Steven Singer had a stellar year in 2017. He published a book and he posted some brilliant commentaries. He even got censored by Facebook, not once, but twice.
Here are his top ten posts.
His #1 Post was about the ignorance and arrogance of Betsy DeVos.
His #2 Post was about U.S. schools. He said, “They are NOT failing. They are among the best in the world.”
Southold and Greenport are adjacent towns on the North Fork of Long Island. I have been fortunate to meet the superintendent who shares responsibility for both districts. His name is David Gamberg. I have visited high school plays, seen (and consumed) the products of the school garden, and watched musical performances of his students. I live in both Southold and Brooklyn, and while both are located on the same island, they are worlds apart. The headlines in Brooklyn are about crime, politics, corruption, major real estate deals, etc. The front page of the Suffolk Times, in which David’s article appears, is about the decision by the owner of the local “department store” (actually a small, old-time hardware store whose owner is renowned for the guitars he sells and plays) is moving his store next-doors. Goofy things happen here, and no one sees them as goofy but me. Rothman’s Department Store is famous in local lore because Albert Einstein, who summered here, came in to buy sandals. In his thick German accent, he said “sun-dials” and the owner regretted that he didn’t carry sun dials. Eventually, the two became fast friends. Southold boasts a great observatory, the Custer Institute, and its website has a photograph of Einstein and David Rothman, the department store owner. No one knows if Einstein ever visited the Custer Institute. Typical North Fork.
David Gamberg writes here about the learning experiences that shape students and ultimately shape communities.
He is very much a believer in active, engaged learning. His communities are lucky to have this wise man as their educational leader (by the way, opt out numbers in the North Fork were high).
He begins:
I am convinced that the foundation of good education is about the concept of building — building a school, building community, building relationships and building a sense of self.
This belief started to form in me as a young teacher, a teacher who began his career working in a school for incarcerated students. I remember being alongside students whose life story and life trajectory left little hope for the future. I recall wondering as a young educator — what can I do to alter their story, their path in life? The idea that we can help shape or reshape what seemed to be a child’s destiny represented a challenge for me, both personally and professionally.
School “works” for many students to provide a pathway into the future, a foundation of rich experiences that inspire and form the basis of their life stories. I wondered: Why not with these students?
I realized that many other factors conspired to bring them to this point. Education and schools can never be fully responsible for the outcomes that our students achieve; yet I wondered, what could be a key ingredient to reshape their view of the world? What could be something so powerful that it could reboot the system, rewire the hardware, stimulate a new emotional connection to the world around them?
I thought that having them build something, having them make a physical change in their environment, would change them as well. This, I thought, could reawaken their spirit; they would imagine themselves rebuilding their souls while rebuilding their surroundings. Shape the world around you and you shape yourself in the process.
Tending a garden offers students a chance to shape their environment and participate in the natural transformation of seed to plant. Building a greenhouse teaches students all subject areas, including math and science. Creating a gallery or museum display involves a student in a real process of honoring history and art. Putting on a drama or musical production shapes the experience of others, as the audience becomes the beneficiaries of our students’ talents and contribution to the larger community.
Mark Naison salutes a principal in the Bronx, Luis Torres, who has overshadowed the Success Academy co-located in his Building because his school is more innovative, more dynamic than the test-taking machine at SA.
Mark calls him “a genius.”
“One of the most brilliant and important achievements of PS 55’s visionary Principal, Luis E Torres, is that through innovative programming and a relentless public relations campaign, he has totally overshadowed the Success Academy Charter School co-located in his building! Normally, Success Academy tries to humiliate and stigmatize the public schools it is co-located by pointing out how much better it’s performance is! Not at PS 55! Here, the action, innovation and excitement is all with the public school, whether it is the scientific and pedagogical innovations of the Green Bronx Machine, the school based agriculture program housed at the School; the full service Medical clinic Principal Torres has created; or the school’s championship step team and basketball team! People from all over the city and the nation come to see what Principal Torres has done; while Success Academy stays in the background.”
Was it competition that spurred Torres’ creativity? Or was he an exemplary principal who wanted the best for his students regardless of the competition?
The first thing to say about Pai Sahlberg is that you should read his superb book “Finnish Lessons.” It is the living evidence that we in the U.S. have lost our way. After reading that book, I had the chance to visit Finland for a few days, and the luck to have Pasi as my guide. Imagine a country whose schools have no standardized testing, where teachers are trusted and well prepared, where schools are architecturally impressive, where the emphasis is on the well-bring of children, not test scores; where creativity and the arts are encouraged; where all education, including graduate school, is tuition-free.
I will assume you have read that book. Now you should read Pasi’s short book of advice for education leaders, which elaborates on four ideas. They seem simple, even obvious, but they are not.
Here is Pasi presenting in a small session at Teachers College, Columbia University, just a week or two ago.
The first big idea is that all children should have ample time for unstructured play. In Finland, every hour includes 15 minutes of recess. This not only gives children a break, it gives teachers a break.
The second big idea is that small data, the information gathered by teacher observations, has more value than Big Data, the collection and analysis of large quantities of information that often invades privacy and typically provides correlations, not causation.
The third big idea is the importance of equitable funding, sending money where it is needed most.
The fourth big idea is to beware of urban legends about Finland. Finland, for example, does not recruit the best and the brightest into teaching. It selects those with the strongest commitment to the life of a teacher. There is no Teach for Finland.
It is a short book. Only about 90 pages. It is refreshing. It will remind you about what matters most. Clears away the foggy thinking that is now common among our political leaders.
Back to school time!
Butterflies in your stomach!
But you get to see your friends and your teachers!
And watch this to see why public school is great!
Let’s remember what matters most: Friendship. Kindness. Creativity. Joy. Compassion. Integrity. Good citizenship. Thinking. Learning. Goodness. Heart. Character.
In case you wondered, the video is from Ossining, New York.
You know how you can pick up a book, start reading, start annotating with underlining and exclamation points, then realize you are marking up almost every word?
That is Steve Nelson’s “First Do No Harm.” It is chicken soup for the educator’s soul.
Nelson recently retired as head of the progressive Calhoun School in New York City. He also just joined the board of the Network for Public Education because he wants to devote his time to the fight for better public schools for all children.
He describes progressive education as ways to engage children in thinking critically, asking questions, and engaging creatively in play and work. He knows it is endangered, even though children thrive when given the opportunity to love learning.
He recognizes the soul-deadening approach of no-excuses charters and suggests that they exhibit unconscious racism. Maybe not always unconscious.
He points out that affluent communities think they have great public schools, without recognizing that their schools are gifted by the privilege of parents and the community. The same is true of elite private schools, whose students are drawn mostly from wealthy families with every financial advantage.
Every effort to standardize education–whether it is NCLB or Common Core– robs children of the chance to think for themselves. Such top-down programs demand conformity, not critical thinking or creativity. Indeed they punish students who think differently.
Nelson goes into great detail about the harm inflicted on children by no-excuses charter schools like KIPP and Democracy Prep.
He stands strongly against vouchers, which typically are used in religious schools, where children are subject to indoctrination.
Nelson understands the link between education and democracy, education for freedom.
I recommend this book to you.
William Mathis is managing director of the National Education Policy Center and vice-chair of the Vermont Board of Education.
Mathis writes here about the inherent flaws of today’s standardized tests.
“They claim to measure “college and career readiness.” Yet, it takes no particular insight to know that being ready for the forestry program at the community college is not the same as astrophysics at MIT. Likewise, “career ready” means many different things depending upon whether you are a health care provider, a convenience store clerk, or a road foreman.
“The fundamental flaw is pretending that we can measure an educated person with one narrow set of tests. There is no one universal knowledge base for all colleges and careers. This mistake is fatal to the test-based reform theory.
“When the two test batteries (PARCC and SBAC) are put to the test, they don’t score very well. Princeton based Mathematica Policy Research compared PARCC test scores with freshman grade point average and found only 16 percent could be predicted (in the best case) by the math test and less than 1 percent by the English Language Arts score. The SBAC doesn’t have such a validity study but they say it “appears in their crystal ball.” (p.72 1). Since the future of schools and children are in the balance, this is no place for murky crystal balls…
“In the current latent traits fad, here’s how the tail has to wag:
“Knowledge can only have one line from easiest to hardest, children within a grade are equally distributed within and across all classrooms, and that all children learn the same things in the same way, in the same order and at the same time. As any parent of two or more children can tell you, that is not reality.
“Another fatal tail wagging is that no matter how important the item, if it doesn’t fit the latest test fad, it is tossed out. The result is that the test drifts off in space. This problem is made worse when politicians dangle money in front of test experts to do things with tests that cannot and should not be done, says Shavelson.
“If we redesigned our measures to address what our state constitutions and citizens tell us is important, we would concentrate on the skills that define success as a citizen, worker and human being. These which include clear and effective communication, creative and practical problem-solving, informed and integrative thinking, responsible and involved citizenship, and self-direction.
“This is not to say that standardized testing should be eliminated. It is the single uniform measure across schools. But the very standardized attributes that make them valuable cause harm to those things that are truly important for our children, and our communities.
“Since the “recommended” SBAC tests’ standards are currently set to fail about two-thirds of students, the data will wrongly and dishonestly provide fodder for school critics. In high scoring states, a mere half of students will be declared failures even though they would rank in the top 10 percent of the world. The test scores measure neither college nor careers nor success in life. They simply float free in monolithic space radiating glossy ignorance but as far as informing us about our schools, they are a cold, silent and misleading void.”
I have only one disagreement with Mathis’ keen analysis.
Given the pervasive misuse of standardized tests, our nation would benefit by having a moratorium on standardized testing of three to five years, during which time we might figure out how and when to use them, how to educate without them, and why test scores not the purpose of going to school.
Robert Sternberg has studied intelligence for many years. In this interview by Scientific American, Sternberg decries the new era of standardized testing.
At last weekend’s annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) in Boston, Cornell University psychologist Robert Sternberg sounded an alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society. Sternberg, who has studied intelligence and intelligence testing for decades, is well known for his “triarchic theory of intelligence,” which identifies three kinds of smarts: the analytic type reflected in IQ scores; practical intelligence, which is more relevant for real-life problem solving; and creativity. Sternberg offered his views in a lecture associated with receiving a William James Fellow Award from the APS for his lifetime contributions to psychology. He explained his concerns to Scientific American.
The interview begins like this:
In your talk, you said that IQ tests and college entrance exams like the SAT and ACT are essentially selecting and rewarding “smart fools”—people who have a certain kind of intelligence but not the kind that can help our society make progress against our biggest challenges. What are these tests getting wrong?
Tests like the SAT, ACT, the GRE—what I call the alphabet tests—are reasonably good measures of academic kinds of knowledge, plus general intelligence and related skills. They are highly correlated with IQ tests and they predict a lot of things in life: academic performance to some extent, salary, level of job you will reach to a minor extent—but they are very limited. What I suggested in my talk today is that they may actually be hurting us. Our overemphasis on narrow academic skills—the kinds that get you high grades in school—can be a bad thing for several reasons. You end up with people who are good at taking tests and fiddling with phones and computers, and those are good skills but they are not tantamount to the skills we need to make the world a better place.
What evidence do you see of this harm?
IQ rose 30 points in the 20th century around the world, and in the U.S. that increase is continuing. That’s huge; that’s two standard deviations, which is like the difference between an average IQ of 100 and a gifted IQ of 130. We should be happy about this but the question I ask is: If you look at the problems we have in the world today—climate change, income disparities in this country that probably rival or exceed those of the gilded age, pollution, violence, a political situation that many of us never could have imaged—one wonders, what about all those IQ points? Why aren’t they helping?
What I argue is that intelligence that’s not modulated and moderated by creativity, common sense and wisdom is not such a positive thing to have. What it leads to is people who are very good at advancing themselves, often at other people’s expense. We may not just be selecting the wrong people, we may be developing an incomplete set of skills—and we need to look at things that will make the world a better place.
Do we know how to cultivate wisdom?
Yes we do. A whole bunch of my colleagues and I study wisdom. Wisdom is about using your abilities and knowledge not just for your own selfish ends and for people like you. It’s about using them to help achieve a common good by balancing your own interests with other people’s and with high-order interests through the infusion of positive ethical values.
You know, it’s easy to think of smart people but it’s really hard to think of wise people. I think a reason is that we don’t try to develop wisdom in our schools. And we don’t test for it, so there’s no incentive for schools to pay attention.
The rest of the interview is worth reading. These days, we have a lot of very smart people acting very selfishly and ignoring the common good. We could use a lot more common sense, creativity, wisdom, decency, and concern for others.
Education Week reports on the plans of billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan to redesign American education. They have launched something called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative–or CZI Initiative–to carry out their plan for “personalized learning”‘( I.e., “depersonalized learning”) to remake education into whatever they think in their limited experience is best. They have hired James Shelton–formerly of the Gates Foundation, formerly in charge of Arne Duncan’s failed SIG program (the School Improvement Grants part of Race to the Top, which federal evaluations found produced nothing of value).
What’s wrong with CZI? First, neither of its founders understands that public education is a democratic institution, in which parents and communities make decisions about their children’s education. It is not a start-up or a venture fund or an app. Did someone elect them to redesign American education without telling the public? What arrogance! Why don’t they pick a District and ask for permission to demonstrate their vision before they spend hundreds of millions to lobby for it?
Second, if they want to help children, why don’t they open a health clinic in proximity to every school that needs one? Dr. Chan is a pediatrician. Children’s health is something she knows about. Mark knows code. Children don’t need code. They need care.
Third, the article describes this as a “high-stakes venture,” but there are zero stakes for Chan and Zuckerberg. If they drop $5 billion, so what? Who will hold them accountable when they get bored and move on?
Why don’t they do what is needed, instead of foisting their half-baked ideas on the nation’s children?
And last, it is beyond obnoxious that they dare to call their tech-based approach “whole-child personalized learning,” which is an oxymoron. What part of “whole-child learning” happens on a computer?
Where are their plans to feed the hungry, heal the sick, create opportunities for play and imagination to run free?
Sad to say, this is a vainglorious and anti-democratic imposition of C and Z’s ideas on people who have nothing to say about it. The one-tenth of 1% toying with our children and our schools, for their enjoyment.
An excerpt from the Education Week article?:
“Pediatrician Priscilla Chan and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg are gearing up to invest hundreds of millions of dollars a year in a new vision of “whole-child personalized learning,” with the aim of dramatically expanding the scope and scale of efforts to provide every student with a customized education.
“The emerging strategy represents a high-stakes effort to bridge longstanding divides between competing visions for improving the nation’s schools. Through their recently established Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the billionaire couple intends to support the development of software that might help teachers better recognize and respond to each student’s academic needs-while also supporting a holistic approach to nurturing children’s social, emotional, and physical development.
“The man charged with marrying those two philosophies is former Deputy U.S. Secretary of Education James H. Shelton, now the initiative’s president of education.
“We’ve got to dispel this notion that personalized learning is just about technology,” Shelton said in an exclusive interview with Education Week. “In fact, it is about understanding students, giving them agency, and letting them do work that is engaging and exciting.”
“To advance that vision, Shelton has at his disposal a massive fortune and a wide array of levers to pull.
“Chan and Zuckerberg created CZI as a vehicle for directing 99 percent of their Facebook shares-worth an estimated $45 billion-to causes related to education and science, through a combination of charitable giving and investment.
“The initiative is structured as a limited-liability corporation, rather than a traditional foundation. That means CZI will be able to make philanthropic donations, invest in for-profit companies, lobby for favored policies and legislation, and directly support candidates for elected office -all with minimal public-reporting requirements.
“For now, Shelton said, CZI is “one of the best-resourced startups in the world, but still a startup,” with fewer than 20 people on its education team.
“In the near future, though, he expects the initiative to give out “hundreds of millions of dollars per year” for education-related causes. Such a figure would place the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative among the highest-giving education-focused philanthropies in the country.
“Within five years, Shelton said in the June 22 interview, CZI’s work should have helped launch a “meaningful number” of schools and learning environments “where kids are performing dramatically better, and feel more engaged, and teachers feel more engaged in the work that they’re doing.”
“Chan, 32, and Zuckerberg, 33, also have embraced the idea of a long horizon for the initiative’s work, saying their support for personalized learning will extend over decades.
“From the outset, however, the couple’s attempt to engineer big changes in the U.S. education system faces significant obstacles.
“Personalized learning” was an amorphous concept even before this new attempt to integrate it with equally hard-to-define “whole child” strategies. It remains unclear how Chan, Zuckerberg, and Shelton intend to balance the organization’s support for research and development with their desire to quickly bring to scale new products and approaches, many of which have limited or no evidence to support their effectiveness.
“And CZI won’t commit to publicly disclosing all of its financial and political activity or to making the source code for its software open and accessible to the larger education community. That stance has stirred complaints about a lack of transparency.”
Looking for innovation? Check out your public schools, where the entire district can collaborate to develop new ideas and sustain them, and where districts can exchange and incubate good ideas and practices.
On June 5, the Southold Independent School District honored high school students engaged in broadcast journalism. Representatives of schools from across Long Island gathered for the inaugural Broadcast Awards for Senior High, or B.A.S.H. It is believed to be the first event of its kind, recognizing students for their achievements in broadcasting.
Thirty-eight videos made by students were judged by a panel of experts from the broadcasting industry.
“A special lifetime achievement award [was] presented to the students and staff at Great Neck South Middle School in recognition of their longstanding commitment to such programs, which began at their school 65 years ago; Great Neck South Middle School is believed to have been the very first public school to offer a professional broadcasting program for students, circa 1952.”
Awards were given in categories such as “Best Opening Segment,” “Best Anchor Team,” “Best Sports Package,” “Most Entertaining Package,” “Best School News Package,” “Best Public Service Announcement,” and “Best Broadcast.”
The format of the event was akin to the Emmy Awards, with a red carpet and celebrity guests.
Superintendent David Gamberg said:
“In a society that grapples with how to teach young people to be responsible digital citizens, navigating the news and entertainment landscape is an important challenge faced by schools and communities throughout the United States. This program helps to recognize and celebrate how students can learn this important civic responsibility, as well as recognize various skills involved in media, journalism and the broader field of communications.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 