Here are two contrasting views about what happens when (if?) children return to school in the fall.
In an article in the Washington Post, Mike Petrilli, president of the rightwing Thomas B. Fordham Institute, proposes that all students be held back a grade to make up for the ground they lost when schools closed in March. He also suggests that this is a good time to embrace distance learning.
Jan Resseger, retired social justice director for a religious group, says that this is the right time to recognize the failure of the standards-tests-accountability regime of the past two decades and to develop fresh ideas about children and learning.
Petrilli does not address the many studies (such as CREDO 2015) that show the abject failure of cyber schools. That study found that students lost 44 days in reading and 180 days in math when they were schooled online. Nor does he consider that being “held back” is universally seen as failure. The students haven’t failed. Why should they be punished? Expect a parent revolution if any state or district tries this.
Resseger writes:
Conceptualizing public education as students climbing ladders of curricular standards without missing a rung is only one way to think about education. And while such a theory has been drilled into all of us as a sort of “standards-based accountability conventional wisdom,” it isn’t really how most of us learn. If we want to understand something new, and there is some background we need, most of us look to experts or do some research to fill in the holes. School curriculum is better conceptualized as a spiral instead of a ladder. Children learn some processes and then as they move on to more advanced material, teachers are taught to spiral back—to review and even provide new and previously missed background. Sometimes people apply what they have learned in one discipline to help them understand or enhance what they have learned in another discipline. Remedial classes worry educators because too frequently they trap students in the most basic material—material skillful teachers can introduce and reinforce as children learn more complex material. After schools reopen, acceleration will be preferable to remediation.
To use a different metaphor, the advocates for the status quo see each grade as a measuring cup that must be filled. Some students will get the full measure, some will get less. The standardized tests, they think, can gelll is how much of the cup was filled. This is all nonsense, an outgrowth of a vapid, mechanistic approach to education that explains the failed regime of standards and testing. After twenty years, can anyone seriously claim that NCLB and Race to the Top succeeded? Seriously.
Due to the blinders tightly strapped on our policy makers, we are stuck in a pointless, soul-deadening approach to schooling that kills the joy of teaching and learning, except for those few subversive educators who have found devious ways to escape the dead cold hand of the status quo.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
After World War II, we addressed the four year arresting of education by offering a pile of money to veterans and expanding the higher education opportunities at state institutions. I personally benefitted from this attitude when I attended a state university near my house in the 1970s. This was a result of the mentality that paid for my cousin, a Brooklyn native and navy vet, to go to Florida Southern (where he met my cousin, thus becoming part of our family). He ultimately headed a vocational school in Polk County, Florida. I can say the nation got their money’s worth from him. I am not sure the country got its money’s worth from me.
This mentality lingered for a generation. During my own generation, people like economist Buchanan, who went to the same school as I did (see his story in “Democracy in Chains”) decided that the world needed for students to pay for their own education. Now student debt is piled up behind a system that is a house of cards.
Will we go back to believing in education?
Roy, thank you for sharing your experience and the history lesson! (I think our country did get its money’s worth from you!) I’m inspired to research this and learn more…
This money spent on you was well spent indeed, Roy!
The test and punish advocates to not want that regime for the elite, who they expect to be the economic and political leaders of the next generation. If they did, they would not push for test of low level skills and automated learning. Teaching to develop the ability to conceptualize, think critically, and apply knowledge to novel contexts are not meant for “the masses” in their view. Rather, it is the frame of mind to do what one is told without question. The bi-partisan No Child Left Behind, Race-to-the-Top, Every Child Succeed, school choice/privatization era has been profoundly anti-democratic and elitist– cynical, if not dismissive of the potential for a more equitable way of living together.
Exactly right, Arthur Camins, thank you.
If students don’t return to classrooms by fall, then we will be in a spiraling global depression that changes almost every aspect of life for the worse. Education standards will be way, way, way down the list of our problems, and teachers will be rightly more concerned about mass furloughs and municipal bankruptcies and pension wipeouts.
yes
So in Petrilli’s world, do we prevent 5 year olds from entering kindergarten? Or do we have double classes with the new 5 year olds and the repeating 6 year olds?
Also, in his world, those seniors who have already been accepted to college should have to defer to repeat their senior year?
And if Petrilli is so concerned about year end loss of learning, does he think grades should be repeated because of loss of learning time due to standardized tests?
I think the phrase for Petrilli’s piece is “concern trolling”.
Is Petrilli aware of the research on holding students over in a grade? Retained students are more likely to drop out, less likely to attend college, and they are more likely to get into trouble in school and later in life.
I don’t have a subscription to WaPo to read the article, but I would think that Petrilli is likely advocating for testing at the beginning of the school year for K-8 (since one must keep the testing money moving right along). If a child can “pass” the test then they get to move forward. His kids and the other children who attend schools with Petrilli’s children will not be affected at all. Where Petrilli lives is uber wealthy, mostly white and asian with 0 FARMS students able to live in that area. The public schools in that area are more like private schools (lots of PTA dollars flow into the coffers) and teachers fight for positions to teach in these schools when there are openings. Right now, I would lay $ that all the parents in this area (outside of DC) are connected to WiFi and have numerous computers in the home, the kids are having daily online learning sessions with their teachers (no packets) and the parents have signed onto expensive online learning platforms/tutoring. These parents will NOT be denied good test scores from their children….to hell with the others. It is a dog eat dog competition for test scores and who gets into which Ivy League college at the end. This is ALL about parents bragging rights.
Yes, Petrilli does advocate testing in September, another useless idea.
useless save for those making money from the process, as always
Petrilli is a really bad armchair QB. Not only a double cohort in Kindergarten but that double cohort moves through 13 years of schooling. The average cohort is about 4 million children. Having 8 million in each grade for 13 years is a really stuppid proposal. A one year delay starting them at six means a graduation age of 19 – and 20 if retained just once. Neither option is doable. Petrilli makes the great mistake of many adults: underestimating the resiliency of children.
Petrilli acknowledges that there would be two kindergarten classes. He didn’t think about seniors who defer college for a year. It’s everyone start over and test a lot.
He was prolly thinking “college ready in kindergarten” so he just did not want unprepared Kindergarten grads going immediately to college and taxing the higher ed system because they lacked the all critical last 3 months of kindergarten when most kids take calculus and quantum mechanics..
That’s completely understandable.
Petrilli is an expert on repeating. He’s a broken record.
LOL. Yes.
With only a BA in political science, Petrilli like so many in so-called reform, he is an “expert” in his own mind. He does not allow evidence to get in the way of his firm opinions. It is unfortunate he has such a large platform to peddle his views.
I would have guessed that Petrilli had a BS since that seems to be his forte.
A bachelors in BS?
Or a PhD….piled high and deep
Self correct has obviously acquired artificial intelligence.
It is calling me “someday poet”
I read a lot of ed reformers- you have to if you’re a public school family in Ohio because they have completely captured my state government- and there’s a culture in ed reform that rewards people who take or say they are taking “bold, tough stances”. They’re big fans of this kind of “take your medicine!” approach.
There’s the old joke about older people telling younger people they “walked five miles to school”? Ed reform adopted that as a culture. They see themselves as people who tell “hard truths” that no one else is “brave” enough to say.
I think it’s amusing because I always go back to the fact that I was actually in public schools 30 years ago and this ed reform nostalgia for some lost era of “accountability” and “rigor” is just nonsense. Public school was easier 30 years ago than it is now. The current crop of students don’t have an easier path- it’s more difficult. Their central premise is wrong.
I just wish we had national and/or political leaders with some kind of plan to safely re-open.
I don’t know- shouldn’t that be the focus rather than “reinventing school” to allow for a rampant uncontrolled virus? Maybe I’m crazy but reorienting their whole lives instead of focusing on, I don’t know, beating the virus, seems insane.
This is fine for an emergency but shouldn’t someone in power be working to mitigate/control the issue, which is not “how schools handle epidemics” but controlling the epidemic in a way that allows schools to re-open?
Absolutely — people need to hear, from some person in authority, what the plan is to re-open schools, the economy, and life in general. The plan cannot be “we’ll deal with that once we’re through this emergency,” because that means there is no plan. We also need to hear more explicitly what the goal of lockdowns is and how we can evaluate our progress toward that goal. If the goal is to “flatten the curve,” what does that mean? How long must it be flattened? If the goal is to get to the point where there are “no new cases” (as Dr. Fauci has suggested/stated on at least one occasion), then we need to hear that (even though that is an absurd, impossible goal). You cannot exterminate the virus through shelter-in-place, and a vaccine is far, far off. You cannot keep an entire economy shut down indefinitely without clear goals and timetables, especially in a country this large, where federalism is a real thing, and where, despite the situation in NYC (where I have been locked in an apartment for over a month now), the vast majority of hospitals across the country are way under capacity. People are going to start rebelling soon in a lot of states as more and more see their livelihoods wiped out.
FLERP,
I think the problem with discussing what will happen in the fall is that there is a great deal of uncertainty. The faculty at our schools of medicine and public health expect this virus to act like other viruses of this kind and die back in the summer. They then expect another wave of infections sometime during the fall. Undoubtedly we will have better testing by then. Perhaps we will have an effective treatment by then, but your right that it is likely too early for a vaccine (though several are in first stage human trials). It is highly likely that we will have social distancing requirements in at least some areas of the country.
The plan for the fall semester at my university is to teach with the expectation that at least some of the course will happen on line, perhaps at relatively short notice. It might be the first month that is on line, it might be a middle month, we are just not sure. I would expect that the public school districts are coming to a similar conclusion.
Guys like Petrilli have NEVER addressed the 800 lb. gorilla riding the elephant all around the reform room: TWO narrowly focused subjects emphasizing soft, unteachable skills while willfully ignoring the the majority of teachers, school subjects, and essential content and procedural knowledge. Its more like wanting to fill just two Dixie cups with arbitrary hand drawn calibrations. Two decades of test-and-punish reform has placed nearly 80 million children and adolescents onto the testing carousel to nowhere.
According to The 74, the only schools that are doing any work at all are charter schools:
https://www.the74million.org/article/analysis-how-18-top-charter-school-networks-are-adapting-to-online-education-and-what-other-schools-can-learn-from-them/
So there’s a shocker- the ed reform organizations that exist to promote and expand charter schools rate charters higher.
It’s all VERY scientific 🙂
The new phrase for money-follows-the-child policies favored by those who want privatized education is this:
We have a “pluralistic system of education.” That phrase is already being used in promote subsidized choice, with everyone eligible for federal funds and expansion of state-level choice programs.
Pluralistic education means that the great American way to educate children will support–
homeschoolers,
free-lance education service providers,
charter schools,
private schools,
religious schools,
traditional public schools,
online instructional delivery,
pay-for-success ventures,
specialty programs for the talented and those in need of therapeutic support (whether in homes, commercial facilities, or brick and mortar schools).
and other possibilities.
In this pluralistic system, market forces and innovative forms of instruction flourish, unimpeded by regulation. Federal subsidies are “fair” when money follows the student.
Proponents claim that all of these flavors of education can and should be subsidized with public funds, eithe in proportion to their market share or their performance on the optional “normative pluralistic standards and curriculum.”
Examples of optional “normative pluralistic standards” are those present in current federal and state legislation, in national campaigns for standards and tests such as those launched to support the “Common Core State Standards,” and the proliferation of rating schemes such as those at GreatSchools.org, US News and World Reports, and EdWeek’s “Chance of Success” reports.
This Pluralism R-US meme is being promoted by EdChoice, the organization once known as the Milton & Rose Friedman Foundation, also Jeb Bush and his Chiefs for Change organization, and scholars.
Key scholars are at the Walton funded University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform; Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes; the University of Washington Bothell’s Center on Reinventing Public Education; Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance; and Johns Hopkins School of Education Institute for Education Policy.
For a brief look at the rationale for this meme and the policy agenda see
“Pluralism in American School Systems,” https://edpolicy.education.jhu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/PluralismBrief-Jan2018.pdf
For a look at other promotions, see this recent 74 Million.org call for the use of stimulus money for “all types of schools.” https://www.the74million.org/article/bradford-13b-in-stimulus-money-for-k-12-schools-is-a-good-start-but-all-types-of-schools-will-need-more-help-from-the-feds-in-order-to-reopen/
In my view, any prescription for addressing what ails our public education system that does not address the serious wounds to civic literacy is the wrong medicine. We need a revitalized perspective on social studies (I see you Harold Rugg; Jon Meacham; Henri Giroux), and we need curriculum development in the sciences that gets away from the toxic splitting of science and art and the foolish indoctrination of the ‘there is only one way for knowledge to be produced’ orientation. The damage to civic literacy has gotten us to where we are now, it seems to me, with the country in a cold civil war period and a leadership vacuum at the top that reflects John Le Carre’s comment that America has entered a period of madness. Math and science are important, for sure, but without vibrant civic literacy the old Jeffersonian notion of informed citizens being the bulwark of democracy becomes merely a slogan. What we need is not more drill and skill in school curriculum but to revitalize the spirit reflected on a sign I spotted at the Women’s March back in 2017 – “Make America Think Again!” We won’t make America think again, in the context of truthful civic engagement and robust civic literacy with EITHER of the paths articulated in this post from Diane Ravitch. Lonnie Rowell
I especially like this line: “…the toxic splitting of science and art…”
If Petrilli had any clue about what actually happens in schools, he would know that the last couple months are mostly a wasteland, anyway, in which almost nothing else happens except test prep and test taking, precisely because of the policies he advocates,
and if he had ever actually read one of the ELA tests he advocates, he would know it not to be a valid measure of what it purports to measure.
In many ways, Petrilli is quite like Trump–an expert on matters he knows nothing about. However, they differ in this respect: Trump holds his position because he convinced a lot of clueless voters that he knows what he’s doing. Petrilli holds his because of the financial support of a few billionaires who find people like him useful–Gates, the Waltons, etc. Petrilli is not an expert. He is not a “thought leader,” as he used to describe himself on the website of this think tank where thinking tanks. He is a paid propagandist. Nice gig if you can get it. Very lucrative. Requires only a kind of low cunning.
There are other words for what Petrilli does for a living, but they aren’t appropriate here on Diane’s blog. Let’s just say that he is well paid to say what he says.
The fourth quarter, especially under federal testing laws is pretty much a wash. Academic momentum just about stops dead thanks to the mindset produced by the over-emphasis put on testing. A vast wasteland indeed. I always thought that a proper school schedule would have a fals end date; one month before it arrived we give students the big surprise! Problem is it would only work once.
Every time I read one of the essays from Fordham and other Distrupter propaganda organizations supported by Gates, the Waltons, etc., I am blown away by the irreality of what is said, by how little these people know about what actually happens in schools. Clearly, they never leave their desks.
I wish I could post here the testing schedule from my high school. It goes on for two months. Any given class is either empty because of testing or has a great many students absent doing make-up testing (those who were out, for whatever reasons, on testing day). Every student has multiple tests, and every teacher has a test proctoring schedule. If he or she is not in class because his or her students are taking a test, then he or she is proctoring a test. And many of the teachers are using their prep periods to do test prep, and all are encouraged (or forced) to do test prep in their classes. It’s basically two months wasted. And folks like Petrilli are CLUELESS about this.
Very true. Sans Covid, we were about all washed up for the year, a nasty truth no one will admit. It used to be I would complain about spring sports, prom, and student burnout. Tests did not change any of those problems, it just intensified the effect of the end of the school year.
We need to forget testing for about a decade, then decide if we are getting better results. Remember that testing was meant to force schools, perceived as recalcitrant, into behavior that would mean better education. This education would be reflected in the test scores. There is enough failure in this logic to go around and around.
Petrilli knows what goes on in public schools this time of year. I live a mere 20 miles and in the next county over from him. Parents here know what goes on but they don’t care. It’s ALL about test scores and being “better than”. It’s ALL about how many Ivy League colleges are willing to except these rich kids. It’s ALL about “how it looks”. It’s awful being a child/teen in certain counties in the state of MD. It’s the same with youth sports and the pay to play, the expensive camps and coaching. It’s awful living in close proximity to DC because the cockroaches don’t want to live in DC, but they want/need to work there….so they live (and try to control) in the surrounding counties.
Perhaps he does. Perhaps it’s just that he is paid to pretend that he doesn’t know. I was being charitable to attribute part of this to ignorance.
Fordham published a white paper to “debunk” the notion that testing takes a lot of school time. The paper ignored the vast amount of time spent in test prep, in data chats, in preparing “data walls.” It ignored the vast amount of time spent with devolved test preppy curricula. It vastly underestimated the amount of time that kids spent taking the tests themselves. It ignored the time spent taking pretests and benchmark tests, throughout the year, based on the state tests. And, of course, any actual teacher reading that paper would know that it was BS. But the real consumers of the paper–the oligarchs who fund Fordham and the Deformer/Disrupter community–are largely ignorant of what’s actually happening in schools now, and they will believe any nonsense that supports profitable disruption and privatization.
Petrilli didn’t say we should hold all the kids back; he said we should hold back the Title 1 kids. He’s showing us his racial segregationist side.
Yesterday, Dr. Donald Trump was interviewed by Hannity. Here’s a little online exercise teachers can have their students do: rewrite Trump’s responses in English (to the extent possible; many of these statements are simply gibberish). Of course, Dr. Trump was talking about everything opening up again as if by magic.
COVID-19 is not going away. A vaccine is a year or more away. There will be several waves of this thing. Perhaps by fall we shall have enough tests and contact tracing in place to resume school safely. Perhaps there will be enough ICU beds by then. Perhaps some therapies will have been developed that actually reduce death rates of those with the disease. Perhaps schools will start taking the temperature of everyone who enters a school building. However, given the farce of the response so far, I am doubtful about our ability, by then, to test everyone so that we can know where the virus is, though that’s what’s needed in order to start opening things back up. The best case scenario is that we will develop the ability to pinpoint cases and isolate them and their contacts. That will mean closing down schools and businesses often. I haven’t seen any evidence of planning for this.
Suppose that by Fall we do have tests for everyone and a way of tracking these. In such a scenario, what happens when someone tests positive? Well, contact tracing has to be done, then, and the places where he or she has been closed down (isolated) until we can see whether the disease develops there. What provision is being made for that–for supporting, financially, that restaurant that has to close temporarily, then, because one customer tested positive?
There’s no indication that such planning is being done. Trump is a magical thinker (or nonthinker). There doesn’t seem to be a plan for testing everyone. There doesn’t seem to be a system being instituted for effective contact tracing.
This is going to be bad for a long time.
As many of the ESL and low-income teachers around here can attest, students of all ages arrive in this country from poverty-stricken, war-torn countries where they have had little or no formal education while dealing with a life-time of trauma. We don’t start these kids all the way back in kindergarten; we start them with their age-appropriate grade. Yet, after a period of adjustment and safety, these kids almost always catch up with their peers, graduate on time and go on to successful lives.
If kids who are that “far behind” with a lifetime of trauma can catch up so quickly, why is Petrilli so worried about kids “falling behind” in a couple months, when the whole damn world has come to a near complete stop?
Dienne makes sense; Petrilli makes no sense.
In all fairness, I think everyone should read Mike Petrilli’s article, which is behind a paywall.
Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
Education leaders nationwide are working 24/7 to set up distance-learning opportunities for their students for the rest of the school year. That includes navigating multiple logistical and regulatory hurdles, training millions of educators overnight in how to use online tools, and figuring out how to get digital devices and packets of printed material into children’s hands, among dozens of other pressing tasks.
So it’s understandable if educators are a bit preoccupied at the moment. But it’s not too early to plan for next year, because major decisions loom that could impact students’ trajectories for the rest of their academic careers. Most critical — and sensitive — is whether kids should be “socially promoted” to the next grade come fall. The answer for millions of elementary pupils who were already a year or two behind when the crisis struck should be no.
That is especially true since the 2020-2021 school year is likely to be rocky as well. Even if some states and communities are prepared to return to a semblance of normalcy in September, localized outbreaks are likely to shutter schools again for weeks or months at a time.
All of this time away from school is going to be particularly devastating for poor and working-class youngsters, many of whom are already below grade level. Their parents are often working the sorts of jobs that don’t have the option of being done virtually, and their homes are more likely to lack high-speed Internet and ample devices.
Perhaps middle and high school students can overcome these challenges, given their ability to work and read independently. But most low-income, low-performing elementary students will struggle mightily, almost surely falling even further behind. Thousands of Title I schools nationwide, serving upward of 10 million students, are full of kids fitting this description.
So when schools reopen in the fall, these students should remain in their current grade and, ideally, return to the familiarity of their current teacher. (Other types of schools — including affluent schools, middle schools and high schools — may also want to consider a similar approach.) The first order of business will be to attend to the social, emotional and mental health needs of their children and to reestablish supportive and comforting routines.
Then teachers should develop individualized plans to fill in the gaps in kids’ knowledge and skills and accelerate their progress to grade level. The use of high-quality diagnostic tests will be critical in assessing how much ground has been lost in reading and math. Students who are assessed as ready for the next grade level can move onward.
The next step would be for teachers to develop plans for each pupil to make progress, aimed at getting them to grade level by June. The plans should involve as much small-group instruction as possible, with kids clustered according to their current reading or math levels, plus some online learning opportunities in case schools are closed again. Those who are furthest behind could get regular one-on-one tutoring from specialists. This would be different from just “repeating the grade,” which, research shows, rarely helps students catch up.
To be sure, holding back most students would present challenges. For one, schools would have two kindergarten cohorts, so principals would have to quickly staff up to find qualified teachers for the extra classrooms and extra funding to pay for them. (In future years, some of the “first-year” kindergarteners would move ahead, but others might benefit from additional time, especially if the school is again hit by long closures.)
Principals would also need to find extra space for additional classrooms, though thanks to declining enrollment (caused by the ongoing baby bust), that shouldn’t be an insurmountable hurdle.
None of this is ideal. It would have been far better if U.S. schools had embraced “personalized learning” long before the crisis hit — whereby kids move at their own pace, rather than in lockstep with their peers. But if there’s any silver lining, it’s that school closures create an unprecedented opportunity to give struggling students the gift of extra time. That will reap rewards in the years ahead.
Petrilli writes:
All of this time away from school is going to be particularly devastating for poor and working-class youngsters, many of whom are already below grade level.
They are below grade level not because they are poor, but because their school could not teach them well, with their teachers probably scoffing at ‘the science of reading’ as well as at ‘science of mathematics,’ ‘science of history’ and ‘science of science.’
when schools reopen in the fall, these students should remain in their current grade
They were poorly taught from the start, and now they should spend an extra year because their school screwed up. With the same teachers, no less. Push those underclassmen back from where they want to rise, eat your watered down soup and go work in a mine.
affluent schools, middle schools and high schools may also want to consider a similar approach
May, but oughtn’t. This is how cream is separated from skim.
Then teachers should develop individualized plans
Individualized plans do not work in mass schooling. What he suggests will break the back of the schools. But maybe this is what he wants.
It would have been far better if U.S. schools had embraced “personalized learning”
Aha.
Given this post, perhaps you should apply for a job at the Fordham Institute for Securing Big Paychecks for Officers of the Fordham Institute. They pay people who have no clue what a factor poverty is in people’s educations a great deal of money for spreading that cluelessness. Given the “science of reading” comment, it sounds as though you are also of the phonics cures all school. A little note about that: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2017/09/02/on-the-pseudoscience-of-strategies-based-reading-comprehension-instruction-or-what-current-comprehension-instruction-has-in-common-with-astrology/
Warning. Actually reading work by people who know something about this topic could do damage to your ideology.
In his defense, I have found very few teachers willing to stray from “the bullet lists” in my school district. We had a ton of test prep even before CCSS across all grades and different classes. When CC was introduced, lots of veteran teachers retired (or were given incentives to retire). Maybe it’s different elsewhere? Test prep delivered as curriculum is pretty darn dreadful. The whole package of CC is why child #2 attends private school.
“Test prep delivered as curriculum is pretty darn dreadful.”
You really nailed it there, LisaM! The opportunity cost of this, in lost real learning, is extraordinarily high.
One possibility is simply ignorance. The other is that he is lying. In the case of Petrilli, who is a reasonably smart guy, I’m inclined toward the explanation that he is usually lying, but one should never underestimate the power of a) ideological blindness and b) pragmatic blindness (being paid very, very well to view things in particular ways).
It’s not the teachers’ fault. Education deformers bought control of teacher education colleges a long time ago. It takes a great deal of learning to undo the damage.
You have to give Gates, the Waltons, etc., this: they were thorough. They bought the unions. They bought many teachers’ colleges. They bought many, many EduPundits, who got lucrative contracts to develop CC$$ tests and professional development. Vichy collaborators, all.
For more than two thousand years of recorded history, when one dynasty replaced another in Imperial China, the practice was to execute the former rulers and their families so they wouldn’t be a threat anymore.
Hmmmm. But a convert to the Resistance is very, very valuable. He or she knows the Deformers’ secrets.
If there are no more deformers left, no need to know their secrets.
Haaaa! Lloyd Lofthouse, the Robespierre of the Resistance!
Wasn’t it Robespierre who introduce the guillotine for a swift, sharp justice … until he got the same keen edge?
LOL. Lloyd. You kill me, man! Love to you and yours.
And unlearning is often the most important kind of learning, isn’t it? And the hardest to do.
“…eat your watered down soup and go work in a mine.” If you said that in my classroom to any of my students I would rightly and quickly have you removed. You tempt others to tell you to go eat something and then go down a dark hole. Your palpable lack of respect for and downright hatred of your fellow Americans is unacceptable in any educational setting. Not funny. That’s enough, ColorFermat. And the truly frightening thing is the close parallel between your attitude and the attitude of Petrilli.
What is not funny is you taking these words as representation of my own thoughts, as my direct speech, not as a lampoon. Talk about reading comprehension.
Good.
Sorry, ColorFermat, if it was not clear to me, either, that you were presenting or lampooning Petrilli’s positions rather than your own. If so, my apologies!
Resseger writes:
School curriculum is better conceptualized as a spiral instead of a ladder.
You learn about quadratic equations, and then out of the blue there is a third-grade exercise that asks you to apply distributive property without any relation to what you are doing now. Or you are having intro in Newton’s laws of motion, the teacher makes gross mistakes, but that’s ok, because the kids will learn it later “in a proper physics course”. I am not even mentioning the water cycle, the favorite subject of many an American elementary and middle school teacher because the picture is pretty and requires no math of physics or chemistry knowledge beyond Bill Nye show.
American schoolkids spend more time in school than kids in many other countries, but learn less. How is that? Because reading is taught for three, four, five years, and the kids still cannot read. Because they cannot read, they cannot absorb anything more complicated than “Look, it is a ball!” Come to middle school and listen the kids read. Therefore all the subjects are watered down. Add to this the spiral approach, and you get the system that we have now, grossly inefficient as an educational establishment, instead burdened with social workers, food distribution and psychology counselors.
If public schools want to stay relevant, they need to up their game. Sadly, it will be much harder because of the shutdown.
Remedial classes worry educators because too frequently they trap students in the most basic material—material skillful teachers can introduce and reinforce as children learn more complex material.
Remedial classes are a sad necessity because kids enter college utterly unprepared by grade school. Getting rid of remedial classes in colleges means watering down college courses, so the whole system becomes even less efficient, yet colleges cost more and more every year. Soon a college grad will know no more than a high school graduate from a good high school.
As for “introducing basic material”, it works the other way around: skillful teacher introduce new, more advanced concepts while teaching something more basic. For example, you define average speed as distance over time, then you can point to the area under the graph of speed and show that it equals the distance. Here you can introduce the concept of integral in middle school without kids even noticing it. That what good teachers do. Basic stuff is presumed to be taught in earlier grades and learned cold by students. If a teacher cannot rely on what another teacher should have taught, this is a problem with the system.
You are throwing out a list of baseless allegations about the U.S. public schools.
For instance: “Because reading is taught for three, four, five years, and the kids still cannot read. Because they cannot read, they cannot absorb anything more complicated than ‘Look, it is a ball!’ Come to middle school and listen to the kids read.”
There is a simple answer: It is called poverty that few lesson plans will fix. One in four U.S. children lives in poverty. In fact, among developed nations, there is only one other country with a higher child poverty rate. An endless list of reputable studies shows that poverty impacts a child’s ability to read and learn not just in the United States but every country, and that includes China.
… “There is an achievement gap between more and less disadvantaged students in every country; surprisingly, that gap is smaller in the United States than in similar post-industrial countries, and not much larger than in the very highest scoring countries.
“Achievement of U.S. disadvantaged students has been rising rapidly over time, while achievement of disadvantaged students in countries to which the United States is frequently unfavorably compared – Canada, Finland and Korea, for example – has been falling rapidly.” …
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/january/test-scores-ranking-011513.html
There is no magic bullet like your “spiral” thing that will overcome the impact of poverty on a child that is growing up without proper health care, parent support, and a nutritious diet. When most of those children that live in poverty first start school at age 5, they start out behind and stay behind. Many of those students do not pay attention in class. Many of those students do not read outside of the classroom. Most of those students do not have a healthy diet. Too many live in disruptive homes.
If this country wants to do the right thing, trust the professional teachers to decide how to teach and what to teach just like teachers are allowed to do in Finland.
I do not have to visit a middle school and listen to kids read because I was a middle school English-Lit teacher for 12 of the 30 years I was a public school teacher. In one class, for example, I’d have kids reading at a 2nd-grade level all the way up to college level and that held true for high school where I finished the last 16 years as a public school teacher and all of those children were expected to learn out of a grade-level textbook.
California ended tracking back in the 1980s. Kids that were reading way below grade level were in those college prep classes, too, using grade-level textbooks, but they were also getting extra support from reading specialists.
You, along with almost anyone else on this blog, do not believe in measurements and tests, but you do believe in reports that poverty causes low achievement? In other words, you believe in some numbers, but not in other?
What these reports find at best is correlation, not causation. All kids are taught rather badly, but poor kids’ parents have no money to hire a tutor. Of course, their overall lack of access to books, museums, quality theatrical shows, etc does not help.
Yes, all kids are expected to read and learn from a grade-level textbook. And if many of them cannot, the elementary school is at fault. Now substitute college for high school and weep.
P.S. “Spiral” is not my “thing”, have you read the original posting?
“All kids are taught rather badly, but poor kids’ parents have no money to hire a tutor”
I call your opinion BS. All kids are NOT taught “rather badly”.
If you actually read this blog with an open mind, you would know that “measurements and tests” have been tried for the last couple of decades and have FAILED miserably.
FairTest reveals “The Dangerous Consequences of High-Stakes Standardized Testing” in this piece:
One: High-stakes tests are unfair to many students …
Two: High-stakes testing leads to increased grade retention and dropping out …
Three; High-stakes testing produces teaching to the test. …
Four: High-stakes testing drives out good teachers …
Five: High-stakes testing misinforms the public …
“Conclusion: High-stakes testing does not improve education.
“Test standards and major research groups such as the National Academy of Sciences clearly state that major educational decisions should not be based solely on a test score. High-stakes testing punishes students, and often teachers, for things they cannot control. It drives students and teachers away from learning, and at times from school. It narrows, distorts, weakens and impoverishes the curriculum while fostering forms of instruction that fail to engage students or support high-quality learning. In a high-stakes testing environment, the limit to educational improvement is largely dictated by the tests – but the tests are a poor measure of high-quality curriculum and learning. In particular, the emphasis on testing hurts low-income students and students from minority groups. Testing cannot provide adequate information about school quality or progress. High-stakes testing actively hurts, rather than helps, genuine educational improvement.”
http://fairtest.org/dangerous-consequences-highstakes-standardized-tes
In addition, the research/studies about what poverty does to children has not been proven wrong by anyone.
From the NCBI (National Center for Biotchnology Information):
… “We find overwhelming evidence from this literature that, on average, a child growing up in a family whose income is below the poverty line experiences worse outcomes than a child from a wealthier family in virtually every dimension, from physical and mental health, to educational attainment and labor market success, to risky behaviors and delinquency. …
“Second, and vital to the committee’s charge, is the issue of correlation versus causation. Income-based childhood poverty is associated with a cluster of other disadvantages that may be harmful to children, including low levels of parental education and living with a single parent (Currie et al., 2013). Are the differences between the life chances of poor and nonpoor children a product of differences in childhood economic resources per se, or do they stem from these other, correlated conditions? Evidence both on the causal (as distinct from correlational) impact of childhood poverty and on which pathways lead to better outcomes is most useful in determining whether child well-being would be best promoted by policies that specifically reduce childhood poverty. If it turns out that associations between poverty and negative child outcomes are caused by factors other than income, then the root causes of negative child outcomes must be addressed by policies other than the kinds of income-focused anti-poverty proposals presented in this report. …”
“WHY CHILDHOOD POVERTY CAN MATTER FOR CHILD OUTCOMES
“Economists, sociologists, developmental psychologists, and neuroscientists each emphasize different ways poverty may influence children’s development. …”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK547371/
Lloyd, thank you.
Some people come here to leave comments that are insulting to teachers and students. They should do it where it will be appreciated. This is not the right place to scoff at AMERICAN education.
Cx: everyone, not anyone.
I am going to be nice and only call Petrilli an idiot.
The first semester of most school years ends in December for most states. Each semester has 90 student days and 180 student days for each school year.
When the pandemic closed most public schools near the Spring Break, there were about 46 school days left.
Most high schools have 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12 grade. That means a four-year high school has a total of 728 school days from start to finish.
46 days is half of a semester or 6.3 percent of the total number of school days from 9th to 12 grade.
And the idiot called Petrilli wants to punish Seniors on track for graduation because this missed 6.3 percent of school days for four years of high school.
The same logic could be applied to K through 8th. In the first 9 years of school, there are 1,620 school days. Someone tell that idiot, Petrilli, (I doubt he’d listen) that holding a child back for missing 46 days of school out of 180 is reprehensible. If a child was passing their classes when the schools were closed and qualified to move on, then that child should earn a passing grade and move on to the next grade — without test results. Instead, use the GPA for the 134 school days that were not canceled.
46 school days represent 25 percent of a school year. Any child earning a passing grade for 75 percent of a school year, should not repeat that grade again.
I presume that you believe the converse is also true: that no student who fails to earn a passing grade for 75% of the year (or 100% of the year for that matter) should advance to the next grade. Is that correct?
That already happens, at last in the school district where I taught for thirty years. High school students that did not meet the requirements for a high school diploma according to California’s Ed Code did not graduate and to earn an HS degree had to take night classes or attend a local community college.
The evidence says this is probably true across most of the United States because if you check the Census, you will discover that by the time most Americans reach age 25 or 26, they have earned a HS degree, but the average on-time HS graduation rate for the country is lower than that in the 80 percent range.
As for kids in K through 8th grade, if they are held back should depend on their overall GPA and not a poor grade in one subject or class.
Back in the 1970s, when I was teaching in a middle school, I sat on a teacher panel that decided who would be held back and who would be moved on when they didn’t deserve to move on based on merit. The few we moved on were usually boys that were too old and too big to keep in a middle school because they had been held back once or twice already.
However, that does not mean they ended up automatically graduating from high school. Even the few that were moved on that didn’t earn the right still had to meet all the state requirements to graduate from high school four years later. There was no panel deciding if we should let someone graduate that hadn’t met the state’s requirements. There was no way to fudge that one.
Again, the kids were ALREADY missing almost all the last two months because they were spending this time a) taking high-stakes tests (many kids in high school take six or seven of these), b) doing test prep, c) taking practice tests, d) taking part in watered-down classes because many kids were absent, doing makeup tests, and e) doing the other time-wasting end-of-year stuff (the class picture with the Chess Club, yearbook distribution, blah, blah, blah).
If schools do not reopen this school year, I think it would be perhaps a good idea for all students, (leaving out high school seniors) to return to the status quo antes, rejoining their teachers and former classmates for some short period of time, perhaps until the middle of October. Teachers in many cases have had no opportunity to bring closure to the cycle as is usual. A short period of time might allow for teachers to take stock of where kids are and who needs extra support – many kids and grownups will have experienced some trauma. The familiarity of school routines with the same faculty, staff and students might mitigate and ameliorate kids’ and families’ circumstances. Then we declare SY2019-2020 one for the books.
We begin 2020-21 in mid-October or whenever with the expectation that it is an abbreivated year in an exceptional time and carry on from there. If end of the year testing in 2021 is eliminated, the time usually lost in the last two months of classes can instead be dedicated to covering curricula there would not have been time for with test prep.
We resume the regular schedule once again in August or September of 2021. But since two years will have passed without standardized tests, we just eliminate them moving forward in 2022 – forever.
High school kids get to move on. Hold commencement exercises in the fall. All of them will be in the same boat – give them their diplomas, let them begin college, community college or move to other training and jobs and go on with their lives. Give them the grace of special dispensation during a crisis.