructional materials were riddled with errors in grammar, usage, mechanics, sense, and fact and appeared to have been put together by remedial students with no education in linguistics or in English. In my responses to the materials, I took to writing long lists of the errors in grammar and usage and fact in the instructional materials. They passed me anyway. All this busywork taught me nothing that I didn’t already know. 300 hours! Mind you, in most undergraduate programs, 60 hours of instruction is sufficient to graduate with a major in a given subject.
I also had to complete a number of state-mandated “trainings” (roll over, sit up, good boy) on gangs, drugs, medical emergencies, and much else, from which, again, I learned nothing that wasn’t common knowledge.
Twice a year, I had to complete a lengthy Individualized Professional Development Plan, an inane, useless exercise in educational gobbledygook and bs.
I was required to sit through countless “professional development trainings” (roll over, sit up, good boy) of such mind-numbing stupidity that one would have thought the presenters were talking to second graders about My Little Ponies.
I was required to submit Byzantine two-page lesson plans for every class that I taught and to have a copy of these plans available for inspection at all times. One year, I had five preparations and had to prepare 15 of these (30 pages total) every week.
Each day, I had to write on one of my whiteboards, for every lesson, for every class, an enormous amount of material that included bellwork, student outcome, vocabulary, higher-order thinking skills addressed, an essential question, and homework. This alone took between half an hour and 45 minutes each day. In the year when I had five preps, I had to use two whiteboards for this.
I had to submit to three separate formal evaluations and countless informal pop-in evaluations every year, each involving a lot of paperwork. (In my nonteaching career, I always had one formal evaluation per year.)
I had to maintain and regularly update a student “data wall” in my classroom.
I had to update, weekly, a “word wall” in my classroom.
Half of my students had IEP plans, 504 plans, gifted student plans, ESOL plans, or PMPs, and I had to do regular reporting on all of these and to keep an enormous binder of all this material. I also had to attend parent meetings on all these.
I had to maintain a separate binder with paperwork related to every parent contact and yet another binder with paperwork related to any student disciplinary action—even something as minor as marking a student tardy.
I had to keep both a paper gradebook and an online gradebook and post at least two grades for every student every week. In addition, I had to record attendance for every class on paper and online.
I was required to proctor standardized tests and do daily car line duty at no additional pay. (When I taught years earlier, car line was handled by people hired and paid for this purpose.)
All of this was an enormous waste of time, effort, and money. Almost none of it had any positive effects, and the opportunity cost, in terms of time taken from actually doing my job, was enormous. When I taught years before, almost none of this was required, the teachers were no worse, and the kids didn’t learn any less.
The other thing that had changed since I taught years ago was the general attitude that was taken toward teachers. When I taught at the beginning of my career, teachers had a great deal of autonomy in choosing their materials and in planning their classes. Today, they are treated as children, not as professionals, and are continually micromanaged.
Basically, in the job as it exists today, I spent so much time doing administrative crap that I had very little time left over for doing my job. I literally spend all day, every Saturday and Sunday, simply completing paperwork. And somewhere in all this I was supposed to do grading. I taught 7 classes, with an average of about 28 students in each. If I assigned a single five-paragraph them, I would have 980 paragraphs to read and comment on—roughly two large novels’ worth of material.
So how did we get to this place? Well, I suppose that over the years, every time some person at the district or state office got a bright idea for improving teaching, it was implemented, and the requirements kept being piled on until they became literally insane. Hey, you know, we’ve got this state program that provides teachers with $70 a year for buying supplies, but we’re not doing a very good job of tracking that, so let’s create a weekly “Whiteboard Marker Usage and Accountability Report (WMUAR). It will only take a few minutes for a teacher to prepare. Great idea! You know how these teachers are. They will just run through markers like crazy unless you monitor this.
In the teacher’s bathrooms in my school, there were literally posted instructions on how to use the toilet. You know how teachers are, they can’t use the toilet properly without instruction in flushing.
Interestingly, NONE of this crap had anything to do with whether I actually knew the subject that I was teaching. Oh, I forgot. I also had twice-yearly “evaluations” by the District Reading Coordinator. This person approved the novels that we were allowed to teach. She thought that “classical literature” was anything considered a classic and that The Odyssey was a novel. So, one had to deal continually with such people—ones who were profoundly ignorant but a) made the major curricular decisions, b) did evaluations, and c) treated teachers in a profoundly patronizing and condescending manner.
Yes, we need professional standards. But these should start with teacher and administrator training programs requiring that these folks demonstrate, via studies outside those programs, mastery of the materials that they are going to be teaching or that are taught by those whom they manage. A person overseeing English teachers ought to know something about literature, grammar, and so on.
Theodore Roosevelt once said that the secret to getting something done is to hire someone who knows how to do it and then get the hell out of his or her way. The best publishing manager I ever worked under, a fellow with the altogether appropriate name of Bill Grace, once told his assembled employees, “I’m a successful guy. And I’m going to tell you the secret to my success. I hire people who are smarter than I am and leave them alone to do their jobs.”
We need a lot more of that.
The Florida deformers seek to put as many impediments in the path of those that wish to teach in legitimate public schools in the state. At the same time they turn a blind eye to millions in waste, fraud and seizing of pubic real estate in the charter industry. They also have no problem trying to off load as many students as they can into unaccredited voucher schools with programs of questionable academic value. The state is run by education vandals and brainwashed right wing libertarians.
Considering the number of obstacles in Bob’s path and the amount of expensive, useless, bureaucratic nonsense he faced, Bob has shown he has “true grit” for his perseverance. Unfortunately, not all teachers are like Bob. They are leaving in droves, and that is exactly what the deformers want while they chisel away public education in the state.
Voucher programs are getting a big push from our new governor. If you want to use taxpayer money to pay for sending your kids to a school where they will be taught that the Big Bang is a myth, that Adam and Eve rode around on dinosaurs, that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and that the followers of other religions are all going to hell, then Florida is the place.
interesting to reflect that as ocean levels rise due to the human-created planet warming which Floridian legislators despise as a concept, FL will be a US land mass soonest swallowed…
YUP, but IQ45 will not live to see Mar-a-lago underwater due to the global warming that he doesn’t believe in because his intuition is so much better than, you know, science.
My brother maintains that God controls the weather. It was a great hoax to believe in global warming. How can this country progress when scientists aren’t believed but Trump is? He watches Fox and told me that he heard a great program by Hannity. He listens regularly to Rush L.
……………….
NASA’s Goddard Space Radar Flight Center is studying Antarctica’s ice. Lasers can measure the thickness of the ice, how its moving, and whether it’s growing or shrinking. Every second three Olympic size swimming pools of ice is disappearing from Antarctica.
Video: Antarctica is losing ice at an accelerating rate. How much will sea levels rise?
PBS NewsHour
Published on Apr 10, 2019
The frozen continent of Antarctica contains the vast majority of all freshwater on Earth. Now that ice is melting at an accelerating rate, in part because of climate change. What does this transformation mean for coastal communities across the globe? William Brangham reports from Antarctica on the troubling trend of ice loss and how glaciers can serve as a climate record from the past.
ouch, so close to you in relationship: I have a cousin who could be your brother’s twin in thinking, but I almost never see/hear him
My brother lives in another state. He says that Fox didn’t report that Trump’s budget would cut Social Security or Medicare. If it was true, he said that Fox would be reporting this.
The deformers hand in hand with Big Tech: teachers gone, computers arrive in massive number…
That’s the end game, I think. The Deformers hate the funneling of resources into paying the salaries of people to serve as teachers. Decades ago, I read a speech by BIll Gates in which he descried the fact that the costs of schools were all in facilities and salaries. His notion was that that was so yesterday in an age when ordinary people’s kids could learn on computers. Put 500 of them in a room with one proctor and some computers and software. . . . presto! depersonalized learning. Good enough for prole children, and all of that sitting at computers doing inane crap will be great training for them to spend their lives sitting down, shutting up, and doing what they are told by their masters in the New Feudal Order.
and saddest reality is that his brain functions in a way which leads him to absolutely think this is truth
Opps. Decried, not descried. Forgive the typo.
The permafrost is melting at an alarming rate. At the same time it is releasing large amounts of CO2, methane and germs we haven’t seen in hundreds of years.https://www.vox.com/2017/9/6/16062174/permafrost-melting
“…Bob has shown he has “true grit” for his perseverance. Unfortunately, not all teachers are like Bob. They are leaving in droves,…”
While I have nothing but admiration for Bob, the thought of what he has had to do horrifies me. His workload Was unsustainable. I am almost eight years out of the classroom now and still miss the kids, but I was putting in 60 hours pretty routinely and more when IEPs hit. Bob sounds like under 80 would have been nonexistent. I hope his sense of self preservation has led him to retire.
“His workload Was unsustainable.” This is key. Sustainability is the issue. An unsustainable workload will automatically mean high turnover in any profession. Even when we were farming, 16 hour days, constant labor without a break, we were sustained by our independence from unnecessary restrictions.
I often told people, at the time, that I worked for harder and put in far more hours as a high-school English teacher than I did as president o a publishing house (one of my jobs for a time).
HOLY CRAP! How many intelligent, qualified and knowledgeable teachers are going to jump through that many hoops? No wonder there is a severe teacher shortage. Go through all of that and then don’t get paid enough to live decently?
What is wrong with politicians who ‘have all the answers’ and are dumb as rocks? I keep protesting to my state Senator Niemeyer [R-IN] who is in that particular rigid category.
Bob, you are a miracle for putting up with this nonsense. How in the world did you decide to go to school in Indiana?
My working-class parents moved to Bloomington, Indiana, so that I would be able to go to a high-quality state school at reasonable cost. The school did not disappoint. I was fortunate, there, to have breathtakingly learned professors whom I have thought about with reverence and gratitude almost every day of my life since.
“What is wrong with politicians who ‘have all the answers’ and are dumb as rocks? ”
Just so you know: the rocks in my yard are very insulted by that comment.
I can hear them rumbling.
My kids had gerbils who were smarter than the folks who do education policy planning in Florida.
Gerbils are also soft and cuddly
Can you imagine cuddling with Jeb Bush?
Like cuddling a prickly pear cactus.
I feel sorry for his wife. She must wear a suit of chain mail whenever he’s around.
I abhor, ofc, Bush’s education policies. They are an obscenity. I laud his opposition to IQ45’s anti-immigrant policies. His brother G.W. has also spoken out against Trump’s anti-immigrant racism.
SDP: I was afraid that might happen. Please give my apologies to all the rocks on earth, but not the ones in politicians’ heads.
The problem with DeSantis is that he IS smart, but brainwashed. He is cunningly smart.
The silver lining in being eligible for retirement in a state with a severe teacher shortage combined with teaching a non-tested subject is that I can now more or less ignore all the administrivia that is imposed on teachers from the powers on high.
I keep all my lessons and materials on-line, so if the administrators want to see what I am doing, they can look. My binders are mostly empty, as a new assistant principal tossed out the contents when she came on board, and I chose not to use my valuable time to recreate them. I use my boards as spaces for students to practice or to post pertinent information for days at a time. No one ever comes to observe me, because they are instead breathing down the necks of the teachers who teach the tested subjects. Fortunately, another new AP is constantly in the halls and can see that my students are mostly on-task, that I am teaching, and that I handle my own classroom management issues.
There is no way that I would go through what certification takes these days if I were just beginning my professional life. I would choose coding over teaching for a number of reasons, and several generations of students would never know what they were missing.
“and several generations of students would never know what they were missing”
You said a lot there, Ms. Partridge!!!
That’s my concern–that highly qualified people simply won’t put up with all the administrative crap, given the low pay. In three years of teaching in Florida, I saw many extremely bright, well-educated young people leave the profession for more lucrative work outside teaching. Invariably, they told me that they were sick of the excessive busywork in the name of accountability.
When it comes to education Corey Booker is one of those “politicians who ‘have all the answers’ and are dumb as rocks.” They want a cheap way out and the result is more wasted time and money. We have Socialism for the rich, the wrong way.
AGREE, bpollock42.
Booker has no clue. He’s needs a “real” job, and not as a classroom teacher.
I would hasten to add that none of the long list of nonsense in that post originated with my Principal, who was an extraordinarily gifted, able, wise administrator. These were state- and district-level requirements, and my Principal was talented at helping the shepherd the newbies through these labyrinthine processes. Basically, teachers and administrators are all, today, caught like flies in the treacle of Education Deform. I loved my Principal and my fellow teachers, who were extraordinarily dedicated DESPITE all this crap. Why did they do it? Why did they work so hard and put up with all this nonsense? It certainly went beyond just earning a paycheck. They put up with this stuff because the kind of work they do matters, enormously to individual kids and to society as a whole. As my principal used to say, we don’t do this for the income, we do it for the outcomes.
Of for an edit button so one could correct typos in these posts! LOL.
They put up with this stuff because the kind of work they do matters enormously to individual kids and to society as a whole. As my principal used to say, we don’t do this for the income; we do it for the outcomes.
cx: helping TO shepherd the newbies
Bob, I follow your blog and don’t see the post that Diane refers to above. Can you post a link here? Diane usually puts a link to the source article in her posts, but I didn’t see one above.
I had a similar experience when I tried to return to teaching in California 9 years ago. After three years I decided to become private tutor instead; I try to keep my rates affordable for middle class families (I could easily double them), and thus make less than $30K per year with no benefits or sick leave, but luckily I can afford that hit.
At least things were not as extreme in CA as your description of Florida. Nonetheless there is no doubt in my mind why the average teacher doesn’t make it past five years.
You describe the totally screwed up overregulation of teachers, but there is also another self-imposed problem due to seniority rules.
One always hears about the need for math and science teachers. I am able to teach all levels of math, physics, and chemistry. I passed the CSET subject exams the first time with little or no review, etc., when many teachers take repeated attempts to do so, but because of budget shortfalls from 2010-2012 and seniority rules, I was always in the first group to be laid off each year during the “Great” Recession.
When I was a manager in the software industry, I would NEVER treat my new employees the way teachers treat new teachers. Common sense says that you shouldn’t pile all the hardest discipline problems and the lowest achieving classes on new people, but the teaching profession continues to do so. As a software manager, I would always roll up my sleeves and do part of the grunt work myself and try to parcel out interesting assignments to everyone. It became apparent to me that I would have to wait years to be able to teach a class of good students who actually wanted to learn.
I was up at 4:45 AM every weekday morning after preparing lessons and grading papers till midnight. This was my routine and I am not exaggerating. I knew where every coffee shop was between my home and school…
I was one of the only teachers who would show up to counseling meetings with students in trouble, and I also made frequent calls home to parents to brief them on kids. I did not have a classroom and had all of my classes in other more senior teachers’ classrooms during their prep periods. This meant that I had to carry all of my books, papers, and a laptop in a heavy backpack up and down a three story building between classes AND find time to squeeze in a bathroom break when needed! The laptop the school gave me was so old and bad that I shelled out about $600 of my own money to get one that would enable me to teach.
I could go on, but I am sure you get my drift; I bet there are many other readers who have similar stories.
I completely agree that we need to restore teacher autonomy. A central theme at my blog is my constant struggle against state mandates overwhelming local control. Teachers need to band together to combat this garbage, but they also need to learn to be more generous to each other and rid the profession of a system that gives all the perks to senior teachers and leaves the dregs to “newbies.”
Your comments about the the low quality of the material you had to wade through, grammatical errors, etc., is another pet peeve of mine. I think it is a long term consequence of changes in educational philosophies that I described in my blog article “Never Believe Educational Experts or Me!” https://eduissues.com/2018/01/29/never-believe-educational-experts-or-me/
It was posted as a comment on Diane’s blog
Which article?
I don’t recall, David. Sorry. Here is a link to the pieces on Ed Deform on my blog: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/category/ed-reform/
BTW, David’s blog is a great read. I highly recommend it. Imagine schools using bottom-up continuous improvement processes run by teachers with the knowledge that people like David have. We would see real improvement in education.
Thanks, Bob.
ommon sense says that you shouldn’t pile all the hardest discipline problems and the lowest achieving classes on new people, but the teaching profession continues to do so.
In my first year of teaching, before my publishing career, there were five remedial English classes in my high school. I got all of them.
I had a “repeater” geometry class of 28 kids who had all failed the subject once. 12 kids had IEPs, all of which said “don’t sit this child next to another student with an IEP” (never mind that I learned later that there shouldn’t have been this many IEPs in a single class). That was an interesting geometry problem in its own right! In other classes I had kids with significant discipline problems including students who were on parole…
I had one fifth grade class with a student who was the “Principal’s pet’. The principal told him that if a teacher did anything he didn’t like to let her know. This kid would throw crayons out the door into the hallway and put his legs on top of his desk. He’d throw books out the window. She told the kid to call the abuse hotline if his parents ever spanked him. She gave him the number to call. By the end of the year, the kid was never in class and would walk around swearing at teachers. He was totally out of control.
The next year he was put into a behavioral disorder class.
If any kid was sent to the principal for discipline she would give the child candy and walk them back to his classroom. Once when a sub was in a different room a kid hit a girl over the head with a chair. One kid let down his pants.
This principal had just received her doctorate in education and wanted to move to a better paying district. People from that district came to the school on a certain day to appraise where she worked. The principal had sent letters to the worst students’ parents and told them to keep their child home that day. All the teachers gave her an outstanding recommendation, just to get rid of her. Unfortunately for that good district, this disaster was hired.
She had manipulated the superintendent into thinking she was magnificent. Teachers had sent a petition to the superintendent telling what was actually happening in the school. He didn’t believe the teachers.
The music teacher right before me had sued the principal for the evaluation that she gave. The music teacher won the suit and got a year’s salary.
There was NO amount of money that would convince me to work in that school. On the very last day of school, I involuntarily screamed at the top of my lungs as I walked to my car.
The secretary of the school said that she wanted to tell me to not take the job when I first entered the school. She said that she couldn’t do that.
A new principal was hired after this mess left and he took control and I heard that things got better.
“She told the kid to call the abuse hotline if his parents ever spanked him.”
Well, good for her for that much anyway (not that the hotline, unfortunately, would actually do anything about it). Spanking is abuse. If an adult hits another adult it’s battery and they can go to jail. What makes it okay for an adult to hit someone a third or a quarter of their size?
If an adult, with 18+ years of experience on the planet, can’t come up with a better way of managing a small child than violence, that adult shouldn’t be around other humans, most especially not young and vulnerable ones.
David, I giggled at your comment about not sitting IEP students next to each other. As a special education teacher, I (and all the other special ed teachers) used to use the term “preferential seating” for those easily distractible or disruptive students. That way the teacher was free to decide what they as the teacher preferred. 🙂
Other than what he wrote, what else is wrong? LOL
Sadly too, education is snot the only place where one has to bow down to the “upper intelligentsia”. Even in the military now one goes “by the book” which is often not up with the times and we get officers who toady up and get ahead while the creative more in touch with reality don’t. [Note Viet Nam].
For those who watched “the man who knew” regarding the 9/11 attacks will recognize what is going on in the U. S. now.
Education was once the search for truth relying on people who had studied in depth, were intellectually astute enough to digest this, who understood something about the “human condition”.
Now political hacks degrade the “education” of our children. Lies, post truths, alternative truths become the norm in society. Children are taught “facts” which the government OKs.
Sleep well America..
This is also happening the medical profession and throughout the business world. In general, Americans haven’t learned the lessons of bottom-up continuous improvement processes taught by the pioneers of the quality-control movement–by such visionaries as W. Edwards Deming and Joseph M. Juran–that you get continuous improvement by empowering workers to improve their own processes–by engaging their autonomy and intrinsic motivation. No one does his or her best work in conditions of low autonomy and micromanagement or when he or she is subject to excessive and continual external punishments and rewards, which are actually DEMOTIVATING for cognitive tasks.
This man could be the poster child for school choice/vouchers. Governments should just get out of education, and give families vouchers. Then the families could select a quality non-public school (that does not have all of these byzantine rules).
One of the oft-stated reasons that public school teachers leave the public school, and seek private school employment, is to get away from all of the red tape and bureaucracy.
The answer, Charles, is not to deprofessionalize teaching more but, rather, to require high-quality professional education of teachers and then to leave them alone, once they are on the job, to do their jobs, which would include providing them with ample time in their schedules for choosing materials, preparing lessons, collaborating with other teachers in Lesson Study-style quality circles, and so on. In other words: train professionals and then treat them like professionals.
The answer is certainly not to allow anyone without the requisite learning to take the job. That would be a disaster.
Here, my recommendations for a high-quality teacher preparation program for English teachers: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/04/09/what-should-be-taught-in-an-english-teacher-preparation-program/
I also wanted to note that I didn’t start that post with a list of my accomplishments because I wanted to toot my own horn. I wanted to show that I had to do all this nonsense despite the fact that I was obviously highly qualified for the job, but these bureaucratic requirements in the name of standardized accountability are excessive and invariant. I believe that teachers should be required to attend accredited teacher preparation programs, but I also think that state departments and politicians and district leaders need to get a clue about the excessive demands that they put on the time and energies of teachers. There are significant opportunity costs to these bureaucratic requirements. Every minute that I spent doing data chats or filling out an individualized professional development form was a minute that I wasn’t working with a kid or preparing a lesson.
The biggest issue faced by teachers is having enough time to do the job well. There is never enough time. No teacher can adequately meet the individual and varying needs of 196 students (a typical load for me), and properly preparing lessons and collaborating with other teachers to bring about continuous improvement requires lots of free time for REFLECTION, which public school teachers never have. If we wanted to see real improvement in US public school education, we would reduce the number of hours that teachers are in the classroom by at least a third, hold class sizes to a maximum of 20 students, and institute a program of Japanese-style Lesson Study whereby teachers meet with others in their departments once a week, for a few hours, to plan lessons, collaborate, share ideas and materials, tell war stories, talk about what is and isn’t working and so on. It is by such bottom-up processes that one gets real continuous improvement and not via top down deforms as standards bullet lists, high-stakes tests, and VAM. Real improvement will come only via such investment to reduce teacher loads so they actually have the time to do the job properly.
There’s another important moral to all this: People work best in conditions of autonomy. When such conditions exist, people rise to the occasion, they become personally invested in their work. People in general don’t get up in the morning and say to themselves, “Well, I would like to go in and do a lousy job of my work today.” But they do become so sick of the onerous crap they are required to do on the job that they stop caring. Imagine that you have a small business and a cleaning crew that comes in at the end of the work day. Then imagine that you were to stay and to follow the crew around and stand behind them while they are working and say, “No, move the rag counterclockwise, not clockwise. No, put the cleaning solution in the bucket before the water. etc.” The crew would resent you, and when your back was turned, they would begin cutting corners and doing the job poorly.
Workers and students need intrinsic motivation, not external punishments and rewards. When the focus is on the former, people make amazing things happen. That’s how people tick. Ed Deformers do not understand this.
This is so very true. The list of expectations and edicts are extensive in LAUSD also, where they keep adding “one more little thing” to ensure accountability, without ever removing anything. It seems to emanate from different office downtown, each claiming it will only take a few minutes to complete, without realizing there are dozens of other “few minutes” being asked of our time. And yes, it stems from the belief that teachers are untrustworthy and unprofessional. I always felt like I was being treated as the most senior child on the campus by the district. I always meant to keep track of all the directives and accountability tests, but could never find the time, so thank you for putting this list together.
A complete list, Melissa, would be many pages longer. LOL. I left a lot out.
It’s difficult to laugh and cry so hard while eating breakfast. Schools have become a travesty. Kindergarten registration was on Thursday. Bring them in, shoot them up with vaccines, so we can pump in the academics everyday just so they can spit it out through testing on laptop computers in two years. KIDS DON’T PLAY ANYMORE. I’m 64 and trying to figure out the answer to Why do I keep submitting myself to this commercialized racket????????
Thank you, Mary. I know. The list reads like something out of a Theatre of the Absurd play by Eugène Ionesco. It’s funny and tragic at the same time. Here, a poem about kids in the grip of standardized testing: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2017/10/02/the-coring-of-the-six-hundred-with-apologies-to-alfred-lord-tennyson/
Um, vaccines aren’t about “pumping in the academics”. They’re about herd immunity and ending mass epidemics like we used to have regularly. When’s the last time you heard about polio, measles, mumps or smallpox? Assuming your answer is, “just about forever”, thank the availability of vaccines.
dienne77: I read that children now have to get 36 different vaccinations. I’m sure that some of that number is to make money for drug companies. It has hit the absurd button.
I was at one poverty level school and the principal would have a large flat thing that she used to spank kids. I loved working at that school. If that is being used, even though it was against the law, then some parents do use this as a way to control. Be it good or bad, no principal has the right to interfere in a child’s life to the extent that this principal did. It was her decisions that put this fifth grade kid in a behavioral disorder class. He was running loose and swearing at teachers. I believe his vocabulary was much more advanced than mine at that time.
Agreed entirely with regard to vaccines, Dienne. Not vaccinating your kids is child abuse and should be, I think, criminalized. It’s very, very dangerous, for the kids and for others who might come into contact with them when they become infectious (e.g., babies too young to have been vaccinated yet, elderly people whose vaccines have worn off).
Children today receive more than 12 times as many vaccine doses than in 1940
Tuesday, April 23, 2013 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
Tags: vaccine schedule, immunizations, children
(NaturalNews) It is a fact that children today are far less able and free to develop their own natural immunity through proper nutrition and normal childhood development. This is due to the fact that the vast majority of them, at least in the industrialized world, are bombarded with an obscene onslaught of vaccines before they are even old enough to attend kindergarten. Data compiled by the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) reveals that children today receive as many as 49 doses of 14 vaccines before they reach age six, which is roughly 12 times higher than the number of vaccines administered to children back in 1940.
Since 1995, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued yearly revisions to its official childhood immunization schedule, typically adding an increasing amount of vaccines to every new revision. Prior to 1995, CDC issued only periodic updates to its official vaccine schedule, which were typically released every five or six years. But in recent years, the number and frequency of vaccines on the yearly-revised schedule has increased dramatically, as have the number of combination, or multivalent, vaccines being recommended for children.
“Our children are among the most highly vaccinated children in the world, and they are among the most chronically ill and disabled,” explains NVIC in a powerful infographic outlining the current vaccine schedule…
https://www.naturalnews.com/040042_vaccine_schedule_immunizations_children.html
Vaccines save lives. New vaccines are continually being developed to combat disease, and this is a very good thing indeed. Please read this: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/whatifstop.htm
There are lots of “natural medicine” quacks peaching this anti-vaxx nonsense in order to sell their snake-oil “natural” special potions and elixirs and diets and so on. Quacks, just like the traveling snakeoil salesman of years gone by. These people are very dangerous and are themselves and infection that has spread all across the Internet. When kids are not vaccinated, kids get sick with preventable diseases that can leave them permanently debilitated or dead. As with climate change, there is an OVERWHELMING scientific consensus on this. One can believe the science, or one can believe the snakeoil salesman on the holistic healing sites and Jenny McCarthy on Oprah. I’ll go with the science, thank you.
Vaccinations: Know the Risks and Failures
The non-profit (501c3) charity National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) was established in 1982 by parents of DPT vaccine injured children to prevent vaccine injuries and deaths through public education. NVIC co-founders worked with Congress to secure vaccine safety informing, recording, reporting and research provisions in the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986…
After Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, to give drug companies marketing vaccines in the U.S. a liability shield from vaccine injury lawsuits, the “first, do no harm” precautionary approach to vaccination by doctors and other vaccine administrators changed. Reasons for delaying or not giving a child federally recommended and state mandated vaccines were revised by public health officials and medical trade associations so that fewer children qualified for a medical exemption to vaccination, such as when children suffer convulsions/seizures, high pitched screaming or collapse/shock (hypotonic hyporesponsive episodes) after receiving pertussis-containing vaccines. 43 44
The prevention of vaccine reactions became less of a priority after Congress amended the Act in 1987 to extend vaccine injury lawsuit liability protection to doctors and other vaccine administrators. Then, with the assistance of DHHS exercising rulemaking authority, between 1989 and 1995 Congress added more amendments to the Act to weaken the law’s vaccine safety and compensation provisions.
After 2011, when the U.S. Supreme Court effectively removed all liability from vaccine companies, public health officials and medical trade associations stepped up pressure on state legislatures to restrict or remove non-medical vaccine exemptions for religious and conscientious or philosophical beliefs…
https://www.nvic.org/vaccines-and-diseases/Vaccinations–Know-the-risks-and-failures-.aspx#.XLJCww88ekg.gmail
I really don’t want to have this discussion here. I don’t think it an appropriate forum. Sorry.
Bob Shepherd: We can agree to disagree. I am a fan of Dr. Mercola’s. I have one more comment under moderation.
People can disagree. But their rights stop at the noses of other people. When people don’t vaccinate, other people get sick and suffer terrible debilitation and/or death. You have free speech. But you can’t yell fire in a crowded theatre. You have a right to deny yourself medical treatment, but you can’t deny it to others, including your own children. There are limitations on such rights in order to protect the rights of others. Sane limitations.
Bob Shepherd: I have no influence on anyone except myself. I remember getting just a few vaccinations in my lifetime. I believe they were good and that most do help people.
THE NVIC. Nice, official, scientific-sounding name for a quack science organization. I get mailings all the time from places called things like The National Senior Protection Center telling me that “the government has just approved new low-cost medical benefits that I can apply for FREE of charge, with only MINIMAL handling fees. Same kind of scam. But enough. No more of this. Diane’s blog is not the place for this. Not vaccinating kids kills people.
Bob Shepherd: Do not believe everything the medical establishment says. They are out to make money. Not everything the medical profession does is reliable. Even places like the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, which is the largest research facility in the United States, does horrible things.
I have a strong dislike of the medical profession. I have mentioned that I was a patient at the National Institutes of Health for a study called Natural History Study for Neurofibromatosis type 2. I was in the study for four and a half years. This is a rare nerve disorder and the usual first symptom is tumors growing inside each hearing nerve that goes from the ear into the brain.
After around 2-3 years there were 160 people in the study . At that time I was the ONLY one functioning normally. Most people who have this disease die at age 35.
I shrank a meningioma brain tumor 2 mm and this showed up on an MRI done at NIH. My hearing was improving and the head researcher agreed that this was happening.
In November 2012, I received a letter from the head researcher at NIH telling me that I was being kicked out of the study because I didn’t get psychiatric help. NIH’s psychiatrist wrote up a bogus report declaring that I was so severely mentally ill that they were afraid that without psychiatric help that I’d be a threat to myself or others.
I had a report written up by a licensed clinical psychologist who was also a Qigong healer. His report said that he saw no evidence of psychotic behavior but that the Western medical establishment did not recognize healing.
I sent the psychologist’s report to the Director of NIH, the psychiatrist, the head of the NINDS’s public relations department and the head researcher. I never heard from them again.
Read about the trials of Dr. Royal Rife. He created a vibrational method of healing cancer in the 1930’s. It was verified in a research done in California. I believe he had 16 patients who were in terminal stage 4 cancer. All were cured within 3 months except for 2 who had to have further treatments before being cured.
He died penniless and the AMA would not let his method be continued. Doctors, and there were a number of them who were getting the same results, were told that their medical licenses would be taken away if they continued to use this method. They all stopped.
Video: Dr. Royal Raymond Rife: The “SUPPRESSED” Cancer Cure?..
firstflyover
Published on May 21, 2012
Send this to your Doctor…
This video covers just a short part of the amazing story of Dr. Royal Raymond Rife. His life and his CURE for cancer using his frequency instruments. Please Google all the information in this video and learn about this suppressed cure. This is a crime.
There’s science, and then there is quackery. Unfortunately, the Internet has given quacks like the anti-vaxxers a broad channel for funneling adherents to their wacko alternative universe Galapagos islands in cyberspace where they can hone pseudoscience to such a degree that it fools a lot of folks into eschewing actual science in favor of it. And all of that would be merely regrettable if there weren’t very real consequences for other people. Here, from an actual scientific organization, the Centers for Disease Control: “We know that a disease that is apparently under control can suddenly return, because we have seen it happen, in countries like Japan, Australia, and Sweden. Here is an example from Japan. In 1974, about 80% of Japanese children were getting pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine. That year there were only 393 cases of whooping cough in the entire country, and not a single pertussis-related death. Then immunization rates began to drop, until only about 10% of children were being vaccinated. In 1979, more than 13,000 people got whooping cough and 41 died. When routine vaccination was resumed, the disease numbers dropped again.”
But enough. I am not going to comment on this further. The antivaxx movement is dangerous nonsense and this is not an appropriate forum.
Bob Shepherd: Can you agree that not everything the Western medical establishment does is respectable? End of conversation.
Yes, I agree. There are some doctors in the West who go into the anti-vaxx snake oil business and make fortunes selling herbal supplements and the like online to the disciples in their anit-vaxx cults. And there is nothing respectable about the US paying TWICE what other countries in the OECD do for healthcare because it is alone in not having a sane universal, single-payer healthcare system.
Bob Shepherd: Oh dear. You had to mention herbal supplements as equivalent to snake oil. My primary care doctor is a certified physician and is my primary care doctor. He has his own pharmacy of alternative supplements that heal. He does fill out prescriptions if that is what is necessary.
Healing goes slowly but does work. Many hospitals in China have a Western side or a Qigong healing side. I have worked with a Qigong healer in Montreal and a Qigong specialist about an hour from my place.
The National Institutes of Health now has an alternative medicine section and is doing studies on Qigong healing. It receives a very small amount of money compared to the ‘real’ doctors at NIH.
There are a number of different healers who are not ‘snake oil’ sellers. I have worked with several of them. I used one method of shrinking a brain tumor from reading the book, “Intention Heals” by Dr. Adam McLeod. He is a doctor in Canada who only treats cancer patients. He can see inside each person and knows how to treat them.
I found one treatment in his book that was meant to do shrinkage of cancer tumors. I used it to shrink a NF2 brain tumor. I visualized the tumor and filled it with metallic nanoparticles. Then I sent imaginary radio waves to the tumor. This would cause me to sweat. 9 times I was sweating so hard that sweat was dripping off my chin.
When I went to NIH, this tumor had shrunk 2mm. This type of tumor NEVER shrinks. This is one example of ‘snake oil’ that works.
I have no doubt, Carol, that’s one’s state of mind has enormous effects on one’s physical health and prognosis for recovery. I am very glad to hear that you have seen positive results!!!! My very best to year, dear Carol. And I want you to know that I typically really enjoy your contributions to this blog.
Bob Shepherd: Thank you for the compliment. I very much enjoy your contributions to Diane’s blog.
There are many things that happen that have no common explanations. I wish medical science would look into more of why ‘miracles’ happen. I have studied with a number of healers and am currently working with a Cherokee Shaman.
The US tried its best to get rid of the Native Indian culture. A lot would have been destroyed if those people had been totally wiped out. My shaman is an amazing person with extraordinary abilities.
Vaxxed: How Vaccine Safety Has Been Undermined and Suppressed
October 13, 2018
…Importantly, the vaccine industry has long shied away from evaluating vaccinated versus unvaccinated populations to determine potential differences in general health outcomes. The few independent scientists who have attempted such an investigation have little comfort to give to those who believe vaccines are essential for health, and mandatory use of vaccines by all children is the only way to protect society from disease.
One such study,2 published just last year, examined health outcomes among infants 3 to 5 months old following the introduction of diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) and oral polio vaccine in Guinea-Bissau, which took place in the early 1980s. This population offered the rare opportunity to compare vaccinated and unvaccinated children due to the way the vaccines were rolled out in the West African country.
Shockingly, researchers discovered “DTP was associated with fivefold higher mortality than being unvaccinated.” According to the authors, “All currently available evidence suggests that DTP vaccine may kill more children from other causes than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus or pertussis.”
In other words, the researchers concluded that DTP vaccine weakened the children’s immune systems, rendering them vulnerable to a whole host of other often deadly diseases and serious health problems.
Other clinical trials in West Africa revealed that a high titer measles vaccine interacted with the DTP vaccine, resulting in a 33 percent increase in infant mortality.3 In this case, the finding led to the withdrawal of that experimental measles vaccine targeting very young infants, but what would have happened had those studies never been done? Clearly, we need many more like them.
In the U.S., the CDC now recommends that children receive 69 doses of 16 vaccines by the time they’re 18 years old, with 50 doses of 14 vaccines given before the age of six.4 How does this affect their health? And is anyone actually tracking the health outcomes of children adhering to the federally recommended childhood vaccine schedule and state mandatory vaccination programs?
The answer is no. We do not know if or how all of these vaccinations are affecting the general health and mortality of our children…
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2018/10/13/vaxxed-film-on-vaccine-safety.aspx
Step right up folks and get your Dr. Mercola miracle cure alternative medicines! https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/becoming-an-edupundit-made-ez/
Christine, you lost me with this anti-vaccine spiel. Vaccines save lives. Unvaccinated children are at risk and put others at risk. Right now, NYC declared a health emergency due to a measles epidemic, mainly among Orthodox Jews who don’t trust government.
Bob Shepherd: “One can believe the science, or one can believe the snakeoil salesman on the holistic healing sites.”
Science DOES NOT recognize healing. There is no money from that. Did you recognize the work that Dr. Royal Rife did to cure cancer in the 1930’s? Did you read how I got throw out of NIH for being severely mentally ill because I had healed and they couldn’t accept that happening?
[I feel like I’m beating a dead horse.]
I have worked with a number of healers who are authentic but none of them are recognized by the Western medical establishment. Many of the wish to stay ‘under the radar’ of the medical establishment.
Read the story of Anita Moorjani. She was given 36 hours left to live due to cancer tumors all over her body. She had a Near Death Experience and crossed over. She met her father who told her it wasn’t her time yet. She came back and was totally healed within a few weeks. Her book, “Dying to be me!” is a NYT’s best seller. She is an international speaker. She had a remarkable and complete recovery of her health.
Why isn’t the medical establishment studying why this happened? A miracle simply means that the doctors don’t know the reason something happened. I sent what her doctors had written to the head researcher at NIH who was in charge of the program I was in.
Western doctors recognize prescriptions and surgery, and many inoculations for children. That makes money. What they do is good for many people but they could do a much better job.
Dying to be me! Anita Moorjani at TEDxBayArea
TEDx Talks
Published on Nov 30, 2013
Anita Moorjani has become something of an international sensation since her book “Dying to be Me” hit the New York Times bestsellers list only two weeks after its release in March, 2012. World-renowned author, Dr. Wayne Dyer had been instrumental in bringing Anita’s story to public attention, and wrote the foreword to her book.
Thanks, Bob & Diane.
Having taught (mainly) Latin here in Jax since right after the sky-is-falling ‘A Nation at Risk’ came out, I’ve certainly seen most of this nonsense.
While we’re focusing on the inanity, however, millennials are continuing to disrupt public education in ways that the business community loves:
1) TFA has greatly disrupted colleges of Ed. because corps members can teach w/o a single course.
2) The two-and-through mentality of TFA reflects the disdain for and deprofessionalization of career educators—as well as unions.
3) Non-profits such as KIPP and other no-nonsense charters, TFA, etc. are the darlings
of the business world, who see their venture philanthropy as the solution to old dogs like me (us).
I fear non-profits more than the DoE. One only needs to look at New Orleans to see my fear in action.
Having taught at the beginning of my career (in the 1980s) and again at the end of my career (in the 2010s), I saw this deprofessionalization firsthand. The contrast between the teaching environment then and now was really striking. In the old days, teachers made their own decisions about textbooks and materials. Administrative requirements were minimal (keep a grade book and a log of topics of your lessons). At department meetings, teachers actually made decisions. Now, at department meetings, they simply listen to a read-out of this week’s administrative mandates. In the old days, if someone had a question about why a particular novel was being taught in Grade 10, the Principal would say, “Go ask the English Department chair, or ask Shepherd–he’s the American lit guy. Now, the district or the school administrators make those decisions despite having no expertise to draw on in doing so. Teachers used to meet to plan their curricula for the coming year, and they wrote their own tests. Now, they are handed a curriculum and told to stick to it, and they are forced to use district- or state-mandated standardized finals. There’s basically a “shut up and do as you are told” mentality now. In the old days, an English teacher could read a great article in The English Journal about, say, sentence combining to teach syntactic fluency, about using archetypal story structures from myths and folk tales to operationalize instruction in story writing, or about the ubiquity of dead metaphor in ordinary speech and go back and talk with the other English teachers and incorporate these new ideas into the curriculum. Now, if it’s not already on David Coleman’s puerile bullet list of standards, it’s dead in the water. There will be changes in what is taught when the powers at be convene their Commissariat in a few years to issue the next bullet list of national “standards.” Teachers, today, are basically herded and told what to do, just as they kids are. And in such conditions of micromanagement and low autonomy, teachers loose motivation and the skill to effect continuous improvement. This deprofessionalization of teaching is criminal and sickening and a direct consequence of wrong-headed, top-down Education Deform in the name of “accountability” based on garbage “data.”
I was in Finland last May where teachers are in charge of their curriculum. So many people want to be teachers in Finland that there is not enough room in their teacher education program for them. Could there be a lesson here?
EXACTLY!!!! They put people through rigorous teacher preparation programs–they train professionals–and then they leave them alone to do their jobs. That’s what works. Clearly. American Ed Deformers don’t understand this.
Here, my recommendations for a high-quality teacher preparation program in English: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/04/09/what-should-be-taught-in-an-english-teacher-preparation-program/
Any student would be lucky to have Bob as a teacher.
It is sickening to think of all the teachers like him who have left because of the policies of dumb as hammers politicians (forgive the redumbdancy)
By the way, What’s the difference between a politician and a hammer?
Answer: The hammer is actually useful for something
A group of larks is called an exaltation. A group of crows is called a murder. A group of baboon is called a troop, a flange, or a congress. The last of these is extremely unfair to baboons. There are, ofc, exceptions in Congress–Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and AOC, for example. We need a lot more people of that caliber.
Though I must admit I have never witnessed a congress of baboons, having seen the US Congress in action, i am willing to bet (sight unseen) that a congress of baboons has both more intelligent and more productive discussions than the US Congress has.
There might be a few exceptions as you say, but even the exceptions do stupid things (eg, Sanders and Warrens support for the continued Federal mandate of state testing under ESSA) and as Forrest Gump’s mother said, stupid is as stupid does.
An international teacher I know needs to renew his Florida certificate to continue teaching at his IB school. Florida will not accept his Finland master’s degree courses because his university is not on their list! Why would Finland bother to fill out the forms Florida requires to be a certified university for Florida certification? It’s absurd. So what will he do? Take the test again.
Insane
I know a woman who attended Suffolk University and Harvard and did her clinical practice to become certified as a clinical psychologist in Massachusetts. These two top-flight universities were not on Florida’s approved program reciprocity list, so to practice as a psychologist in Florida, she would basically have to do her education all over again. I suspect that psychologists in Florida lobbied the legislature to limit reciprocity in order to reduce competition from workers coming from other states.
“The Age of Deformers”
Aka
“The Age that will Bury Us”
(after The Age of Aquarius (5th Dimension) )
When the PISA’s in the Randumb House
And stupid is as stupid does
Then tests will guide the teaching
And cranks will steer because
This is the dawning of the Age that will bury us
Age that will bury us
Will bury us, will bury us
Ed and stats misunderstanding
Ignorance is just astounding
Tons more falsehoods and derisions
Chetty having dreams and visions
Cattle model mathturbation
And the mind’s tergiversation
Will bury us, Will bury us
When the PISA’s in the Randumb House
And stupid is as stupid does
Then tests will guide the teaching
And cranks will steer because
This is the dawning of the Age that will bury us,
Age that will bury us
Will bury us
Let the sun shine, let the sun shine in
The sun shine in, na na na na na….
Sing along with the Fifth Dimension
Oh my Lord, SomeDAM. You’ve outdone yourself. That’s a masterpiece. I am completely KICKLED. That’s a portmanteau of killed and tickled.
What are the odds that teachers in Florida’s corporate charter school and voucher school industry are NOT required to do this — all they have to do to teach is work longer hours for less pay and no benefits and sign a nondisclosure agreement that’s designed to send them to prison for decades where they will be required to work for pennies by the hour to pay back the stiff seven figure money penalty written into the nondisclosure agreement?
Most charter schools in Florida are required to hire certified teachers. However, when he was governor, Rick Scott introduced and got passed a bill creating special types of charter schools called “Schools of Hope” that do not have to hire certified teachers. I believe that there is no requirement that private school teachers be certified, and Florida is in the process, right now, of vastly expanding its “scholarships” program, which will provide a lot more taxpayer money that parents can use to pay private school tuition.
Basically, right-wing legislators in Florida and elsewhere have learned that if they call vouchers “scholarships,” they can slide voucher programs past their constituents. The right-wing in the US is very good at this sort of renaming. Mike Huckabee advised people at the CPAC a few years ago to go back to their states and rename their Common Core State Standards because they name had become so toxic, and that’s what many of them did. So, those states have the Common Core still, but under new names. Similarly, the right-wing killed Medicare for all with talk of “death panels” and unions with “right-to-work” legislation. And, ofc, Coleman’s puerile bullet lists are continually referred to (laughably) as “higher standards,” and use of the invalid, unreliable high-stakes standardized graduation tests is called “data-based accountability,” even though the tests don’t measure what they purport to measure–are basically examples of garbage in, garbage out. The right in the USA is VERY GOOD at developing Orwellian Newspeak in service of its agenda. See this little dictionary: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/02/22/from-the-reformish-lexicon/
BTW, Diane was too kind in her comments above. Her manuscript was BRILLIANT. She’s one of the best writers I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, and I’ve edited work by many of the country’s leading public intellectuals. Her learning and insight in education is extraordinary. Here’s what I think of Diane Ravitch, who should be, without any doubt, our next Secretary of Education: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2017/09/04/our-boadicea-our-jeanne-darc-is-a-79-year-old-grandmother-an-existence-proof-of-the-stupidity-of-ageism/
Bob, everything you described in Florida is the same here in California. Fact is we’re not teachers; we’re data producers. It is no longer our job to educate young people. It is our job to use websites that ask us questions to which the only accepted answer is use more websites. The twisted road of “professional development” leads online. That’s why none of it makes any sense. Put the students in front of screens, put the data in the Cloud where Gate$ and Hasting$ can snatch it and sell it. Ka-ching. Period.
A lot of Bob’s writings and the comments of others hits home hard. I’ve been a teacher in the public schools for almost 19 years. I started the same year as 911 happened and shortly thereafter No Child was pushed down our throats. Everything has changed in education since those pivotal points in our history. I did my student teaching and some subbing back on the mid 80’s so I saw how things were back then and how they digressed in the early 2000’s. One thing is certain, we are not teachers anymore. Even in the primary grades, students do not get to really learn. They are force fed basic skills that are prescribed in our curriculum. It is sad. I don’t blame any teacher that wants to bail out. I am only sticking it out a few more years (61 currently) and my attitude is “I dare you to fire me.” In my state (AZ) they are so desperate for teachers they are certifying people with no education background. The state made drastic cuts in education during the recession which the schools are still feeling the effects of. The charter schools are taking over this state. They are sucking the money out of our schools and recently the BASIS charter schools in AZ were found during an audit to not be financially sound (where do you think the money is going?). The discipline problems in the schools are also driving away teachers (and subs.) There are no consequences for inappropriate behaviors and the students run the school b/c the principal and district are afraid of the parents–mainly that if parents are unsatisfied they will go to the charter schools. It is all sad, dysfunctional and perverse what is happening to public education. And yes, we are treated like children and there is a lot of pitting teachers against each other. We are treated very patronizing by those “higher beings” in admin. They treat us like we are numbnuts which perhaps we are because we put up with so much bs and crap from those who know better than us. My question is why would anyone enter this profession today?
It saddens me so much, Desert Sunflower, to read such comments. Ed Deform has taken an enormous toll on US public education. But the good news is that people are fighting back and winning. Ed Deform is a fake movement with no adherents who aren’t paid shills. And its dying of its own dead weight, of its inability to fulfill any of its promises, even by its own measures. After 20 years of this nonsense, there have been no statistically significant increases in test scores and no closing of achievement gaps, but there has been this vast dumbing down of curricula and pedagogy and deprofessionalization of teaching. It’s been a long, sad, sorry, precipitous ride into ruin, but, again, the tide is reversing. People are getting wise to this crap. They are fighting back and winning. One day soon, people will be writing books about the Dark Ages of Ed Deform. It will be remembered as we now remember the racial eugenics theories of the 1920s and 30s that gave rise to the Nazis, as a period of madness. Bullet lists of vague skills standards, high-stakes standardized summative testing, value-added measurement, vouchers and privately managed charters, school grading, data walls and data chats–all this load of nonsense will soon be remembered as we remember other pseduoscientific fads of the past–phrenology and bloodletting. People are waking up. And when that happens, a lot of Vichy collaborators with Ed Deform are going to have a lot to answer for, and most are going to claim that they always opposed it, and then there will be a few, like Diane Ravitch, who are remembered as having been lights in the darkness.
cx: And it’s dying of its own dead weight,
edit:
“patronizingly” not ‘patronizing”— and “those who know better than us” should be in quotes. Thanks.
Bob, I think the busy work is even worse than you’ve described. Why? I’d bet that after you did it all, no one else bothered to even glance at it beyond what would be needed to verify, in the most cursory manner, that it got done. (unless principals are burdened with the task of reading every page?) They have so much free time during the day, just like teachers do, right? As if all that isn’t bad enough, where O where are all those documents today? One wonders what would happen if you suddenly developed a need to review some of them and asked to get them back. Even Stanislaw Lem would be shivering in fear in a corner if he heard this tale.
“Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (Pamiętnik znaleziony w wannie, 1961) – Kafkaesque novel set in the distant future about a secret agent, whose mission in an unnamed ministry is so secret that no one can tell him what it is. Translated by Michael Kandel and Christine Rose”
Love this comment, Jon. Thank you. I shall look up that tale by Lem!
Jon
“I’d bet that after you did it all, no one else bothered to even glance at it beyond what would be needed to verify, in the most cursory manner, that it got done.”
You make a superb and often overlooked point, one that I have been putting to the test for the past five+ years. Taking a minimalist approach to the busy work not only saved me endless of time but it also provided lots of comic relief. I played a simple game that became progressively more amusing: could I write so little that I would be asked for more. Well, had you made that bet Jon, you would have won in my neck of the woods.
” I planned, wrote, and edited over 50 highly successful textbooks and online instructional programs ”
How old are you, Bob, 100? Anyways, the story is unbelievable.
Typically, Mate, I had a staff helping me with these books, though I did much of the planning, writing, and editing myself.
And, Issac Asimov wrote or edited over 500 titles.
Yeah, but he was like 1000 when he died, while according to your pic, you are 31 or so.
Nor should we forget some of the writers of old. Charles Wesley, the Methodist poet of American Protestantism in the second Great Awakening, wrote over ten thousand hymns.
And many of them were masterpieces!
Thanks, Mate. I’m 55 in that pic, taken a few years ago.
OK, Mate. Updated with a recent pic!
Máté, how are you feeling? Are you recovering well from your surgery? All the best to you and yours!
It’s all good, really. I am recovering much faster than thought. Thanks.
That’s really good to hear. Much love to you and yours.
Mate,
I hope you recover fully
This community is rooting for you
Diane
Thank you guys. According to these pics, just 8 days after surgery, I could outrun my son.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/PUmqQvuhXcxssu8K7
Reality is different, but the recovery is really unexpectedly fast.
Máté Wierdl: Great photos!! Now you have proved that us older people are fantastic. Keep up the great running. [HA!] Your son has a great sense of humor and so do you!! That is what keeps us young.
Mate, that’s very impressive!
Máté Wierdl: Fantastic! Glad to hear that!!
A brilliant piece of writing. Thank you Bob. This mirrors my experiences as a teacher for the last 17 years – frighteningly. The paperwork and data collection demands of the modern Ed bureaucracy have largely hamstrung teachers’ ability to be effective. There is a great scene in Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” where Tuttle (Robert Deniro) is engulfed in a stream of flying newspapers to the point where he is immobile. This is what teaching today is beginning to feel like. Teaching used to be what that weird girl/guy who always reads and can’t do much else went into. Now it’s a privateer’s gold rush with corporations and hedge funds wielding greater influence over Ed policy. With scant remuneration and hostile environments like these who will go into this profession anymore?
Yes indeed. Very like an absurdist scene from Brazil! LOL.
I was so impressed by this post when Bob wrote it last week. I was very busy yesterday, so I did not get to comment. One of the things I was doing was having coffee with a friend who is retired. Then we worked up our music for Easter Sunday when we will play together for congregational hymns and other liturgical music. He is reading Hamlet.
It got me to thinking about our different paths to life. He was educated in a public school near Memphis. I went to a public school for elementary and a private school for high school. Our paths crossed mostly over traditional music, a thing neither of us got from school.
Here is what the deform advocates do not understand: we get the good things out of a good education long after we leave school. Often these thing do not even relate to our specific course of study. The only true indication of whether we get a good education or not lies wholly in the degree to which we value its broad goals years after we pass on to our lives. School is the soil from which a good society grows, and counting the corn kernels from a crop may say something broadly, but the real question is whether there is continued fertility.
If I expect my students to instantly enjoy history, I will be disappointed. There are many people who never come to understand history. If, on ther per hand, I can plant a seed that will grow into reading about some subject and reflecting on it later in life, I have succeeded. Not even the agricultural statistics guy, Bill Sanders, can figure out how to “measure” that one. Educational success cannot be quantified.
Because of this, the business model, which crept into education about the time I hired on, is the intellectually bankrupt idea leading us into the mess we are mired in. You can count money. You can count stock prices. You can count corn, cars, and dead armadillos. But you know education has succeeded when your friend tells you he is really enjoying reading Hamlet.
“[C] ounting the corn kernels from a crop may say something broadly, but the real question is whether there is continued fertility.”
Oh. My. Lord. Roy, that is so BEAUTIFULLY put!!!
Roy, this is such a beautiful piece. May I share it on my blog?
I would, of course, be flattered. You are always so gracious and effusive in your praise of the works of others, a remarkable thing in view of your own penetrating analysis of policies and ideas.
Thank you, Roy! Here it is: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/04/14/roy-turrentine-on-the-long-term-effects-of-a-good-education-and-one-of-the-many-things-that-ed-deformers-dont-understand/
Thanks, Bob. I think that what we would call a terrible big compliment.
I’m not sure where to put this video. It shows what dementia people should be getting. I have been a hospice volunteer for around 9 years and the hospital where I work had a hospice wing that has now closed due to lack of earning enough money. There is still one hospice patient that I regularly visit who has Alzheimer’s. She sits in a wheel chair day after day after day. She has a TV in her room but has progressed in the 2 years that I’ve seen her to the point whereby she no longer can to pencil puzzles. She is unhappy even though her children regularly visit. Why wouldn’t someone be unhappy in a traditional hospital setting? Her eyesight isn’t that great and she complains about the amount of medication that she has to take because it makes her sleep a lot. She is a fantastic person. I’d love to see her in this village in Amsterdam.
See what Amsterdam is doing for dementia patients. If America really cared, and it doesn’t, this type of thing would become available in the US. The wealthy can afford the best but the rest of us won’t get much.
This is a TED talk.
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The “dementia village” that’s redefining elder care | Yvonne van Amerongen
Many of us are going to suffer from Dementia as we age and I hope that facilities like the Hogeweyk dementia care center in Amsterdam become commonplace. If you ever have a loved one suffer from Dementia then I hope you remember that when they are confused that is when they need compassion.
How would you prefer to spend the last years of your life: in a sterile, hospital-like institution or in a village with a supermarket, pub, theater and park within easy walking distance? The answer seems obvious now, but when Yvonne van Amerongen helped develop the groundbreaking Hogeweyk dementia care center in Amsterdam 25 years ago, it was seen as a risky break from tradition. Journey with van Amerongen to Hogeweyk and get a glimpse at what a reimagined nursing home based on freedom, meaning and social life could look like.
TED
Published on Apr 8, 2019
I didn’t know that corporal punishment is still so widely used.
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Opinion | The Supreme Court didn’t ban corporal punishment. Local democracy did.
By Ryan Park
April 11
A few months ago, with a quiet vote by a local school board, nearly two centuries of corporal punishment in North Carolina public schools came to an end.
North Carolina law still allows schools to inflict “physical pain upon the body of a student,” but school boards have the final say. Just 12 years ago — when the legislature last voted to maintain corporal punishment statewide — about 70 percent of North Carolina’s 115 school districts allowed instructors to hit their students. Since that time, however, in a triumph of local activism, all of those districts have reversed course. Graham County was the last holdout. Yet when the end came, it was uncontroversial — the board voted unanimously to end the practice with little public debate. Now, a bipartisan group of legislators is seeking to change state law to ban it for good…
Corporal punishment in public schools remains formally legal in 19 states; in at least three of them — Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas — a majority of schools still report using it. But in most of the United States, evolving social mores have led to its de facto abolition…
https://wapo.st/2G8nNJi?tid=ss_mail&utm_term=.9d6be23c3336
According to this article, corporal punishment is still actively used in more places than you mention—including Tennessee—in 25% of the schools.
http://neatoday.org/2016/10/17/corporal-punishment-in-schools/
In my first teaching job, in my first year out of college, I was given ALL the remedial English preps in my high school. The teachers were all required to keep a big wooden paddle in their chalk tray and to use it when kids got out of line. When I refused to do so, my principal got really upset with me. There were continually kids out in the hallway being paddled by their teachers.
I had one class that consistent entirely of remedial 11th-grade boys. The Principal called me on the carpet because he saw us, several days in a row, out in the parking lot with our heads under cars. But there was a method to my madness. Those boys and I produced a manual for doing simple repairs on cars. Cars were these boys’ great passion, and they threw themselves intensely into this project–planning and writing and editing and debating the content and revising, revising, revising. This was one of the most successful units that I ever taught.
Find THAT in David Coleman’s puerile bullet list of so-called “higher standards.”
I am completing my 23rd year of teaching, something I came to fulltime when I was 49,and from which I have tried to retire twice before. During this span I have worked in 5 public high schools in two states and four districts, two charter middle schools in DC, two middle schools in the district in which I spent most of my career and in which I won my biggest teaching award and from which I retired, and a brief stint at a private school serving severely emotionally disturbed students in which I taught all four required high school social studies courses to a total of 18 students. In general I have been very successful in reaching students, but the job of teaching in a public environment has become increasingly impossible, and Robert identifies many of the reasons.
I have rarely been required to write formal lesson plans except when being observed. That is because people who oversee me in general have come to understand that what has enabled me to reach my students and be “successful” as a teacher has been my willingness to turn on a dime to meet their needs. Ask me after a lesson why I did what I did and I can give you detailed explanations. Ask me to document in advance in detail what I plan to do is often a waste of time, because I have to go where the lesson and the students go, and since at time I have had 4 preps and at times 196 students on my rosters, I do not have time to waste, not if I am going to read and correct where appropriate all work turned in by the next class – something key to having students understand properly (if they are making common mistakes do not I have to address that BEFORE I move on??).
It is not that I don’t plan. I think long and hard about content, research exercises that might help students connect. Robert mentions Multiple Intelligences. I am predominantly Musical-Rhythmic, so I understand why the verbal-linguistic approach of many classrooms is so difficult for many students. I try to provide multiple points of access and multiple ways of demonstrating knowledge, helping students to develop skill and confidence in domains that might otherwise be alien and even intimidating to them.
But we lose so much time to mandatory literacy tasks, mandatory testing, that do not really contribute to student learning. Students get turned off.
We do not provide the necessary free time during the day, nor do students get exercise/gym/movement on a regular basis. Thus many students have too much energy that has to go somewhere, and tends to interrupt the learning that has too many courses and too many objectives. I have taught in a high school in which students had 8 classes a day, a few 9 with a zero period. I have taught students taking ten including those they were trying to do on their own. I have seen 10th and 11th graders taking 5 or 6 AP courses at a time when a full load at most colleges is now 4 and not the five I took as a freshman at Haverford in 1963-64 when I was 17. And remember, some of those tenth graders start the year as young as 13.
For a variety of reasons, I am seriously exploring leaving public school teaching, because it is taking too much out of me. I know that I am making a difference for at least some of my students. Friday I had one problematic student tell his class he was not going to respond with anger and sarcasm to another student as he regular does because he has too much respect for Mr. B., which is what many students call me. I want to still keep teaching at least for a while,but have seriously considered moving to an independent school setting where my concentration can be on the students before me, where I do not lose so much time to things that really do not help most students. I was under serious consideration for an independent school whose orientation very much fit my progressive orientation (which I am limiting in following in most public school settings) for which I would have taken a 50% pay cut, but as of now they are not sure they have sufficient enrollment to bring me on board.
I am a professional. I have a lot of experience. Beyond the multiple teaching awards, I have addressed college and graduate school classes on education, written for the general media (Washington Post and New York Times for example), educational publications (Education Week/Teacher), served as a peer reviewer for four different professional publications, regularly reviewed books on education (including by Diane, Linda Darling-Hammond, and other notables), served as a resource/advisor on educational policy and issues to candidates for Governor, US Senate, US House, State Legislature, and to officeholders at federal, state, and local levels.
I think I know what I am doing as a teacher.
Over the years I have taught Middle School English, Reading, Ancient World History, and US History. At the High School level I have taught US History, World History, Study Skills, Social Issues, Government, Comparative Religion, DC History, and Economics. That has included four different AP Courses. I have served as a Reader for the AP US Government & Politics Exam.
And over the years I have become increasingly disenchanted with AP, even though it often means I get more committed students. It has too much breadth in coverage, not enough depth on any topics, is too focused on the exam in May, and has too many students who are not really functioning at a College level, even many who are juniors or seniors. I note that not only are some colleges refusing to give credit for AP, but that a group of the most prestigious independent schools in the DC area (including Sidwell Friends announced last summer that they were dropping out of AP. I have always felt I could challenge my students at every level with greater flexibility than the AP program gave me.
All of this is preface. Some years ago I had an email exchange with Diane where I wrote that I thought we had lost the war to save public schools. Her response was that I might be correct, but that she planned to go down fighting. That inspired me to continue to fight in the public school setting.
I am reaching the end of the line. I will be 73 in May. I would like to keep teaching for another 4 years until my spouse can take Social Security. But if I cannot move to an independent school setting, I will teach for only one more year. It now takes too much out of me for too little return. I know I am making a difference, and in all likelihood my replacement would offer the students less than I do.
Reading the post to which I am appending this comment unleashed what has been building up in me for quite some time.
I respect those who keep fighting for public schooling. I acknowledge they are having some successes, for example, the opt out movement in NY State, and the efforts of teacher strikes to get better compensation so teachers can afford to stay in the classroom. I hope and pray for their continued success. I especially admire the efforts of those like Diane, Anthony Cody, Carol Burris and others in the Network for Public Education, and I will when possible offer financial and verbal support for their efforts, even if I myself can no longer commit to being a public school educator.
What a wonderful piece, Mr. B! Reading it, a thought occurred to me: Someone should be collecting a bunch of oral histories of the struggles encountered by teachers. We need a Studs Terkel of Education! At any rate, thank you for this marvelous piece, and great joy to you in retirement!
Thank you, Ken Bernstein.
We will keep fighting. I think we are winning. I know it is hard for you to believe it, as it will be for many others.
I wrote a book that will be out in January where I cite evidence to prove that the ghouls now haunting education have done harm but achieved nothing. Unless undermining the principle of public education and devaluing the teaching profession can be counted as “victories,” rather than as shameful acts of malice.
We will win. I am now more convinced of it than ever.
Though I’ve had a different experience than Mr. Shepherd, there certainly are many shared ones. My school/district is slowly getting away from the Pearson “text” we got sold (down the river), so I’m glad of that. We don’t suffer from “charteritis,” thank God, but we’ve bent now and then to the “flavor of the year” in education. One of our secrets, I think, is that our superintendents are career people (I’ve experienced 3 in my 30+ years of teaching) and therefore have a vested interest in both education and the community we live in. Many of the teachers and staff do too, so it’s where we live. Of course, there are other factors, but for the most part, it’s been good despite the changing make up of this community (for the better and diverse.) Indeed, Mr. Shepherd has insane tasks to waste his time. I doesn’t know how he does it.
E. Hauck – Long Beach, Ca.
That last line should have been “I don’t know how he does it.” English teacher: occupational hazard.
I do this all the time when writing comments on posts, Ed. Oh for an edit feature so one can correct these typos!
I was handed a Pearson literature textbook series. I opened the boxes, passed them out to my students, and then ignored them for the rest of the year. They were moronic. One could, for example, read the selections from Puritan literature in the 11th-grade American lit text and not learn a single thing about what the Puritans thought–about election or Original Sin or local governance or salvation through Grace. One could read the selections from Transcendentalists and would think, having done so, that they were just a bunch of guys who liked to wander around the woods. Again, nothing about their beliefs. And yet, these two springs of American throught became mighty rivers that determined a LOT of what happened in the US (and in the world) in subsequent years. There were tons of errors in grammar, usage, mechanics, fact, and sense on every page. Every exercise in the books was some triviality involving application of one of Coleman’s dumb bullet list of standards to some random snippet of text. This lit program was obviously thrown together overnight by a committee of poorly paid hacks. It was BREATHTAKINGLY BAD. But it had lots and lots of online resources for tracking one’s “data.” Psuedoscientific numerology.
cx: pseudoscientific
What a splendid account of the state of “teaching” in too many schools. Thanks for this abbreviated but telling autobiographical essay. It is layered with notes on ridiculous intrusions on teaching time and the pervasiveness of well-marketed ideas, many of these transformed into rules and checklists for compliance. Opportunities for “gotcha” demerits abound. The ensuing paperwork (or online entries) for each imagined best practice of the day is now called a “talent management strategy.” The preferred practices are stripped bare of all reasoning about their importance other than saying they are likely to be impactful. UGH.
As just one example, Bob refers to the mandatory whiteboard display of at least one “essential question” for each class. I think that no one really cares, or remembers, how that mandate gained traction, and whether it really matters. Teachers are paying teachers for lists of “essential questions” by subject and grade level. In my quick check of one website with 100 examples of essential questions, most were calls for procedural and predictive knowledge about relationships between abstract concepts (How can you achieve x outcome?) with only a few calling for thinking about “Why, When, or If-then. None of the examples I found online came close to the original value ascribed essential questions in planning curricula—(see http://essentialschools.org/benchmarks/essential-questions/) or the place of those questions in a larger effort to rethink high schools. https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2018/01/02/whatever-happened-to-the-coalition-of-essential-schools/
I suppose I latched on to that one detail in Bob’s account because the National Core Arts Standards, for music, dance, theater, visual arts, and media arts are organized around “Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions, also “Anchor Standards,” and the Understanding by Design Framework®, co-created by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins.
In any case, those 2014 arts standards (851 total for K to 8 only) are under revision now. A report on these efforts illustrates the marginal adoption of all of the standards from the get-go and for many reasons.https://www.nationalartsstandards.org/sites/default/files/NCAS-StateReport_2019_digital-FINAL.pdf
As Bob surely knows, standards-setting exercises are symbolic displays of systematic thinking about education in a hot-house setting. They are not practical guides for teachers. That does not stop the standardistos (thank you Susan Ohanian) from complaining about poor implementation.
I did not intend to veer so far from Bob’s post, but I see that I am not only one whose memory he has jumpstarted.
Oh, Laura! Thank you so much for this post!!! Yes, Ed Deform is littered like a battlefield on the morning after with the dead weight of corpses of once good ideas.
“The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley”
This is proof positive what we already knew – they are trying to drive our teachers out. Teachers are fed up and leaving in droves. They actually projected by the next school year, there will be a shortage of 10,000 teachers in FL. Pathetic.
How about the biased statement,” …but this legislation — which seems to be taken from the national teachers union playbook on how to kneecap charter schools”? This is from the editorial board of WaPo:
Opinion | A D.C. charter school bill aims to fix a system that isn’t broken from The Washington Post
THE DISTRICT’S charter school sector has been largely untouched as charter school opponents across the country have waged an increasingly relentless campaign against them. That is mainly due to the enormous popularity of the schools that enroll nearly half of the District’s public school students and the effective oversight provided by the Public Charter School Board. Unfortunately, though, there are troubling signs of an effort to undermine the city’s charter schools by imposing requirements that would threaten the independence that is central to their success.
The opening volley in this effort is legislation being promoted as a well-meaning effort at transparency and accountability. Sponsored by D.C. Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), the measure would subject the independent nonprofit charter schools to the open-meetings and Freedom of Information Act requirements that apply to D.C. government entities.
We are firm believers in sunshine in public matters, but this legislation — which seems to be taken from the national teachers union playbook on how to kneecap charter schools — is not designed to benefit the public or help students. It ignores the fact that the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which oversees the city’s 123 public charter schools, is already subject to both the open-meetings law and freedom-of-information requests. The board, which has earned national renown for the rigor of its standards, requires charters to disclose financial information, including how they use resources from the government and what they accomplish with those resources. Charters participate in state testing and federal accountability programs, and the charter board leads the way in providing comprehensive evaluations of charters and the job they do in educating students…
https://wapo.st/2UA6ydP?tid=ss_mail&utm_term=.612d7e79a1a8
Washington Post editorial:
“The opening volley in this effort is legislation being promoted as a well-meaning effort at transparency and accountability. Sponsored by D.C. Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), the measure would subject the independent nonprofit charter schools to the open-meetings and Freedom of Information Act requirements that apply to D.C. government entities.”
My goodness, what “harsh” accountability for charter schools in D.C.! Open meetings of their boards? Freedom of information? “Scorched earth” policies intended to crush the charters! What will they think of next?
This is a very unique perspective. The problem of student debt is caused by the federal government giving money to colleges. Senator Braun [R-IN] won by declaring himself to be the strongest Trump supporter.
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April 15, 2019
Thank you for contacting my office regarding the cost of higher education. I appreciate hearing from you on this issue.
This is the finest and most authoritative piece on the current state of teaching I have ever seen, or could imagine. It should be tattooed on Bill Gates’ chest. If I hear the phrase ‘data-driven’ one more time, I won’t be responsible for my actions.
data driven! Now go, kirba53, and spring to action.
Thanks for this outstanding post, Bob, which elicited such a great number & variety of comments. Just as per the ALEC plan (& please, everyone here, educate EVERYONE YOU KNOW about ALEC–there are still so very many people who are unaware of what has been going on for over 40 years–the Master Plan for America) was to create a national teacher shortage, giving rise to TFA & charter schools & un-educating “other people’s children,” so all can grow up to be servants of the oligarchs.
&–as one who contracted measles at age 37 (2 months before our daughter turned 2, & right in the middle of her potty training {thank G-d we had the means–via my husband’s income, not my teaching salary–to hire a trusted, long-time family babysitter to live in & take care of her, i.e., complete her potty training, as well!}), was misdiagnosed 2x, &, nearly died–I can attest to the absolute MUST that ALL children be vaccinated.
Ironically enough, my father-in-law, o.b.m., had contracted chicken pox, also at age 37, & also lived to tell the tale.