Archives for category: Childhood, Pre-K, K
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Her Last Day of Teaching First Grade

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2013 //
62

This came in my private email:

 

As many of you know, I just retired from teaching, having spent most of my career in first grade. Over the last few years, my teaching had become gradually more restricted. Instead of running a center-based day, I was required to run scheduled periods of Fundations, Writing Workshop, Reading Workshop, and (this year) of Envision math. To encourage me to retire, my district had made a financial offer that was difficult to refuse. Almost simultaneously, my daughter had announced that she was pregnant with twins. The decision became easier and easier. As the pressures in New York State increased,  I decided what I wanted to do after retire: support families, fight the tests, tutor children to learn DESPITE the tests. That would mean running workshops for parents about curriculum. But that’s not what I want to write about tonight. I want to tell you about my last few weeks of teaching, and about my last good lesson.  

The district isn’t replacing me next year due to shrinking numbers. Once I announced my retirement, the vultures began to circle – teachers  seeking furniture, leveled books, left over supplies. (All of a sudden, my hoarding had value!) Gradually, my room became emptier and emptier. You’d have thought that my teaching would have suffered, but — I LOVED IT, AND SO DID THE KIDS!!! Painting, gluing, research, math projects; WE ALL RELISHED THE CHANGE! It was a very special time – though teary, for some. I’m not sure why my retiring should result in so many sad children (since I wouldn’t have been their teacher the following year), but there you have it. 

Driving to school on my last full day, I thought about what I could teach that day in my empty classroom. All I had was art paper, scotch tape, and crayons. The kids had already taken home their markers. I thought about how I could say good-bye. I wanted to help them gain some perspective. I wanted them to know they had each other. (I’d already told them they could email.)  I thought about how our paths had crossed and come together so arbitrarily, but how being together in this class had changed all our lives. And then I knew what I’d do! 

I gave each child one piece of 12″ x18″ paper. I told them that each child was to draw a path across the paper. It could be straight across or curved or jagged – whatever. We agreed that the paths would be about a fist wide, and had to be drawn in purple. The rest of the paper was to be decorated with whatever else they thought might have been on their paths this year. 

Everyone did as I requested after a few false starts. Some of the drawings were quite thoughtful and charming.  I then told the kids that we were now going to connect our paths together. I was having a small get together that night, and I told the children we needed something on the wall. Immediately, some of the kids became excited, and tried to put their papers together. I suggested that the kids get on the floor and connect their paths like a puzzle, assemble their work on the floor, and that we’d move it to the wall later. I’d never done this activity before, and had no idea how it would turn out. Over the coarse of the next half hour, I kept telling myself: Remember, it’s process over product.  

As the kids worked, I gradually stepped back. The children were making decisions about which paths connected, which looked best together, which should be moved to a different spot. There were no arguments, even though there were differences of opinion. I handed the kids scotch tape dispensers as needed. I mentioned to one little boy that it was great that there were no fights. He said to me, “Well, remember when I invented a game for the playground and then we all had a fight because I wanted to make all the rules? Remember how you explained to me how a true leader doesn’t make all the rules, but helps others to join in? Well – maybe that’s what we’ve all been doing.” 

I was absolutely floored. 

That’s when I knew how much I’d miss teaching. That feeling of molding a group and helping them become better together than singly – that’s amazing.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Teachers and Teaching

How Should Schools Be Graded?

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2013 //
23

Mike Petrilli of the right-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute thinks that policymakers are wrong to judge schools by proficiency rates. In a thoughtful article called “The Problem with Proficiency,” he argues that it makes more sense to grade schools by whether their students show “growth.”

He offers the example of a school where the proficiency rates (passing rates on state tests) are very low but the improvement each year is impressive.

In his hypothetical, he offers this example:

Our school—let’s call it Jefferson—serves a high-poverty population of middle and high school students. Eighty-nine percent of them are eligible for a free or reduced-price lunch; 100 percent are African American or Hispanic. And on the most recent state assessment, less than a third of its students were proficient in reading or math. In some grades, fewer than 10 percent were proficient as gauged by current state standards.

But, he adds, at the same school “every year Jefferson students gain two and a half times as much in math and five times as much in English as the average school in New York City’s relatively high-performing charter sector. Its gains over time are on par or better than those of uber-high performing charters like KIPP Lynn and Geoffrey Canada’s Promise Academy.”

Now, how would you rate this school?

Gary Rubinstein recognized that Mike Petrilli was responding to the poor showing of many charter schools in New York City on the recent Common Core tests. He wrote a post called “Petrilli’s Desperate Attempt to Save Democracy Prep’s Reputation.”

Matt Di Carlo has often pointed out the problems inherent in grading schools by changes in proficiency rates. In his most recent article, he argued that:

In general, it is not a good idea to present average student performance trends in terms of proficiency rates, rather than average scores, but it is an even worse idea to use proficiency rates to measure changes in achievement gaps.

Put simply, proficiency rates have a legitimate role to play in summarizing testing data, but the rates are very sensitive to the selection of cut score, and they provide a very limited, often distorted portrayal of student performance, particularly when viewed over time. There are many ways to illustrate this distortion, but among the more vivid is the fact, which we’ve shown in previous posts, that average scores and proficiency rates often move in different directions. In other words, at the school-level, it is frequently the case that the performance of the typical student — i.e., the average score — increases while the proficiency rate decreases, or vice-versa.

Critics of the New Orleans “miracle,” on the other hand, have frequently complained that charter champions keep talking about student test score “growth” in the Recovery School District but refuse to admit that the RSD is one of the lowest-performing districts in the state of Louisiana.

Petrilli’s article provoked an extended online discussion among about 50 think tank denizens and policy wonks in D.C. and beyond, who went back and forth about what accountability should look like, how to measure it, etc.

For my part, I find myself alienated from the conversation because I see less and less value in our multi-billion investment in testing and accountability.

This was my contribution to the online discussion, which many in the conversation, no doubt, thought to be from Mars:

I have two children and four grandchildren. I care about them. I care about their health and their well-being. I love them. I don’t care how they compare to others their age in other cities, states or nations on standardized tests. I never had that information about my two grown sons, and they turned out to be wonderful, responsible people who lead good lives. I don’t want to know that information about my grandchildren. It is irrelevant to their lives. I don’t want them graded and rated by anyone other than the teachers who know them and understand their potential and their character. 
**************************************************************************************
Could I be more plain? I don’t care if my two grandsons–one now entering second grade, the other not yet 1–have higher or lower scores than children their age in California, Florida, Iowa, Finland, Japan, Korea, or any other place you can think of. I don’t think their parents care either. They care that their children are healthy; are curious about the world; are loved; learn to love learning; are kind to their friends and to animals; and have the confidence to tackle new challenges.
How did we allow ourselves to get swept up in this national game of “Survivor” or “The Hunger Games” or “America’s Best Students” or “America’s Best Schools” or whatever you want to call it.
Let’s all read Walden, read poetry, listen to good music, visit a museum, look at the stars, and think more about what matters most in life.
Let us see our children not as global competitors, but as children, little human beings in need of loving care and kindness.
Tests have their place in education, but they should be used to help children, not to define them or to “grade” their school.
We are so far off track that it will take a generation to reclaim our human and professional values about how to raise and educate children.
Categories Accountability, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Students, Testing

A Hero Educator Who Heads a Private School in Manhattan

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2013 //
24

What does it take to be a hero educator? It takes brains, courage, integrity, and a deep understanding of education and children.

Steve Nelson, headmaster of the Calhoun School in Manhattan, is a hero educator because he has all these qualities. He wrote a brilliant article about why the Common Core won’t work.

He knows that David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core, now heads the College Board. He knows that Coleman wants to align the SAT to the Common Core, so no one can escape his handiwork, not even students in prestigious private schools.

Here is a sample of Nelson’s article.

“Actual children, as opposed to the abstraction of children as seen in policy debate, are not “standard.” Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of child development knows that children learn in different ways and different times. Some children “read” (meaning a very limited ability to recognize symbols) at age 3 or 4. I have known many students who did not read well until 8, 9 or, rarely, later. The potential (or ultimate achievement levels) of these children does not correlate with the date of reading onset.

“It is rather like walking. Children who walk at 9 months do not become better runners than children who walk at 15 months. “Standardizing” the expectation of reading, and setting curricula and tests around this expectation, is like expecting a child to walk on her first birthday. If she doesn’t, shall we get our national knickers in a knot, develop a set of walking tests, prescribe walking remediation, and, perhaps inadvertently, make her feel desperately inadequate? In the current climate, Pearson is ready to design walking curriculum and its companion tests. The Gates and Broad Foundations will create complementary instructional videos.”

And he also writes:

“If policy makers and test writers had even rudimentary knowledge of rich individual differences, they would know that any standard test is unfair and, ultimately, useless. Just as children learn in very different ways, they express mastery in many different ways. The Common Core tests (and I’ve suffered the experience of wading through the many samples provided in the media) assume that all its takers process information in the same way, have the identical mix of cognitive and sensory abilities, and can, therefore, “compete” on level ground. This is nonsensical and damaging. Some of the most brilliant people I know would grind to a suffocating halt after trying to parse the arcane nonsense in a small handful of these questions. Even the math questions assume a homogeneous ability to understand the questions and a precisely common capacity for reasoning and concluding.

“I could go on: Stress inhibits learning, so we design stressful expectations; dopamine (from pleasurable activities) enhances learning, so we remove joy from schools; homework has very limited usefulness with negative returns after an hour or so (for elementary age kids), so we demand more hours of work; the importance of exercise in brain development is inarguable, so we eliminate recess and gym; the arts are central to human understanding, but we don’t have time.

“I have been accused of complaining but not offering solutions, so here’s a solution: Properly fund schools and allow good teachers to select the materials and pedagogy that serve the actual students in their care. The rest will take care of itself.

“And we can take the billions we’re wasting on NCLB, RTTT, Common Core and other nonsense and spend it to improve the lives of the shameful number of children who live in poverty in the “richest nation on Earth.”

Steve Nelson, welcome to the honor roll as a hero of American education.

Please someone, anyone: send this article to Bill Keller and Paul Krugman at the New York Times.

Categories Arts Education, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Common Core, Education Industry, Honor Roll, Students, Testing

What Your Child Should Do This Summer

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2013 //
8

It is almost too late for these great ideas because school starts soon, along with test prep and the certainty that the test will slap a label on your child and a number.

G.F. Brandenburg has a list of activities that will help your child develop as a resourceful human being.

If it is too late for this year, there are always weekends and holidays and next summer.

Protect your child’s childhood!

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K

Amy Prime: Some Good Ideas for Billionaires and Corporations

By dianeravitch
August 16, 2013 //
13

Amy Prime teaches second grade in Iowa. She has some excellent ideas for billionaires, millionaires, heads of corporations, and politicians who want to reform schools.

If you really want to help, listen to Amy

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Support for public schools, Teachers and Teaching

My Granddaughter Loves Learning

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2013 //
23

Teresa Thayer Snyder is a superintendent in upstate Néw York. She has more sense in her little finger and more understanding of children and education than the entire State Education Department. We have a surprise for her on Monday. And I have a promise for Dr. Snyder: the tide will turn. And she will be instrumental in turning it.

Here she is:

“Dear Dr. Ravitch: My granddaughter is about to turn six and is going into first grade. She is a remarkable child, the light of my life. Her father is an historian and a teacher-she has great background knowledge–it is fun to hear her extol on the swinging gate offence at the Battle of Gettysburg, even if her final commentary is that there were a lot of dead people. I pray she survives these next few years–before we see the tide turned. I have a recent picture of her in silhouette doing a handstand on an ocean beach which will be a part of my opening day talk with my teachers and staff. We need to re-claim childhood for our beloved children. We, as parents and grandparents, need to be a presence which insulates them from the utter obstruction of their education and of their innocent belief that school is supposed to be inviting and exciting for them.”

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K

Why Is America Wasting Our Children’s Futures?

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2013 //
11

In a brilliant essay in the Los Angeles Times, Susan Ochshorn says that the United States is squandering its future by not investing in the well-being of children.

Ochshorn, an advocate for early childhood education, cites an Urban Institute study showing that “federal spending on children fell by $2 billion from 2010 to 2011, the first dip in 30 years. The children’s share of the budget pie was reduced from 10.7% to 10.4%. By 2022, the children’s portion of the budget is expected to drop to 8% and their share of GDP is expected to drop from 2.5% to 1.9%, which will include significant cuts in early care and education. With the Census Bureau reporting nearly 25% of the nation’s children younger than age 6 in poverty, this is not good news.”

It is a cliche to say that “children are our future,” but it is actually true. Children are our future, and if we neglect their basic needs, we sacrifice the future.

Ochshorn writes: “We now know more than ever about how to nurture human capital, with eye-popping technology offering graphic evidence of the rapid pace and complexity of brain development in the first years of life. The bottom line is that kids need time for sensitive, stimulating interactions with adults to promote growth, resilience and mastery, the foundations for their healthy development and academic success. They need access to good healthcare and nutrition, and high-quality early learning settings, not to mention viable communities invested in their well-being.”

Her article cites numerous authoritative sources to demonstrate one basic fact: We are not investing in the well-being of children. Instead, we are spending more and more to test them and to hold their teachers accountable. This is not good social policy. This is criminal neglect.

 

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Economy, Education Industry, Poverty, Testing

Louisiana Will Test 3- and 4-Year Olds

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2013 //
46

Louisiana will begin testing large numbers of preschool children this fall to determine their academic readiness.

If they are found to be not ready, it is not clear who will be held accountable: their teachers? Their families?

“The goal, they say, is to create a grading system like the current School Performance Score reports for public elementary and secondary schools, which are ranked for student performance on standardized tests and progress made from year to year.

“But whether pre-schools will be rewarded for academic progress, or sanctioned for lack of it, like elementary and secondary schools are, remains to be seen.”

John White says that testing toddlers will promote equity.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Louisiana, Testing

Crazy Crawfish: Data Frauds in Louisiana

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2013 //
2

If you read this post, you will never again believe any claim coming out of Louisiana. Crazy Crawfish (aka Jason France) used to work in the data division of the state department of education. He knows their tricks.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Louisiana

How Pre-K Has Changed for the Worse

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2013 //
43

A teacher comments:

Arne Duncan cannot be taken at his word.

I sometimes teach things in Pre-K that I taught in K against what I know is right. My administrators want to see graphs, charts, accountable talk and levels of depth of knowledge.

When I hear the K teachers giving lessons on nouns and pronouns, verbs and adjectives (yes using that vocabulary), I cringe.

Also my school ordered desks a few weekas ago to replace the kindergarten tables. And the teachers, who are good, defend this saying, “Well they need room for all their books.” No painting easel, few blocks, hardly any dramatic play or manipulatives.. It’s a wonder the state still gives an early childhood license (birth to 2nd grade.)

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Duncan, Arne
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