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Mercedes Schneider: Disillusionment with TFA, In the U.S. and Brazil

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2019 //
2

 

 

Mercedes Schneider discovered an article by a former TFA recruit, Rolf Straubhaar, who now teaches at Texas State University. 

Straubhaar compares the experience of Teach for America in the U.S. and the experience of those who joined the TFA offshoot, called a Teach for All, in Brazil.

The program in Brazil didn’t last long. It folded.

His studies persuaded him that many of the participants in these programs became skeptical of its market orientation.

He wrote:

And yet, perhaps the most interesting legacy of being trained as a teacher through TFA and Ensina!, at least for participants in these two studies, is the effect that training has had on the career plans and ideological perspectives of these teachers. Around half of the TFA teachers interviewed and the vast majority of interviewed Ensina! teachers had come to question the efficacy of the Teach For All model, both as a teacher education program and an education reform initiative intended to address educational inequality. …

The most interesting and thoughtful alums of TFA are those who reject it.

Categories Education Reform, International, Teach for America

Peg Tyre Asks for Your Help: How to Encourage Creativity

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2019 //
59

Peg Tyre, veteran journalist, needs your help. If you write her, please copy your comment here. You don’t have to, but it would be nice if you did. I know her and trust her.

Peg writes:

Japan & S. Korea Want Their Schools To Produce Innovators.
Curious About What That Looks Like? I am too!
 
 
 
Policy-makers and parents in Japan and S. Korea are determined to get rid of the shallow, rote learning, and high-stakes testing that characterizes their education systems. They want to adopt new models and help their public schools turn out a generation of innovators and creators. But what will that look like? Will they succeed? What does it mean for education in the U.S. where policy-makers are also facing wide-spread pushback against rote learning and testing?
 
I’m a seasoned journalist (New York Times, Scientific American, The Atlantic and others) and bestselling author dedicated to sophisticated, open-minded (and opened-hearted) inquiry. I’ll be traveling to Japan and S. Korea to learn from teachers, students, politicians and parents what is happening there. I’ll be sending what I hope will be six or so FREE newsletters to give you a first-hand look and feel of what I find. Read about it here, or read a more digested version in a major publication to be named later (that will be keeping it behind a paywall, I’m sure.)
 
You can take an active role in shaping this project. Please send me questions, observations, research, history and personal reflections about your own teaching and learning, thoughts about rote learning and your ideas about what makes an innovator. Tell me what you want to know from my reporting. Twitter: @pegtyre or email: pegtyre1@gmail.com
 
Also, if you know of someone who might be interested in being part of this project, kindly send me their email and I’ll add them to the mailing list.
 
My trip is made possible by a generous Abe Fellowship for Journalists (administered by the Social Science Research Council.) I retain full editorial control. I also appreciate the moral support of my colleagues at the EGF Accelerator, an incubator for education-related nonprofits.
Categories International

Canada: Conservatives Urge Charters and Privatization to “Fix” Test Scores

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2019 //
16

 

Grant Frost writes here about the plans of the new Conservative premier of Alberta to fix the schools by introducing charters and market competition. Grant attended the last NPE conference in Indianapolis. He makes clear here what has been muddy in the U.S. Privatization of public schools is a conservative goal.

Frost writes:

There is a very famous anecdote about McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc and his take on business. According to legend, after speaking with an MBA class at the University of Texas in 1974, Kroc accepted an invitation to join some of the students for few few beers. During that rather laid-back social event, Kroc asked the MBA students, “What business am I in?” — to which all the students replied, quite obviously: “The hamburger business.” Kroc paused (presumably for dramatic effect) and told them they were wrong. He was not in the hamburger business. He was in the real-estate business.

Every McDonald’s restaurant that I have ever seen sits on a prime piece of real estate in whichever town it’s implanted itself. By some accounts, McDonald’s is the largest owner of real estate in the world — most of it, of course, purchased using the proceeds from the sales of the aforementioned hamburgers. But, in the end, the burgers are just the means to the end.

Now, take that same business model and apply it to local public schools. Once Kenney allows charter school operators to own property, the same premise will come into play.

Charter schools, it should be remembered, are set up to operate outside the public system. They are offered up as alternatives to traditional schools, usually after a fairly long and substantive campaign has been undertaken to convince the general population that traditional schools are failing….

The beauty in this for the edu-preneurs is that once the public buys in, parents will line up around the block to get their kids into the charter school, even in the face of evidence that the public system is actually doing well. After all, parents want what is best for their kids, and using another business strategy called FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) charter school proponents find it relatively easy to exploit parental unease.

And, of course, every single student comes to the door of the new charter school with a backpack full of taxpayer dollars in the form of per-student funding, a percentage of which can now be used by the charter school backers to buy a piece of what is undoubtedly prime real estate.

So, among all the rhetoric coming from Kenney about pipelines, the environment and student GSAs, this is one little nugget that — should it be acted upon — will open up the Canadian education system in ways that we could never have imagined possible a generation ago. Canadian schools will be open for business, with the ground they sit upon being the ultimate prize.

Welcome, Alberta, to the era of McEducation. It probably will not be long before the rest of us follow your lead.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, International, Privatization

What is the Point of PISA and the Race for Higher Scores It Inspires?

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2019 //
11

 

PISA—the international test, the Program in International Student Assessment—has set off an insane competition among nations to lift their ranking. Only one country can be #1, and the rankings have political consequences. Rich countries always get higher scores than poor ones. Nations with less poverty get higher scores than those with more poverty.

The US typically ranks in the middle, not because it is a poor country but because it has very high rates of child poverty. But the news media always report the results like a horse race and blame the schools because we are not number one. We have never been number one on international assessments because of the 20-25% of our children who live in poverty. Yet neither the federal nor state governments have adopted a goal of reducing child poverty.

The media simply refuse to acknowledge that the tests tell us that poverty matters. Instead, they produce raw meat for demagogues with simple solutions, like Michelle Rhee, Campbell Brown, and Arne Duncan, now DeVos. When the PISA results are released, it is another opportunity to moan about “a Sputnik moment” and dreams of becoming more like South Korea or Shanghai.

Why don’t the media or the politicians say it is time to emulate Finland, which has high rankings, low child poverty, and no standardized testing?

William Stewart of the British TES (Times Educational Supplement) reports that teachers are feeling anxiety over national rankings. 

Why are the nations of the world bothering to participate? Maybe it is a matter of national pride, even though most are doomed to “fail.”

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if nations opted out?

Categories Accountability, International, Testing

Ontario: Students at 700 Schools Plan Walkout to Protest Mandatory E-Learning and Increased Class Sizes

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2019 //
6

 

In a remarkable show of solidarity, students at 700 elementary and secondary schools in Ontario planned a mass walkout today to protest the government’s imposition of mandatory e-learning in high school, a ban on cellphones, and increased class sizes. 

“Students have started a movement with a very clear message: Hands off our education,” said organizer Rayne Fisher-Quann in a statement.

“Students understand the importance of fiscal responsibility, they understand the importance of balancing the budget, but most importantly they also know that our world-class education system should never be a victim of cuts,” said the Grade 12 student from William Lyon Mackenzie Collegiate Institute in North York.

That will get the attention of the government!

Categories Class size, International, Online Education, Resistance

Why Don Trump Jr.’s “Loser” Comment Struck Fear in the Hearts of Teachers Around the World

By dianeravitch
February 20, 2019 //
174

Recently at a political rally in Texas, Donald Trump Jr. sneered at teachers and called them “losers” who were indoctrinating their students into socialism.

Three teachers published a response on Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet” blog on the Washington Post website. They wrote that his words has a chilling effect on educators around the world.

Valerie Strauss wrote:

In this post, three teachers explain why Trump Jr.’s comment was more than simply mean.

Jelmer Evers of the Netherlands, Michael Soskil of the United States and Armand Doucet of Canada were featured authors in the 2018 book “Teaching in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Standing at the Precipice.”

I wish it was not behind a paywall, along with the rest of the Washington Post, which is a great newspaper. I love its slogan: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” We are living through one of the very dark moments of our nation’s history.

They wrote:

For teachers around the globe, this was a chilling moment.

In a stadium filled with people chanting “USA, USA,” the son of the president of the United States called for hostility toward teachers because of their so-called political leanings. This is a message you would expect in an authoritarian regime, not at a rally for the U.S. president.

As teachers, we come from varied backgrounds and political leanings, but there is an undeniable core to who we are and what we stand for. Teachers nurture, care and protect students. Teachers champion the pursuit of knowledge.

By working daily with young people, teachers are the stewards of the future. Whether Democratic or Republican, liberal or conservative, right, left, center, blue or red — seeing and reinforcing the value of a teacher should be a national pillar that rises high above partisan politics and cheap applause.

Throughout history, schools and teachers have always been among the first to be targeted by authoritarian regimes and extremists. Independent thinking, creativity, compassion and curiosity are threats to dogmatic beliefs and rule.

Many of our colleagues in countries ravaged by war or in shackled societies teach in difficult circumstances. They are often ruthlessly persecuted and even killed for providing a well-balanced education to children, which should be a basic human right.

Echoes of these authoritarian practices are increasingly being heard in democratic countries as well. In Germany, the radical right party Alternative for Germany has launched a website where students and parents can report “left-wing teachers.”

In the Netherlands, right-wing parliamentarians have called on students to out their socialist teachers because they were indoctrinating their students in “climate change propaganda.”

In Canada, Ontario Premier Doug Ford has accused student unions of “crazy Marxist nonsense” and has raised alarms by throwing out one of the most progressive sex education curriculums, which dealt with topics from consent, to gender identity to “sexting” in the age of social media.

In Hungary, textbooks are censored to follow the government’s nationalistic agenda. After years of denouncing teachers and schools, President Jair Bolsonaro’s first education policy in Brazil is to go after the “Marxist” curriculums, which bars teachers talking about feminism and LGBTQ issues.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has fired thousands of teachers. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte is attacking teacher unions.

Research by the United Nations has shown that the globe is spinning toward a dramatic teacher shortage, with analysts predicting a shortage of 69 million teachers by 2030. This is the crisis we should be talking about.

We’ve seen overcrowded classrooms, long working hours, lack of professional development, burn out, low salaries, terrible retention rates and teachers across the United States striking to demand better teaching and learning conditions.

How does Donald Trump Jr.’s description of teachers as “losers” and the encouragement of hostility toward us solve these problems? How does it ignite passion in a new generation to pursue the world’s most important profession?

If we can be accused of anything, it is that we are on the front line of democracy. Education reformer John Dewey famously said, “Democracy has to be born again each generation and education is its midwife.”

As members of a global profession, we reject the narrowing of the mind and we stand by our colleagues defending academic freedom. We call upon parents, teachers and politicians to stand with us. Our academic freedom is what allows our democracies to remain strong.

My words, not theirs:

Without teachers, there is no education. Without teachers, there are no doctors, no scientists, no creators, no inventors, no advancement of humanity.

What has Donald Trump Jr. or his father or his brother or his sister done to advance humanity? What kind of person separates families and puts children into cages?

Who indoctrinated Donald Trump Jr. into his ignorance?

He is a loser.

 

Categories Education Reform, International, Teachers, Trump

The Failure of Market Reforms in Sweden

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2019 //
6

German Bender writes here about the failure of market-based school reform in Sweden.

Privatized schools that get public money, for-profit schools that get public money, the gamut of school privatization has degraded the education system of Sweden.

The main results of privatization: education inequality, falling test scores, and segregation.

Please take note, Center for American Progress, Ann O’Leary (the new chief of staff to California Governor Gavin Newsom, former chief of staff for the Hillary Clinton campaign), and other devotees of school choice (Betsy DeVos, the Koch brothers, the Walton Family Foundation, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, the Dell Foundation, John Arnold, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, etc.).

Categories Inequality, International, School Choice, Segregation

Henry Levin: Want Lower Test Scores and More Segregation? Try School Choice!

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2019 //
6

In this article, published in 2017, Economist Henry Levin explains the international failure of school choice.

The main effect of school choice is to privilege the advantaged and harm the have-nots.

Categories Inequality, Injustice, International, School Choice, Segregation

Robin Alexander of the UK: Do Americans Pay Attention to International Commitments about Children and Education?

By dianeravitch
December 30, 2018 //
9

The British educator Robin Alexander reads the blog and has a question about whether American children have a right to an education. His thoughts were spurred by Jill Lepore’s article in The New Yorker, posted this morning, about whether education is a fundamental right. He wondered whether American education has been influenced by international agreements and norms. The short answer is no. The national education goals were set in 1989. I did not work for the U.S. Departmentof Education until mid-1991. I never heard anyone refer to international conventions or treaties about the rights of the child. I feel sure Betsy DeVos has never heard of them.

Robin Alexander writes:


While it’s beyond my competence to comment on the constitutional and legal aspects of the case for or against education as a fundamental right in the US, it might be worth broadening the debate to take in relevant international commitments to which the US is a signatory. These include:

1. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). https://www.unicef.org.uk/what-we-do/un-convention-child-rights/ . Article 28 states that ‘Every child has the right to an education. Primary education must be free and different forms of secondary education must be available to every child …’. Unfortunately, although the US is a signatory to UNCRC it stands conspicuously apart from the rest of the world’s governments in not having ratified it https://www.humanium.org/en/convention/signatory-states/ .

2. The UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), adopted but now superseded (see 3 below). Goal 2 was Universal Primary Education http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/education.shtml .

3. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), unanimously adopted by all UN member states in 2015. Goal 4: ‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’ with a target date of 2030. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/education/ .

The problem here, it will immediately be recognised, is that the US hasn’t ratified UNCRC while although it has adopted the MDGs and SDGs these were/are directions of travel rather than legally binding obligations. In any event, even if the US had ratified UNCRC, Trump’s record on ratified treaties (e.g. on climate change and Iran) shows that as far as he is concerned these exist to be upheld or disregarded at will. On the other hand, many signatories to UNCRC, adoption notwithstanding, have in practice displayed little commitment to many of its articles so they are hardly in a position to condemn the US for taking what is perhaps a more honest line.

Yet although US administrations tend to prefer to avoid tying their and the states’ hands on such matters, the UNCRC and SDGs (and the weight of international support they have attracted), might at least be invoked to exert a degree of moral leverage to accompany the legal forensics in Jill Lepore’s article at the state government level to which education is constitutionally reserved under the US Constitution’s 10th Amendment and which I realise is one of the problems here. Or perhaps not … Were you in the US Department of Education when the six 1991 National Education Goals were agreed? Food for thought?

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Civil Rights, Education Reform, International

Masha Gessen Interviews Garry Kasparov About Our Age of Chaos

By dianeravitch
December 26, 2018 //
3

Some of you may recall that Masha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist and dissident, was quick to express skepticism about Putin’s efforts to intervene in the 2016 election. In this article, where she interviews Kasparov, a chess champion and an activist, that skepticism has disappeared.

The excerpt begins with a response to her question by Kasparov:

I suspect that they made a conscious decision to create not a Chinese-type system of blocking access to information but its opposite: a flood of information. They created a deluge. For example, they create entire troll debates. You think that there is an argument raging on the Internet, when in reality it’s a script.

When a political system is unstable, something like this can play a serious role. It shouldn’t have been hard to imagine that Putin would decide that, since he has been able to influence Holland, England, Germany, and Italy, to say nothing of Moldova, Romania, and Bulgaria, he would try his hand here. But everyone subscribed to the traditional mistaken belief that Putin is a regional player. Considering the resources Putin has, it was obvious that sooner or later he would challenge the world’s strongest country, because that’s his way to demonstrate his own invincibility.

How well thought-out do you think this strategy was here?

At first they were using Trump mostly as an icebreaker. They expected Hillary to win and wanted to discredit her completely. Trump was the perfect vehicle for discrediting not only Hillary but the entire electoral system. Putin’s great advantage is that, unlike Soviet propagandists, he is not selling an ideology. I call him the merchant of doubt. His message is, We are shit, you are shit, and all of this is bullshit. What democracy? Trump was the ideal agent of chaos.

Trump kept saying that the election will be rigged. This was the Kremlin line. I think their main script was that Hillary would win in a close battle and #ElectionIsRigged would be a hashtag that would discredit her. She would be paralyzed. She’d be facing a Republican congress, which would immediately begin impeachment proceedings.

And then they saw that they had a shot at the jackpot. In its last stages, the campaign changed. They started using WikiLeaks when they sensed that they had a chance of getting Trump into office.

At the same time, Putin held his annual Valdai Club meeting for foreign experts on Russia, and that year it was designed to build bridges with the Hillary Clinton Administration they were anticipating.

Some things take time, even in a dictatorship. Valdai was planned ahead of time. And I’m not saying they had any certainty. Hillary was their main expectation. But they saw that they had a chance. They are card sharks. They stow an ace up their sleeve and keep playing the game.

Later, they thought that they may be able to pull off something even bigger. If you analyze what was happening between November and January, during the transition period, you will see that they were getting ready for a grandiose project. Henry Kissinger played a role. I think he was selling the Trump Administration on the idea of a mirror of 1972, except, instead of a Sino-U.S. alliance against the U.S.S.R., this would be a Russian-American alliance against China. This explains the Taiwan phone call. [In December, 2016, Trump spoke on the telephone with Taiwan’s President, Tsai Ing-wen, breaking decades of protocol and earning a rebuke from China.]

But it all went off the rails on December 29th, when Mike Flynn called the Russian Embassy. Flynn is a few weeks away from becoming the national-security adviser. And still he calls the Russian Ambassador. He calls to say, “Don’t do anything in response to the sanctions the United States has just imposed.” [The Russian foreign minister, Sergei] Lavrov has already announced that Russia will match the sanctions, Cold War–style: the U.S. has expelled thirty-five people and taken away two buildings, and we are going to do the exact same thing. And then Putin, effectively renouncing Lavrov, says, “You know what, we are starting a new life. We are not expelling anyone, and we are inviting American diplomats’ children to our New Year’s celebrations.”

A dictator can’t afford to look weak. He can act this way only if he is absolutely certain that Flynn is speaking for Trump. This means they trusted Flynn absolutely. The were sure that they were going to win in this situation.

Are you perhaps overestimating their intelligence? You are assuming that they had good reasons for trusting Flynn.

Let’s not underestimate Putin. He follows K.G.B. logic. Remember, when several countries expelled Russian diplomats, Putin went tit for tat. I think he even expelled a Hungarian. And yet he didn’t respond to the Americans that time. He was expecting to win big.

My conclusions come from looking at Kissinger’s trip to Moscow and, from what I see, his long-standing connections to Gazprom. It was obvious that China was being distanced and Trump was ready to give himself over to Putin. They were readying the ground for denouncing nato Article 5. This is the picture I get when I add it all up.

Categories International, Politics
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