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Phil Lanoue: The Best Way to Improve Education is Through Collaboration, Not In-Fighting

By dianeravitch
November 2, 2015 //
7

Georgia is a little late to the Mad-Hatters’ Reform Tea Party, but its Governor Nathan Deal is rushing to catch up. At the last election, he changed the Constitution so that the decisions of local boards could be overturned, to authorize a charter school where it was neither wanted nor needed. That is an assault on local control, engineered by the corporate minds at ALEC.

Now Governor Deal is pushing a constitutional amendment to create a Georgia Opportunity School District, akin to Tennessee’s failed Achievement School District, which did not meet its goals of raising low performing schools into the top 25% in the state by turning them into charters.

Fortunately there are wiser heads in the state. One is Phil Lanoue, the superintendent of schools in Athens, who was chosen as national superintendent of the year by his colleagues in the American Association of School Administrators. Phil Lanoue will be one of the keynote speakers at the national conference of the Network for Public Schools in Raleigh, NC, from April 15-17, 2016.

Without mentioning the looming battles and conflicts that reformers dearly love, Lanoue writes about what really works to improve schools.

He calls for an end to “the blame game” and advises:

The Georgia Vision Project (gavisionproject.org) was developed by researchers and educational experts, with the support of the Georgia School Superintendents Association and the Georgia School Boards Association. The impetus for this work is one we must all rally behind – to “offer recommendations which will transform the current system into one that is relevant for today’s children and youth.”

The alignment of our work with Georgia’s Vision must continue with fidelity to be shared across our state, with communities and agencies on board as well. We have a solid framework for improving our schools. For this to occur, we must stop the blame game. This is not an effective strategy, and needs to end if we are truly going to see the shifts we all hope will happen.

The metric for which we assess our students and school performance must change as well. In schools today, we should show success by demonstrating collaboration, innovation, creativity, communication and helping ensure the health of our children. However, the end game today for our students is simply a number from a score on standardized tests. These tests mostly evaluate someone else, like a teacher or administrator, or something else. We know this, but the conversations do not change and that is a major disservice to our children.

We can be much more effective if we build collaboration with multiple agencies to stabilize the often turbulent lives of our students. It can be done, and we have many examples of success across this state and country. However, building the supports we need across all aspects of our community can only succeed with a laser focus on children’s needs from birth to postsecondary education. To improve public education we must share and overlap resources. No single agency can do the work alone in supporting and educating our children. We must work together with a common focus on learning at high levels for all children.

We have a framework, as well as many examples of success. The major obstacle at this point is our decision to do this work together as Georgians. We are stronger than the sum of our parts, and together is the only way we can enact the changes that are needed to propel our state to the next level.

Categories Education Reform, Georgia, Real Education

John Ogozalek: Should We Teach Students to Lead or to Follow?

By dianeravitch
October 11, 2015 //
18

John Ogozalek is a high school teacher in upstate New York. He has taught for nearly 30 years.

He writes:

Secret Service agent Jerry Parr died Friday. He was the agent who on March 30, 1981 shoved President Reagan into the armored limo amid a spray of assassin’s bullets. But more importantly, it was Parr who recognized moments later that the president had actually been shot, then diverted the limo to the nearest hospital It was that quick thinking that is credited with saving Reagan’s life. Parr also broke the rules that day.

“Doctor Ruge, President Reagan’s personal physician, later told me that he probably would have gone in three or four minutes if we hadn’t gotten him to the hospital,” Parr later recalled. “So the decision was right to take him to the hospital when everything in your training says take him to the White House where it’s safe, don’t take him to the hospital where you don’t know what’s going on.”

A real education involves teaching not just the rules but helping our students learn the wisdom to recognize when it’s time to break those rules, too. That’s what agent Jerry Parr understood back in 1981. And, this is the vital concept that many of the so-called school “reformers” seem to have missed as they create a one-size-fits all, top-down, standardized school system. John B. King, the new Acting Education Secretary for the entire nation, seems particularly wedded to an authoritarian model of education, where students are taught to obey without questioning, without ever breaking the rules. Suspend ’em all! See Diane’s “A Revealing Looking at John King’s Roxbury Prep Charter School” https://dianeravitch.net/2015/10/07/a-revealing-look-at-john-kings-roxbury-prep-charter-school/ Also, https://dianeravitch.net/2015/10/09/charles-p-pierce-of-esquire-gets-it

And, it’s not just our children who are being muzzled in this brave, new educational world. How many of us teachers have been told by the “reformers” to just shut up and follow their orders? Read the module, parrot the script, give the test, all in lockstep. And, of course, anyone who questions this top-down authority is marked for career destruction. Too many teachers have been bullied into submission. What a sad lesson for our students.

It’s also not the sort of lesson previous generations of Americans were taught. Take, for example, the evidence in Stephen Ambrose’s account of front line GIs during World War II, Citizen Soldiers. What really won the war, according to Ambrose, wasn’t the top line generals, sitting comfortably far away from combat. It was the independent thinking and willingness of the typical citizen soldier to sometimes even break the rules that made the difference.. The “Greatest Generation” was smart and tough. Many of those soldiers were also wise asses. I can only imagine how they would mock us because of the SNAFU we have created in our public schools today.

The United States of America was created by rule breakers. It’s right in the Declaration of Independence: ” But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security”

Of course, this is NOT the sort of independent thinking that John B. King will be promoting anytime soon. No, John King is such a good….follower.

Categories Charter Schools, John King, Real Education

Jamaal Bowman: A Better Choice Than “No Excuses”

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2015 //
27

Jamaal Bowman is principal of Cornerstone Academy for Social Action in the Bronx, a borough of Néw York City. Knowing that Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy was planning a mass rally today, he wrote an article saying that schools need to focus on the whole child not just test scores.

Bowman describes the harsh disciplinary policies at Success Academy schools to the supportive environment at his school. Unlike SA schools, school has very little teacher turnover, very minor student attrition, and low suspension rates.

He writes:

“During a recent conversation with a sixth grader who attends a Success Academy charter school, she referred to her learning environment as “torturous.” “They don’t let us be kids,” she told me, “and they monitor every breath we take.”

Although praised by many for its test scores, the draconian policies at Success are well documented. Students must walk silently in synchronized lines.

In classrooms, boys and girls must sit with their hands folded and feet firmly on the ground, and must raise their hands in a specific way to request a bathroom break.

DE BLASIO SEEKS 80% GRADUATION IN 10-YEAR EDUCATION PLAN

Most disturbingly, during test prep sessions, it has been reported that students have wet their pants because of the high levels of stress, and because, simulating actual test-taking, they’re not permitted to use the restroom except during breaks.

Regarding the praise for Success Academy’s test results, we must be mindful of overstating the quality of an education based on test score evidence alone….

“As reported by Juan Gonzalez in the Daily News, the first Success Academy opened in 2006 with 73 first graders. By 2014, only 32 of the 73 had graduated from the school.

“What happened to most of that student cohort? Did they leave willingly just because their families were moving? Did they leave for other schools because Success Academy wasn’t right for them? Were they pushed out?

“Further, school suspensions and teacher turnover at Success are disproportionately higher than district schools. Said one teacher in a recent New York Times article, “I dreaded going into work.” Another teacher, when requesting to leave work at 4:55 p.m. to tend to her sick and vomiting child, was told, “it’s not 5 o’clock yet.”

At Bowman’s school, 99% of the students are black or Hispanic.

He writes:

“Although 90% of our students enter sixth grade below grade level, we’ve had success on the state standardized tests, ranking number one in New York City in combined math and English Language Arts test growth score average in 2015.

“But testing is not how we measure success.

“Our mission is to create a learning environment anchored in multiple intelligences. Student voice and passion are embedded into the curriculum. In addition to traditional courses like mathematics and humanities, S.T.E.A.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art of Architecture, Mathematics), computer science, the arts, leadership and physical education provide a rich and robust learning environment.

“A favorite course of both the staff and students of C.A.S.A. is “Genius Hour.” Borrowing from the 20% time concept of Google, Apple and Facebook, we give students two 60-minute blocks per week to work on “passion projects.” Using design thinking, students explore issues within their community that frustrate them and conduct research into how to create solutions to identified problems.

“Finally, at C.A.S.A., during the 2014-15 school year, only 2.3% of our students received a suspension. Our teacher turnover rate is 1.5% annually. We also have an average of less than a 1% student attrition rate annually over a six-year period.

“Parents and students of Success Academy schools will rally Wednesday against Mayor de Blasio’s agenda of investing in public schools to turn them into community schools and otherwise improve their learning environments. Their goal instead is presumably to turn ever more schools into privately run charter schools — though it’s unlikely Moskowitz would agree to take over any struggling schools if she had to keep the student body intact.

“Our city needs more public schools that serve the whole child without an obsessive focus on tests. Only then will our children truly feel at home. This is a cause worth rallying for.”

Categories Charter Schools, Harlem Success Academy, Joy, New York City, Privatization, Real Education, Supporting public schools

William Stroud: The Commercialization of Everything

By dianeravitch
September 29, 2015 //
26

William Stroud is the principal of Long Beach High School in New York.

“Our lives have become increasingly commercialized in a modern, global society that everywhere promotes consumerism; surrounding us with images that link glamor and status with possessions. The desire to have more, new, “better” things infiltrates our sub-conscious, influences our daily behaviors, and compromises our value system in remarkable ways. What we have, becomes a substitute for who we are. Buy happiness.

“I often refer to the commercialization of public education, i.e. the contemporary takeover of schooling by a corporate elite that imposes its own paradigm rather than a vision of education as liberation; a system which would develop our full potentials as individuals, strengthen our sense of community with each other, define what it means to be a human being in the grandest sense – values, thoughts, and behaviors. Schools can provide a forum for us to explore how we can make the world a better place.

“Instead, the corporate leaders that guide educational policy, inspired by Milton Friedman’s ‘Freedom and Democracy’ and their own self-interest, have transformed public education into a marketplace. Education becomes synonymous with “achievement” results, and “choice” becomes the reform lever. Students and teachers are measured according to standardized test performance. Significance of data becomes more essential than quality of relationships. Public monies are “freed up” so private service providers can be contracted. And there’s the big money – sales in curriculum and assessment, and educational technology.”

Categories Education Industry, Real Education

Lloyd Lofthouse: The Best Way to Learn to Read

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2015 //
151

Lloyd Lofthouse, a frequent contributor to the blog, offers advice about how to teach reading:

“By the time I was eight years old, I was an avid reader. The grade school I was attending didn’t have a library but the county had a library bus visit the school every week, and I’d check out the maximum number of books.

“Eventually, I was old enough to ride my bike the few miles to the town’s library and check out books. I haunted that library.

“The high school I attended had a well stocked library where I worked as a student assistant for four years with that one hour a day counted for credit toward HS graduation. The librarian even graded her student library assistants. It was the only HS class where I earned my only A’s in HS.

“In my academic classes, I sat in the back and spent more time reading the books I was checking out of the HS library than I was doing the school work or paying attention to most of my teachers.

“By the time I barely graduated from high school with a 0.95 GPA, I must have read a few thousand books. I was a horrible test taker and usually failed the tests. School work had never been important to me because I didn’t plan to go to college. That would change when I was fighting in Vietnam and a sniper came within a fraction of an inch of blowing off the left side of my head. I felt the bullet caress my ear. I thought if I’d gone to college as my mother had wanted, I wouldn’t have been there. There were several other very close calls from other snipers, rockets, mortars and grenades.

“I was 23 when I was honorably discharged from the Marines and applied to go to college on the GI Bill. The community college gave me a literary test to see what English class to put me in. They had several levels of what’s known as Bone Head English for readers who were not reading at the literacy level necessary for doing college work.

“I passed that literacy test at the highest literacy level and never took a Bone Head English class in College even with my lousy 0.95 GPA out of HS. Imagine what that GPA would have been without those A’s from the librarian.

“If we want children to read at a high literacy level, those same children should be reading every day from books they enjoy—not some crap from a David Coleman or Pearson list.

“For instance, when I was teaching 7th grade in the early 1980s, one mother came to me concerned for her daughter who was a student in the English class I taught. The mother told me that her daughter was reading five levels below grade level. She wanted to know what could be done so her daughter would catch up.

“I said, “Turn off the TV at home, and have your daughter read for at least one hour or more every night at home seven days week, 365 days a year. The more she reads books that she enjoys, the faster her literacy level will grow.” I told her to use the local county library because it was free.

“That mother was skeptical. She even said as much but she promised to do what I suggested—and she did.

“A year later, after the next standardized test to determine reading levels, the mother wrote a letter to the district commending me for my advice because her daughter had jumped five years catching up to her grade level in literacy. That letter went into my file that the district kept of me as a teacher.

“I taught about 6,000 children over 30 years and suggested this to other parents, but this one mother was the only mother who did what I suggested about turning off the TV and replacing that time with reading books.”

Categories Real Education

Alan Ehrenhalt: The Stupidity of Our High-Stakes Testing Regime

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2015 //
18

While cleaning up my files, I discovered this excellent article by Alan Ehrenhalt, contributing editor to Governing magazine (and formerly executive editor for 19 years). It was written in 2013, but remains pertinent today.

Ehrenhalt sees through the fraud in the high-stakes testing obsession of our day, in which scores on standardized tests are used to label children, rate teachers, and close schools.

He begins by writing about the Tony Bennett grade-rigging scandal in Indiana, then moves on to Florida, where Jeb Bush launched measurement mania.

He writes:

The Tampa Bay Times newspaper lamented that “after grading schools for 15 years, Florida’s education leaders still cannot get it right.”

One might easily go further and argue that changing the results to make the picture look brighter, whether it involves outright cheating or not, is cause for embarrassment all by itself. If new test questions can have that much effect on a school’s overall performance grade, then why should anybody believe in the integrity of the system?

What’s especially humiliating is that Florida is the birthplace of the school testing movement, the state where former Gov. Jeb Bush decided in 1999 to begin awarding overall letter grades to individual schools to provide information for parents and help assess statewide educational performance. More than a dozen states have begun using a similar system since then, several of them just in the current year. Now they are being told that the Florida model they dutifully copied is too full of flaws to be trusted.

That matters a great deal because a lot more is riding on FCAT test scores than just local bragging rights. If a school receives repeated grades of D or F, it can be required by the state to take a variety of drastic measures, such as making the entire faculty reapply for their jobs, converting the school to a charter or closing it down altogether. So public confidence in the grading process is essential if the state is to have any credibility as a dispenser of draconian educational remedies.

States applying or adapting the Florida model have learned that changing the questions on the test, or switching to a new type of test altogether, can result in wildly fluctuating school grades. School officials in New Mexico this year were delighted to find out that the number of schools receiving A grades had more than doubled in comparison with the results from the year before. Was this the product of innovative new pedagogical techniques? Well, no. It was because the state had abandoned the federally designed No Child Left Behind test and switched to a new one designed by state education experts. Mississippi had a similar experience. Its school test scores went up dramatically because state officials took the expedient step of removing high school graduation rates from the list of test criteria for some schools.

The dramatically higher scores that resulted were a cause for initial state elation. But on further review, they raised another serious question. If the testing process is based on solid educational research, then the results from different tests ought to be reasonably congruent. If the results are dramatically disparate, there is a disturbing suggestion that the people writing the tests aren’t sure what it is they are supposed to be measuring.

Then he shifts his focus to Maine:

Maine is another state that has endured a season of controversy based on the introduction of its new school grading procedures. Gov. Paul LePage, a tireless advocate of school measurement, pushed through a new system this year based largely on the Florida model. Schools were evaluated on student test scores in reading and math; the percentage of students who had shown improvement in their scores during the past year, especially among the bottom 25 percent; graduation rates among upper-level students; and percentage of students who take the national SAT exam.

When the statewide results were tallied, Maine’s schools averaged a C grade—a reasonable enough sounding score. But when researchers in the state began looking at the results in greater detail, they found something that disturbed them. What the tests were really tracking was demographics. Schools in poorer communities around the state nearly all finished lower than their counterparts in affluent suburbs, regardless of academic methods. High schools that were graded A had an average of 9 percent of their students on free or reduced price lunch. Schools that got an F had 61 percent of their students receiving subsidized lunches. To a great extent, the test was simply a measure of poverty, not school quality.

He recognizes that testing has become a problem in itself:

It is hard not to conclude in the end that the school testing movement represents a popular fad in educational policy that is desperately lacking in either substantive methodology or common sense. Its fundamental assumption, underneath all the jargon, is that schools fail because they just aren’t trying hard enough, not because they are being asked to educate pupils who are culturally and socially unprepared to learn. Cooking the books on the tests won’t do anything to solve this problem. All it will do, when the extent of the mischief is revealed, is undermine public confidence in the entire enterprise of school testing.

We have gotten into the business of measuring school performance with precise testing numbers because it’s something we know how to measure. In doing so, we leave aside the subtler and more personal things that teachers and principals do all the time to make their schools function in an orderly way and disseminate as much learning as they possibly can. In the words of Roger Jones, a professor at Lynchburg College in Virginia, one of the states that enacted an A-F grading system this year: “We have gotten so caught up in testing that we have lost sight of a true education.”

Categories Florida, Indiana, Maine, Real Education, Testing

What Matters Most in Education: Human Relationships

By dianeravitch
August 4, 2015 //
38

I don’t know why we have to keep rediscovering the wheel in education. I guess it’s because the reformers keep imposing bad ideas that teachers know will not work and that violate their professional ethics that it becomes necessary to repeat again and again what used to be common knowledge.

 

Bill Boyle wrote a lovely reflection on the key ingredients in the classroom: human relationships and affection.

 

Big data can’t take the place of a caring teacher.

 

He writes:

 

“I continue to wonder, why do we attempt to impose technocratic solutions on contexts such as education that require the nexus of human relationships? To be more specific, why do use a market driven model of corporate education reform imposed from the top that uses data abstracted from context?

 

“It’s kind of like arguing for a first down in the game of basketball.”

 

He quotes the poet Wendell Berry, who said,

 

““I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it…By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind and conserving economy.”

 

This is why efforts to replace teachers with machines will not work. And it explains why class size is important. Too many students reduces the time for relationships.

 

Boyle writes:

 

“The hard fact of the matter is that this corporatist reform movement and the market fundamentalism that drives it will run their course. And then we will be left all that we’ve ever had from the beginning; each other, and what’s left of the land that we depend on.

 

“The more we practice affection in the meantime, the better prepared we will be.”

Categories Real Education, Students, Teachers

Rachel Wolfe: A Video about the Lost Passion of Teens LINK ADDED

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2015 //
29

Rachel Wolfe made this wonderful 30-minute documentary called “Losing Ourselves.”

Losing Ourselves

Rachel is an intern at The Future Project, an education non-profit focused on bringing passion and purpose to the lives of young people, and a sophomore in Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy. She graduated a year ago from Scarsdale High School.

She writes about her film:

I’ve been reading (and loving) your blog, and I thought you might be interested in a like-minded documentary I created during my junior and senior years of high school. The documentary is called Losing Ourselves and explores how an expectation for perfection and a status-driven definition of success undermines students’ love of learning and creativity and gets in the way of our ability to use high school as an opportunity to figure out what we love and who we are. The last chapter portrays how a fifth grade classroom in which creativity is encouraged and failure is praised creates kids who are intrinsically motivated, incredibly passionate, and terrified to have their creativity educated out of them.

Categories Joy, Real Education, Students

My Opinion, What Los Angeles Needs in its Next Superintendent, Published in the Los Angeles Times

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2015 //
46

I hope you will read the opinion piece that I wrote for today’s Los Angeles Times about what priorities the next superintendent should have.

 

For those of you who have frequently criticized the LA Times as a tool of the charter industry, please note that I was invited to write the article.

 

The article is a strong plea for a leader who will restore public confidence in public education. Given that Los Angeles has a very rich, very powerful lobby for privately managed charters, it was written to counter their pressure to convert more public schools to private management. They heavily invest in school board candidates who follow their agenda. In the last election, the charter lobby managed to place a charter school operator on the district school board. Only an awakened public can defend the public sector from raids by the corporate sector on what rightly belongs to the entire community.

 

Los Angeles’ public schools are indeed in crisis. The solution is not to abandon them, but to rebuild them so as to meet the needs of the children enrolled in public schools.

 

 

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Charter Schools, Los Angeles, Privatization, Real Education

Vicki Cobb: The Demise of the Artist-Teacher

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2015 //
47

Vicki Cobb, author of many children’s books about hands-on science, recently spoke at a children’s literature conference in Florida. She was disturbed to meet a new breed of teacher: teachers who had grown up in the era of high-stakes testing and scripted lessons. Too many thought that this is the way school was supposed to be, because it was all they had experienced.

 

She attributes the change to the takeover of education policy by non educators:

 

The business and government suits, who have hijacked educational policy in a top down approach, are not professional educators. Their knowledge of education comes primarily from what they themselves survived (endured?). Most do not know what good education looks like. Their idea of a well-ordered classroom is rows of desks with students quietly bent over a test. Now, the chickens are coming home to roost in the preparation of the next generation of Florida’s classroom teachers. Their professors tell me that they call them the “FCAT babies.” These young people are the pre-service teachers who have grown up in Florida’s test-taking climate. They have a “mother, may I?” permission-seeking approach to their own classroom behavior as teachers. They think test-taking and test prep is normal. They have seen nothing else. They are afraid to think for themselves.

 

As she posed questions to a group of students, she noticed that they answered quickly to her questions, not pausing to think. She sensed the test-prep culture, the reflexive search for the right answer. And that was not what she wanted to see.

 

She missed what she calls “the artist-teacher.” What is the “artist=teacher”? “An artist is someone who brings his or her own self-expression to an activity. An artist expresses personal, closely held views, thoughts, images and passions with such truth and clarity that others immediately connect with this revealed humanity. Thus the personal becomes the universal. Therein lies its power.”

 

Instead, teachers in Florida told her about scripted programs whose goal was to make sure that every teacher was on the same page at the same time teaching the same things. Scripted lessons are “turning teachers into automatons, when American education is crying out for the return of the artist-teacher. This is the teacher who takes one look at the textbooks and goes to the library to find much more powerful reading on the same subjects. This is the teacher who knows each student intimately and can write a poem for each one. This is the teacher who figures that good teaching trumps test prep and is not afraid for her kids’ test outcomes. This is the teacher who has the courage to justify what he’s doing and why he’s doing it to powers-that-be who are not fully equipped to evaluate creativity. It includes a lot of the “best teacher” awardees. This is the teacher who wants to spend more time creating powerful lessons and less time doing accountability paperwork. For the artist-teacher, teaching with autonomy, mastery and purpose is a subversive activity, much as art is subversive in a dictatorship.”

 

Our current educational culture, driven by No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Common Core standards, is rewarding robotic behavior and punishing artist-teachers. In the current climate, good teaching is a subversive activity.

Categories Florida, Joy, Real Education, Teachers and Teaching
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