John Thompson is an historian and a retired teacher in Oklahoma. He wrote this piece for the blog at my request.
In 2006, our John Marshall High School was enduring the worst of the five months-long, extreme meltdowns I witnessed in 18 years with the Oklahoma City Public Schools. Many days, I’d see the anarchy and the blood-splattered halls, and ask if I was dreaming. One thing that kept me sane was the discovery of education blogs, above all Deborah Meier’s and Diane Ravitch’s conversations in Bridging Differences. In a prescient example of the wisdom which grew out of their “animated conversation,” they agreed:
That a central, abiding function of public education is to educate the citizens who will preserve the essential balances of power that democracy requires, as well as to support a sufficient level of social and economic equality, without which democracy cannot long be sustained. We agreed that the ends of education–its purposes, and the trade-offs that real life requires–must be openly debated and continuously re-examined.
As Oklahoma City pulled out of the crack and gang crisis in the early 1990s, I saw a pattern that persisted for two decades – and which became more tragic during the third decade when I was a part-time teacher and an education writer. Each year, our school would make incremental improvements. Then, the district would bow to pressure and implement disastrous policies that would wipe out those gains – or worse. It would mandate policies that Ravitch later dubbed “corporate school reform.” Administrators who publicly endorsed policies where segregation by choice was combined with data-driven decision-making would often tell me off-the-record in the parking lot, that they knew the reforms would backfire. But they had no alternative.
During the first years after the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, local and state leaders often had some success in minimizing the damage done by school “choice” and in “monkey wrenching” the push towards high stakes testing. But, as in the rest of the nation, that resistance angered market-driven reformers who then pushed for harsher, more punitive policies. As opposed to Meier’s and Ravitch’s counsel, they believed that it was essential to remove balances of power, so they could force everyone to “be on the same page.”
One of the worst examples was requiring benchmark testing to be graded; that absurd policy drove John Marshall’s dropout rates for 9th and 10th graders through the roof. Then, the poorest halves of our high school and its middle school feeder were combined into a new school characterized by extreme, concentrated poverty. When a new data-driven staffing model was implemented, a deputy superintendent privately acknowledged that these two, intertwined “reforms” could be disastrous but said that the only thing I could do was lobby the state legislature for more support.
Back then, partially because of my success in conversing with conservative legislators, I naively believed that I could communicate with neoliberal output-driven, competition-driven reformers and the non-educators who conducted their research. But I eventually had to admit that Meier and Ravitch were correct when writing:
Almost all the usual intervening mediators–parent organizations, unions, and local community organizations–have either been co-opted, purchased, or weakened, or find themselves under siege if they question the dominant model of corporate-style “reform.” …
This allows these elites the opportunity to carry out their experiments on a grand, and they hope uninterrupted, “apolitical” scale, where everything can, at last, be aligned, in each and every school, from prekindergarten to grade 12, under the watchful eye of a single leader. If they can remain in power long enough, it is assumed (although what actually is assumed is not easy to find out) that they can create a new paradigm that no future change in leadership can undo.
Not understanding how single-minded “venture philanthropists” were in using “disruptive innovation” to drive top down “transformational change,” I didn’t understand why they would be so adamant about ignoring educators and social scientists, who continually reexamined their hypotheses and complicated analyses. (Falsifiable hypotheses! Who needs falsifiable hypotheses?, was the reformers’ response. We’ll just run more controls on our statistical models.)
When practitioners and researchers tried to explain the interconnected challenges faced in high-poverty schools, these true believers in “the Market” dismissed our advice as “Excuses,” and “Low Expectations.” Reformers instead gambled that they could find individual levers, like data to engineer a “better teacher,” who could turn schools around.
That is why edu-philanthropists sought to use the stress of competition to overcome the stress of generational poverty and trauma, and segregation by choice to overcome the legacies of de jure and de facto segregation. They seemed to deny that the trade-offs that Meier and Ravitch acknowledged even existed. Reformers thus ramped up high-stakes testing to force compliance; in doing so, they ensured that soulless worksheet-driven instruction would result in in-one-year-out-the-other educational malpractice which often would push the most disadvantaged schools over a tipping point.
Then – and now – if I could get data-driven, competition-driven reformers to listen to one thing, I would try to explain why their misunderstandings about generational poverty led to hurried doomed-to-fail micromanaging. I’d try to tell them the story of our run-of-the-mill inner city school, a place with tragic failures as well as great strengths, that corporate school reform turned into the lowest-performing secondary school in the state, where meaningful teaching and learning was replaced with nonstop remediation.
Our Marshall H.S. had survived “White flight,” and the crack and gangs crisis of the 1980s. It had working class and a few middle class students, as well as students from situational and generational poverty. It had a significant number of students who were seriously emotionally disturbed and/or burdened by multiple traumatic experiences, now known as Adverse Childhood Experience (ACEs). Back then, however, we also had numerous students with reading and math learning disabilities, who often became student leaders. Despite confidentiality laws, it was easy to identify many of the students on Individual Education Plans (IEPs) on the first day of class. They disproportionately sat on the front row, with carefully prepared notebooks, ready to “work smart” and succeed.
By 2005, however, school choice had produced an exodus of the top teachers and students (including special education students who were not wrestling with behavioral or emotional disturbances.) Our highest challenge neighborhood was known as the “New Hood,” the home of families that had been driven out of the “Old Hood” by urban renewal. The Old Hood had endured plenty of racism and economic oppression, but it was a community full of African-American churches and home-grown institutions that had resisted Jim Crow.
The New Hood combined concentrated generational poverty, with families disrupted by multiple traumas, in a neighborhood lacking social capital. For example, when campaigning for Jesse Jackson, I learned that we didn’t try to canvass the New Hood because the high incarceration rate resulted in so few eligible voters. Even so, when I canvassed the neighborhood for Barack Obama, I conversed with parents and learned that the majority of its students officially or unofficially transferred to schools in the 20+ districts across the metropolitan area.
Because it is so much harder to improve education “outcomes” in schools serving the highest challenge neighborhoods, our low test scores led to more worksheet-driven mandates. This increased official and under-the-table transfers out of our poorest neighborhoods by families who could find legal or other ways of getting their children into the best schools that they could get to.
After NCLB, it was the highest challenge neighborhoods in the eastern half of our school’s area which first lost their recesses, art and music classes, and extracurricular activities, as drill-and-kill instruction failed to increase test scores. When the school board chairman visited my class and was thrilled by the standing room only audience, each student told him something about their elementary school. Virtually everyone who attended schools in the western half of our feeder area had positive things to report. The majority of those who came from the poorer eastern neighborhoods had horror stories to tell. Those from the New Hood were especially angry about being “robbed” of an education by nonstop test prep.
The tipping point was crossed in 2006 when school staffing was driven by a primitive statistical model that could not distinguish between low income students and children of situational poverty, receiving Free and Reduced Lunch, as opposed to children from extreme poverty, who had endured multiple traumas. Because of the additional costs of providing services for the most seriously emotionally disturbed students, teachers in “regular” classrooms were assigned up to 250 students. So, I had classes such as the one with 60 students where many students on the west side of the room had had family members killed or wounded by family members of classmates on the other side of the room.
Within a couple of years, even after the staffing formula had been worked out, segregation by choice created classes of 35 or more, with more than 40% being on IEPs or English Language Learners, with a majority carrying a felony rap (whatever that meant in a state with the world’s highest incarceration rate); and where two students had recently witnessed the murder of a parent, and two others watched the murder/suicide of their parents; during a year when our kids buried an unprecedented number of family members.
As I have explained, these doomed-to-fail, test-driven, competition-driven policies were pushed by corporate school reformers who knew little or nothing about the nuances of poverty and the legacies of segregation. They ignored the cognitive science which explained why their test-driven approach would drive holistic teaching and learning out of the classroom.
As we deal with the legacies of today’s COVID pandemic, I hope we can learn from the history of my school and so many others. Maybe we can agree with Meier and Ravitch that “democracy cannot long be sustained” without public – not market-driven education. If nothing else, let’s agree that our democracy requires adults to listen to each other, as well as to students.
Great. Thanks for Sharing this with us. 🙂
Logi Bones
Same here. Welcome to title one.
saddest sentence
And in the district in which we both teach, my school isn’t “technically” Title I and gets no services at all, even though we’re a “failing” school. It’s infuriating.
Thompson’s tale is an epic tale of “throwing out the baby with the bath water.” It is the sad saga of what happens when the wealthy and politically connected play with fire and burn the house down. They fail to understand that under served communities are not their personal tinker toys. It is time for deformers to step aside and let educators implement evidence based change instead of the market and test based accountability rabbit hole syndrome into which we have been falling for the past twenty years ever since the advent of NCLB. Disruption and privatization are not “progress.” They are expensive, racist failures.
We need to invest in our community public schools that bring our young people together and support our vulnerable students with wrap around services. Thanks to Thompson for his insights and his honesty. This post made me angry, and it should make all those that understand the value of well resourced community public schools outraged. Strong pubic schools are an essential element in a democracy, and the sooner this county realizes this the better.
I am sad to read about my beloved John Marshall. I graduated from JMHS in 1987 and we were a brilliant group of young adults, taught by many loving teachers. We were diverse in our backgrounds and what our families could afford. We were poor whites and poor Blacks, immigrants from Mexico and Iran, and refugees from Laos and Cambodia. We were bussed in from rural Arcadia, drove in from wealthy Nichols Hills and the Greens, and walked to school from our lower middle class and middle class homes in the surrounding Village. We were taught by many wonderful teachers, graduates of OU, OSU, and Langston University. One of our teachers was a famous Civil Rights leader, Clara Luper, a historian who led restaurant sit-ins in Oklahoma City and had her students re-enact the March on Washington and MLK’s “I have a dream” speech. Each freshmen US History student was assigned a congressional, judiciary, or executive role in her classroom. She was a “project-based” teacher before there were project-based teachers, and made sure every student know their potential and their worth. Jesse Jackson visited us and told us we were “somebody” and asked us to reflect deeply about who we wanted to be as young adults. Our graduates became teachers, principals, doctors, writers, filmmakers, military leaders, chefs, lawyers, naturalists, mortgage brokers, architects, artists, musicians, engineers, travel agents, entrepreneurs, and university deans. We were an integrated school and we dated and befriended one another across the racial and socioeconomic spectrum, recognizing that we had access to education and careers and futures beyond what our ancestors had. There were intense racial struggles, class struggles, identity struggles: as aging adults, we can talk more openly about the traumas and obstacles our Black and Brown classmates faced in the 80’s and must reckon with today. We were part of an important movement to bring students and teachers together as a civil right. But forces beyond us – a new magnet school, data-driven school reforms, a new wave of white and economic flight, and budget cuts dismantled our school. Our old JM was ultimately torn down and a gated apartment complex built over it; those of us who graduated still mourn its passing: today one can buy pens crafted with wood from the original building; old school grads get together and reminisce at reunions, on FaceBook, at backyard barbecues. As a teacher in a beautifully diverse public high school in California, I reflect on what we got right and what we got very wrong at John Marshall, and I wonder what it would take to retrace our steps and make integration of public schools a national and individual priority, along with economic parity and racial justice in our nation. I still dream.
Integration is a powerful tool in attempting to provide greater opportunity and equity. Unfortunately, we as a country have failed to understand its value, and we have been unwilling to accept the challenges it poses. I also taught in a diverse, integrated school district, and I have witnessed all the benefits to students of all colors and socioeconomic classes. As a result, I reflect on my career as a time that had tremendous promise and hope. I retired before the worst of the NCLB stifling trudgery took hold.
When I first walked into Marshall in 1992, I was stunned by the quality of so many teachers. It had never occurred to me that such great teaching and learning was being done in high school. Yes, there were problems; before clocking in on the first day, I was punched twice while breaking up a two-on-one fistfight. But, as happened so often, my deeper memory a few months later was have a student race up to me, “Sir, sir, you dropped this.” As he gave me back the papers, I realized he was the student I helped. He thanked me, and as was so common, he energized me.
Diane and All FYI I have forwarded this post to the National Literacy Association’s list serve with the following introductory narrative. I am responding to David Rosen’s note to the NLA about working with Amy Lloyd who has many credentials working with both business and public institutions and who is now the “New Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and Strategic Initiatives at OCTAE” ALL COPIED BELOW
“Hello David and all: I don’t know you personally (or Amy Loyd) so if I am ‘preaching to the choir’ I think it worth the risk just to be sure of your awareness of what many see as a crisis not only for education, but for democracy itself.
“The on-watch problem is the long-term, concerted, and well-funded push by ‘reformer-privatizers’ for the nationwide adoption of the corporate/capitalist model . . . for everything. At its core, this means the complete elimination of all-things-public including K-12 education and adult education as we know it.
“I include below ONE example (of many) of how concerted the privatization/control movement is and how it works, in this case, from a retired teacher in Oklahoma; but the evidence for this movement as nationwide is overwhelming, especially where K-12 is concerned (see related links).
“However, I think it would be a great oversight on our part to think publicly ordered adult education and services are not on the privatizer/reformers’ radar. My view is that ‘it’s a given.’
“The ‘jobs movement,’ ‘career pathways,’ public-private partnerships, as well as charter schools and vouchers, not to mention, well-meaning teachers and shorter-view corporate-thinking workers, though not endemically corrupting, provide the cover for the concerted efforts by some powerful movers among us to slowly wash-away public services . . . sometimes by mere omission of interest and funding, and sometimes by overt acts of constant dismissal, and even by campaigns to smear public education, qualified teachers, teachers’ unions, and all-things public. (These are a matter of record . . .some don’t even hide it anymore.)
“It remains that some who are involved in the privatization movement are unaware of the essential connection between public education and the democracy, a system that they assume is all-well-and-good, and that they say they love; or how, in fact, they are involved in fostering the foundational break between an open and free/authentic education for all, and their own political system . . . a break that will be difficult if not impossible to fix.
“But we also must admit to ourselves that some in powerful places want nothing to do with democracy or with educating its public, and some are committed to the ‘interruption’ of it in favor of corporate and private control. Ignorance of that movement is not an option for educators; and those how have some power in our fields are called to be aware, to head it off, or to stop it in its tracks.
“Thank you again for your long-term commitment to adult education. Below is that ‘one’ example. Others can be found at the website of the Network for Public Education and at Diane Ravitch’s blog. If I am ‘preaching to the choir,’ please forgive me. Catherine Blanche King”
ADDENDUM: Here is David Rosen’s original note to the National Literacy Association’s list serve regarding workking with Amy Loyd:
ALL COPIED BELOW
“AAACE-NLA Colleagues, The U.S. Department of Education has announced what I believe to be very good news for our field, the appointment of Amy Loyd, as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and Strategic Initiatives, Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (serving as Acting Assistant Secretary).
“Amy Loyd, Ed.L.D., has an extensive background in education and the nonprofit sector, and has designed and led programs across the United States that improve education and workforce outcomes for people and strengthen communities. Most recently, Dr. Loyd was a Vice President at Jobs for the Future, where she led the organization’s programs in college and career pathways that span K-12 and postsecondary education and training into the world of work; in workforce development with a lens on economic advancement; in state and federal policy; and in diversity, equity, and inclusion. She previously was the Director of Education at Cook Inlet Tribal Council, leading a network of schools and programming providing comprehensive, culturally responsive education, training, and wraparound services to the Alaska Native and Native American communities.
“Dr. Loyd holds a bachelor’s degree from St. John’s College and a doctorate in education leadership from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she is an adjunct lecturer focused on using career pathways to increase opportunity and equity.”
https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/us-department-education-announces-more-biden-harris-appointees-0
David J. Rosen,
Moderator of the AAACE-NLA group and advocate for adult foundational skills education
Please identify what OCTAE and AAACE stand for.
Mark Here they are . . . thanks for asking:
OCTAE: Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education
AAACE: American Association for Adult and Continuing Education
Website: aaace.org
“The mission of the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education (AAACE) is to provide leadership for the field of adult and continuing education by expanding opportunities for adult growth and development; unifying adult educators; fostering the development and dissemination of theory, research, information, and best practices; promoting identity and standards for the profession; and advocating relevant public policy and social change initiatives.
“Vision Statement: The American Association for Adult and Continuing Education (AAACE) is dedicated to the belief that lifelong learning contributes to human fulfillment and positive social change. We envision a more humane world made possible by the diverse practice of our members in helping adults acquire the knowledge, skills and values needed to lead productive and satisfying lives.”
Mark My reply went to moderation. CBK
Thank you for a this informed pov on the failure of education meddlers to understand or be blind to the truth that if all students were in the kind of schools rich kids parents can pay for, this country would be far better off. What’s happening to impoverished kids at all levels is criminal neglect.
It’s my hope that you are communicating with the new Dept of Ed head on your ideas.
Corporate style “reform/ed schools” mostly have one thing in common. The only thing missing is the bars and armed guards. The children become powerless inmates at a much earlier age as if they lived in a Stalinist/Maoist totalitarian state. And soon, most of them learn to hate that education system.
Excellent post.
I worked in an area similar to the one you described before I started teaching. It was right when the corporate reform movement was starting in this area and I jumped to the conclusion that I was fed by those around me who thought schools were not responding to the needs of the students – and that charter schools could lead to big positive changes. That was until I started working in a school and becoming more knowledgeable.
“their misunderstandings about generational poverty led to hurried doomed-to-fail micromanaging” ~ this one sentence says it all.
“meaningful teaching and learning was replaced with nonstop remediation” ~ yes and it even trickled out to the high performing districts where lower students were pulled for remediation (that didn’t necessarily work) rather than joining their class for meaningful learning experiences.
Thank you. You are the type of leader we need in a decision making position at the Dept. of Ed.
If you didn’t like ed reformers running K-12 education, wait until you see their plans for workforce training:
“The Social Finance income-share agreement with students ranges from about 5 percent to 9 percent depending on their earnings — less from $30,000 to $40,000, and generally more above $40,000. The monthly payments last four years. If you lose your job, the payment obligation stops.”
They’re setting up student loan financing for 5 week training programs.
Apparently the United States of America cannot afford to provide 5 weeks of job training after high school- the students themselves must pay for it and all of the programs have to be approved by Bill and Melinda Gates.
Do these people know anything at all about “apprenticeships”? Do they know what the word means? Why are Harvard economists and tech billionaires directing both US education policy and (now) labor policy?
The ed reform octopus is now currently lobbying the Biden Administration to take over job training now too.
That’s all we need, right? The ed reform echo chamber will now be in charge of K-12 education, higher education AND workforce training and labor policy? It’s not enough that they’re an echo chamber on education and no dissenters or alternative views are permitted? They’ll now manage the entire workforce?
Chiara THANK YOU for posting this New York Times article. I promptly forwarded it to the NLA list serve with this note: “My guess is that the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 were all well-trained workers.” THANK YOU. CBK
This is another neoliberal scheme that sounds almost like indentured servitude, except the payments never end. Social impact bonds are ways for the wealthy to be monetary parasites on workers. Shame on Biden.
retired teacher Yes, “monetary parasites.” It’s all pay-to-play and totally transactional
. . and, coupled with their “buying elections,” and under-the-dome power-broking, it’s about avoiding both government regulations and paying taxes, both of which are about making life livable in the PUBLIC domain for everyone.
Even when they “donate” seemingly huge sums of money for educational programs, the loss of control by ELECTIONS, and by elected officials who are sworn to Constitutional duties to work for The People who elected them, is the price WE pay for those donations; and ultimately the loss of democracy itself.
Also, if program donations are large, it affords us a clue about how much they intend to get back over time and how important privatization and control of education is to them.
For educators, the whole “jobs” thing, regardless of some real advantages of it to many people, points to the huge distinction between being TRAINED and being EDUCATED. Maintaining a democracy over generations REQUIRES an educated citizenry.
There is no right to be trained but ignorant in a democracy . . . not if you take advantage of democracy while it lasts. And as long as “capitalism” is understood and plays out as predatory, zero-sum, and ONLY transactional, it will be a threat to We The People, and to democratic institutions. CBK
I know none of these people have ever had an hourly job, and they don’t know anyone who was ever an apprentice, but can they find an apprentice and have that person explain to the them that “apprenticeships” don’t charge students for training?
That’s the benefit to the apprentice- he or she doesn’t get stuck with a student loan.
They now want to load people who DON’T go to college with student debt? These are the kinds of brilliant ideas Bill Gates pays his echo chamber employees to churn out? He’s being robbed.
Not happy with saddling an entire generation of college graduates with student debt, ed reformers now propose to saddle students who don’t go to college with debt too.
What a bad deal. Another lousy deal for young people. A rip off.
Can someone save the population of recent high school graduates from Harvard economists? Can we rescue them? This is BAD ADVICE for young people. It’s a rip off.
But i really think youre failing to understand the core of all those problems have already been addressed by tge way we’re dealing with covid hypochondria. We’re staying home and hopping on the web. Very little thought necessary and an abundance of funds to implement a solution.
Firstly, we expand smartphone tracking so lost and stolen smartphones can easily be recovered. There’s nothing better to catch thieves then when the steal a cellphone. They literally just stole world wide servailance node ffs. Its time we stop pretending like no one knows it.
We can easily craft legistlation allowing intellectual property eminent domain and recover any available data conducive with creating online classes. Enough is already written that nice software can be stitched together from spare parts. We change existing school structures to function as work halls where students can learn fundimental work ethic if remedial classes arent achieving standardized goals. Previous to that, the biggest threat to poor attendance or class completion was to suffer through summer school classes. Give students a reason to learn well on their own at home. Maybe even try offering free lunch to any student reguardless of background as reward for high test scores.
Really, you’re just not thinking if all youre going to do is find problems with no solutions.
The trick to encouraging inovation is to show opportunity.
“We can easily craft legistlation allowing intellectual property eminent domain and recover any available data conducive with creating online classes….”
You know nothing about education and exude chronic painful vapidity.
Empty ad hom. See? Thats why youre always going to be the same schmuck you are now. No ability to seek solutuons. If you’re not yet an inner city youth, your next generation will be.
Where did this rhetoric come from that anyone doesnt know anything about education if they disagree with you? You’re not nearly as complex as you imagine yourself if you’re forgetting everyone has already been through public school.
It takes someone as stupid as you to think much of your habitual rhetoric and fallacy.
“It takes someone as stupid as you to think much of your habitual rhetoric and fallacy”
said the mirror on the wall
Esteemed colleagues and friends from these fora: Does anyone know if someone is monitoring these comments? There is a lot of garbage turning up here, and because some of it is in response to things I have written, it is turning up on my WordPress blog as well. But this isn’t about me: I suspect Diane would take a very dim view of this dross and it wouldn’t make it past her discerning eye into these pages.
markstextterminal . . . my thoughts, exactly. Some of these “contributors” do show the great difference between give-and-take dialogue and impenetrable rants. CBK
By any standard to which I’m prepared to stipulate, this is squalid stuff.
Markstextterminal Squalid stuff=Impenetrable rants. . . . commonly followed by relativism: Your-opinion, my-opinion. CBK
I experienced simiilar circumstances teaching in urban schools in the 1980s and 1990s in North Carolina. The district simply acted by grabbing whatever unique unproven policy showed up as “a throw it against the wall strategy” to see if anything stuck to deal with schools that simply needed more people and resources. The final nail came when Charlotte Mecklenburg was declared “Unified”by the courts, at the districts urging, and the number of Title 1 schools exploded from around 18 schools to over 70. People who could attended magnet programs or moved into school zones perceived more effective. Policy makers continued to use test results to justify blaming teachers. My 38 years in public education has shown me how little policy makers and politicians know about the school house. I have conversations with friends where I have to explain the intricacies of teaching and the the labor required to serve children. How do we inform the public when a few with media resources continue to misinform (This is across the media spectrum, not simply in the conservative sphere)? Public schools need resources and better working conditions for teachers. The disrupters want money in their coffers.
“The district simply acted by grabbing whatever unique unproven policy showed up as “a throw it against the wall strategy” to see if anything stuck to deal with schools that simply needed more people and resources.” Yes. Same in our district which is in another part of the country – and we are high performing – but all schools were following suit and treated the same.
Your post hit the nail on the head. It’s hard for non-teachers to understand the “intricacies of teaching and the the labor required to serve children.”
beachteach In reading this thread, I am also reminded of the deep-seated, pervasive dismissal/denigration of teachers of children (implicit bias) that most teachers face.
Somehow, the fact that we teach children morphs over to become the assumed idea that we are not professional . . . in the same way that persons in other professions are. It’s nothing less than rampant ignorance, but it’s still out there. CBK
I agree CBK. And I think it is all also tied to the disregard/lack of understanding “we” (general we in the U.S.) have regarding the time and care it takes to raise and educate children to become kind, respectful, empathetic and happy human beings.
beachteach Yes . . . also, this set of oversights has been tossed-around over and over again on the National Literacy Association site that I have mentioned here before. It seems that we hear lots of lip service about “intergenerational education,” which means programming aimed at families as clearly distinct from those aimed at developing work skills to come “up to speed,” for instance, for manufacturing or corporate jobs. However, when we read some of the stuff that comes out in the field, it’s focus is commonly on jobs, jobs, jobs–as was the original letter planned to send to President Biden, with nary a word for children’s home learning or the effects of adult education on that learning. “We” were able to make some changes, but the thinking drift is always towards work skills. (Where do you think THAT came from?) Family education (the embodiment of what lifelong learning means) is pervasively treated like an unwanted orphan, so to speak. So the two go together in some respect . . . all centered on the assumption that children in the 1-5 age group are shelved items rather than persons in progress and in need of comprehensive regard over the long term–and in accord with how complex our world-to-local situation has become. The researchers really haven’t been able to keep up with our current speed of change.
All tolled, there is still a pervasive mental disregard, even in many in education, for both the needs for children’s development from the cradle (via family educational services) and the teachers who teach children in K-12, not to mention teachers in general. CBK
“Skills” are neat and tidy and easy to measure, organize and make graphs with the “data.”
It’s discouraging when members of an influential organization working on behalf of children can’t see the forest through the tress. It feels like we are swimming against the tide.