David Kirp is one of our most perceptive thinkers and writers about education. You will enjoy his new book about a wonderful public school in New Jersey. It is called “Improbable Scholars.”
In this article, he says that the massacre of little children in Newtown represents a frightening turning point in our society. What happened is –or should be–beyond our imagination. But it is a terrifying reality.
This elementary school teacher wants to be armed with smaller classes.
She also wants to be armed with after school clubs and resources for her special education students. Read more about how she wants to be armed.
This education dean also wants to arm teachers.
He wants to arm them with passion, purpose, knowledge, understanding, and courage.
Anyone listening?
In response to an earlier post about the escalating cost of teacher evaluation programs, a reader submitted this comment. I wish that our elected officials in Washington and in the state legislatures and departments of education would read it.
This voyage is beginning in Connecticut. Every hour that teachers and administrators focus on the new Teacher Evaluation system, and every dollar they spend on training, materials and systems to keep it working means less for students. Now throw in NEW standards, and new books to match the standards, and more training for teachers, and then a new online test in a year, and the corresponding technology requirements again mean less for students. Lastly, add the fact that in 2014 teachers will set goals and compare them to an entirely different test/standards in 2015. The chance for success is very slim. Again, who loses? That would be every single child in the state of Connecticut who senses the anxiety, stress, confusion, pressure to do well on a test, pressure to deny their developmentally appropriate needs to be children all to feed into a poorly designed and completely non-child centered plan. Who wins? Book publishers, technology companies, professional development trainers, administrators, policy makers….but not children.
Katie Osgood teaches children in a psychiatric hospital in Chicago. She is one of our most eloquent bloggers, whose understanding of the damage done to children in today’s society is unparalleled.
This post of hers sums up the meaning of what I called the Twitter kerfuffle.
Last week, I wrote a post about “The Hero Teachers of Newtown,” which caused a VP of TFA to recoil in horror on Twitter. I was never clear what he found so “reprehensible” or why he thought I should immediately retract the post. It seemed to be my having mentioned that the teachers were all members of a union and some had tenure. But I really don’t know what it was that offended him so, since I never mentioned TFA. The only thing I knew for sure was that I would never submit to a demand that I censor myself.
Then Karen Lewis jumped in, and her words were distorted even more than mine.
Katie explains it all in this post.
I strongly recommend that you read it.
Here is some advice from Ms. Katie:
“Stop hiding behind your misinformation, your spin, your talking points, your complaints about tone, your phony research. Come to where the kids are. Listen to parents beg, plead, cry, yell, and chant to save their schools from closure. Come to my psych hospital and hear children’s actual experience of charter schools, of zero tolerance discipline, of school closures, of disinvestment in neighborhood schools, of poorly trained teachers in their classrooms. Listen to parents and students who occupy their schools, hold sit-ins, orlet themselves be arrested to stop school closures and charter expansion.
“Sandy Hook reminded us all of the first thing we must remember about schools. We must protect children above all else. Like the Hippocratic Oath in medicine, we must “first do no harm” in our attempts to better education. And corporate education reform IS HURTING CHILDREN.”
Reformers, don’t mess with Katie Osgood.
She teaches kids whose lives are desperate.
She is fearless.
You can’t touch her.
Don’t even try.
A teacher sent me this link and urged me to post it.
This is a story about Lauren Rousseau, a substitute teacher who lost her life during the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School on one of the days that she was hired to teach.
Teaching was what she most wanted to do, but Newtown had a declining enrollment and was not hiring teachers. It has laid off 10% of its teachers in the past few years.
Lauren Rousseau worked for $75 a day with no benefits.
She was a barista at Starbucks when she wasn’t teaching.
Read it soon because the Wall Street Journal will have it behind a paywall in a few days.
The teacher who sent it to me suggested that it was remarkable because the Wall Street Journal editorial pages are known for their nonstop tirades about teachers and public education.
The editorial board has long been a cheering section for vouchers and the free market and a loud critic of public education.
It is rare that one will see a kind word there about anyone connected to public education.
But I note that this is an article by the news staff, which has long been one of the best in the nation, and which does not share the political agenda of the editorial board.
Congratulations to the fine journalists on the news side of the WSJ for telling Lauren Rousseau’s moving story.
A reader comments on the National Rifle Association’s ideas for school security:
“Let’s pretend. 100,000 schools would need 100,000 guards, preferably active police officers, who would by a conservative estimate cost at least $100,000 per year apiece in salary and benefits. That’s $10,000,000,000 to start, plus who knows how much more for the added costs of liability insurance, training, equipment, etc. Is this making any sense? Even if it did, how could we afford it? But wait, it may just be another golden opportunity for free-markets and privatization cloaked as public service to step in and save the day. The NRA could follow the TFA model to create GFA, Guards For America. Why, with just a few short weeks of specialized training, newly minted nonunion rookie guards would be ready to serve at half the cost for two years before moving on to that next rung on the career ladder. And just think of the profits that would flow to investors and those at the very top of the pyramid. Imagine that.”
A reader explains why armed guards will not end the violence:
As my own experience with troubled children, and as pointed out in the PBS ‘After Newtown’ program of 12/21/2012 pointed out:
(1) the shooters tend to be young males who largely fantasize about the shooting long before they act,
(2) they strongly tend to do active research of their act before doing so,
(3) they see this as a way to end their misery and gain a huge place in the theater of the public mind, and
(4) they know they die knowing the media will have to cover their shocking crimes.
So here are the consequences of putting armed guards in schools:
(1) the young assisins will only see the armed guard as the first thing to take out,
(2) this crime will only add to their search for infamous glory, and
(3) the school is no more safe from the shooter progressing into greater carnage.
The number of youth actively and progressively fantasizing about such things is relatively small, and can be identified. We would be remiss in just thinking that all we have to do is make sure all can get some mental health counseling. We actually have to treat our whole society’s basic mental disease of accepting high levels of alienation, mental narratives that exuse and allow alienation to grow, and not doing the work of community building that naturally curbs alienation. That would-be school guard with the equivalent firepower of our recent shooter would be better serving the memory of Newton by joining Big Brothers, Big Sisters, starting community centers, getting scout units that willing accept anyone, getting the lonely and alienated in on lots and lots of social activities, and other such ideas. Trying to end a gun culture will not happen, but it is possible to work with our gun culture to start selling the wisdom of the gun safe, and the need for a bigger vision of community than those that like shooting ranges.
The National Rifle Association wants an armed guard at every one of the nation’s 100,000 schools. Some legislators want teachers and principals to carry weapons.
Why should policy be reactive? Better to limit all weaponry to officers of the law, except for single-shot rifles for hunters.
Guns should be available only to those authorized to use lethal force.
In this link, with tweets on the subject, someone points out that Columbine High School had armed security at the time of the tragedy there.
Questions: how many assault weapons should be allocated to each school, who should be authorized to use them, where should they be stored, should they be at the front desk or locked up? if locked up can they be readily available when needed?
And: who will pay for the personnel, the weapons and the training?
Here is a terrific cartoon on the subject, called, “Yesterday they called me a union thug, today…”
So many news media have thoughtlessly or knowingly jumped on the bandwagon of corporate reform that it comes as a shock to encounter one saying simple truths.
Te Baltimore Sun wrote, in response to the massacre of innocent children and educators in Newtown, that it’s time to stop the vilification of our nation’s teachers and principals.
Today the Sun joins our honor roll of Merican education for writing in support of our nation’s educators in this time of sadness.
They wrote (read the link for the full, excellent editorial)
“We don’t know how many lives were saved by the alert and brave actions of the faculty and staff at Sandy Hook, but we suspect they were many. Yet how many among us should stand ashamed today for showing so little respect for such public employees — mocking teachers, in particular, for their cost to taxpayers in salary and benefits — and failing to appreciate how willingly many educators stand prepared to lay down their lives for our children?
“Rarely are teachers given the kind of respect afforded soldiers, firefighters or police officers, but how else to describe Principal Dawn Hochsprung but as a first responder? We now know that it was she, school psychologist Mary Sherlach and Vice Principal Natalie Hammond who first confronted the heavily armed Adam Lanza in the hallway. Only Ms. Hammond survived that initial effort to subdue the intruder.
“Four other employees, all teachers, died in the shooting. Anne Marie Murphy, a special education teacher, was killed attempting to literally shield her students with her own body.
Meanwhile, stories continue to emerge from Sandy Hook of teachers who helped lead their students to safety, who hid them away and remained level-headed despite the threat, who calmly instructed them to be brave, who stood ready to defend them until they were certain the knocking on their locked doors came from police and not the perpetrator.
“That the shooter had to smash his way into the school and not simply enter an unlocked door was due to the security precautions instituted in recent years by the late principal. The school had practiced a “lock-down” drill before the fateful day. Ultimately, Ms. Hochsprung helped provide both the first and last line of defense for her students.
“How many among us are certain we would behave so bravely in a similar situation? The military train for that kind of sacrifice, but the faculty and staff of Sandy Hook had no such preparation. What code of conduct informed their choices?
“It is common these days to bemoan the state of public education and question whether the next generation will be able to compete in the global economy. Among the concerns are wide disparities in educational outcomes based on wealth, race and class; high dropout rates; and low science and math achievement compared to other industrial countries. Meanwhile, the economic downturn and the strain it has put on the financing of government, including public education, have made educators easy targets for scorn.
“Not all teachers are saints, any more than all police officers, corporate executives or newspaper editorialists are. But what happened in Newtown — and what continues to happen in schools across America as faculty comfort and care for students unnerved by the events in Connecticut — ought to be a wake-up call to America.
“Last August, it was a guidance counselor named Jesse Wasmer who was chiefly credited with wrestling a shotgun away from a Perry Hall High School 15-year-old who had taken it to school and seriously injured a fellow student. Somehow, he also chose to put himself in harm’s way in order to protect the lives of the innocent youngsters around him.
“Teachers and other public school employees deserve more respect than to be vilified as lazy, overpaid union thugs, or any of the other various taunts that have been hurled their way in recent years. In some states, they are been stripped of bargaining rights. Often, they are cited as a threat to public education and not its chief asset.
“We adopt standardized testing of students, in part, because we don’t trust that teachers are doing their best. Too often, we judge them harshly for not achieving the near-impossible: creating a model citizenry from the imperfect products that show up at their doorstep.
“Next time we discuss the state of education, let us also recall those images of teachers leading children out of harm’s way in Newtown or those half-dozen adults who died in the line of duty. Public educators deserve our respect, not just for what happened in Sandy Hook but for their extraordinary, daily devotion to the education, health and welfare of the next generation.”
No one dare call this distinguished newspaper “reprehensible” or “obscene” for eloquently stating simple and honest truths about our nation’s educators.
Karen Lewis spoke up on my behalf when a TFA officer denounced my post “The Hero Teachers of Newtown”) as “reprehensible. Lewis then became the object of attacks from outraged bloggers and tweeters saying that she literally accused TFA of murder. Lewis said no such thing. This was a fine example of the dark art of twisting words. Katie Osgood, who teaches children in a psychiatric hospital in Chicago and has her own blog, here defends Lewis:
“Lewis was not speaking about TFA specifically, but about the Corporate Ed Reform movement as a whole with which TFA is closely aligned. And yes, the corporate education reforms plaguing Chicago for the past 10+ years have cost precious children their lives. The chaos caused by callous school closings, leading to sending children across the city to “choice” schools crossing gang boundaries has indeed led to increases in youth violence and yes, even deaths. The tragic beating death of Derrion Albert in 2009 is one prime example http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/06/chicago-teen-deaths-viole_n_311877.html
“It is the utter ignorance and arrogance of education reformers, including and especially TFA, which allows terrible policies to get passed. Churn in teaching staff after closings and turnarounds is dangerous to kids who need stability. Charter schools do not serve the neediest students and instead these kids are concentrated in schools purposefully underfunded and neglected causing ever more severe behavior issues in schools given fewer resources to help. Our district buys new tests and “data systems” instead of hiring more social workers, counselors, and nurses which my kids desperately need. Ed Reform creates environments of fear and stress with terrible new evaluation systems and sometimes even pay tied to test scores leaving the people who work directly with the children with less emotional energy to devote to them. Ed Reform also pushes more inexperienced, poorly trained teachers-as the war on veteran teachers, tenure, and unions continues-on the children who need experienced, well-trained teachers the most.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 