Bob Shepherd lists what he hopes will be the lessons learned from the pandemic nightmare.
Since I agree with him, I hope you will read his six lessons.
Feel free to add your own ideas.
Number one: Distance learning is a crock, and teachers are really, really important.
Marion Brady is a retired educator who writes often on the subject he knows best. If anyone wants to “reinvent” or “re-imagine” education, start here. Let Laurene Powell Jobs save herself a bundle. Tell her to read Marion Brady.
Learning is one of the deepest of all human drives and, ordinarily, a source of great personal satisfaction, even excitement. Kindergartners bring enthusiasm to schooling, but mandatory attendance laws, the use of grading, ranking, and other extrinsic motivators, and classroom discipline problems testify to the gradual decline of learner enthusiasm.
It’s essential to restore and expand the school and teacher autonomy that once made the education profession appealing, made American education a model for the world, and brought the nation far more than its share of patents, international prizes, and other evidences of excellence.
The depth of public schooling’s multilayered bureaucracies makes meaningful change discouragingly difficult. However, by using traditional content in non-traditional ways, and by addressing a few long-ignored institutional problems, genuine institutional transformation is possible—from passive to active learning, from text-centered to student-centered instruction, from simplistic top-down policies to bottom-up, educator-guided instructional activities.
Consider:
Problem
‘Alice (in Wonderland) came to a fork in the road. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked.
‘Where do you want to go?’ responded the Cheshire Cat.
‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered.
‘Then,’ said the Cat, ‘It doesn’t matter.’
A little more than a half-century ago I was teaching interdisciplinary social science at Florida State University, working with teacher candidates in the School of Education and with the heads of the sociology departments of FSU and Florida A&M University on a project for the American Sociological Association.
Research connected with that project prompted me to begin making a list of what authors of articles in professional academic journals thought was the overarching aim or purpose of a general education.
The twenty-eight authors on my list had twenty-eight different opinions: Instill a love of learning; explore ‘eternal’ questions; prepare the young for democratic citizenship; introduce the core disciplines; transmit societal values; prepare for college and careers, and 22 more.
The institution has no agreed-upon, overarching aim. To resist inertia and function efficiently, its purpose must be understood and shared by every stakeholder.
Solution: Given an unknowable future and the regional, ethnic, cultural, and situational differences in America’s nearly 350 million citizens, capitalizing on their myriad perspectives requires the aim most likely to support all legitimate aims of schooling: Maximize learner ability to think clearly, creatively, and independently.
“Thinking,” a process, must have an agreed-upon meaning, must actually and routinely require learners to hypothesize, generalize, synthesize, imagine, relate, integrate, predict, extrapolate, and so on through the dozens of thought processes and countless combinations of thought processes that make possible routine human functioning and civilized life.
General education’s present operative aim is “covering the material” in the curriculum adopted by America’s secondary schools in 1893. How little most adults remember and use of what they once “learned” at great cost in money and time is irrefutable evidence of an unaddressed institutional problem.
Make general education’s aim maximizing the ability to think clearly, deeply, and creatively, and learners will draw on the specialized studies of the traditional disciplines as needed and appropriate.
Problem
No one disputes the contention that firsthand experience is the best teacher, but traditional schooling makes alternatives to seat-time and learner passivity difficult. Schools sometimes rival medium security prisons in the degree to which they isolate their charges from the outside world and regiment their actions.
Schooling’s subject matter is reality—what it is and how it works. The whole of that, of course, is beyond comprehension. Reality needs to be scaled down to a size that makes direct, firsthand experience possible.
To that end, imagine a bubble enclosing the school and its surrounding environment—north, south, east, west, above, below, everything inside the bubble, from earthworms under to air above, functioning as it ordinarily functions. Imagine the bubble’s content as textbook, as laboratory, as working, tangible, directly accessible phenomena reasonably representative of the whole of reality of which it’s a part.
Solution: Make the school (or selected aspects of it to keep the tasks manageable) an ongoing focus of study—not the only but the primary general education project.
With understanding will come ideas for improving school performance. If learners know their ideas will be taken seriously, they’ll be motivated to produce sophisticated presentations for school boards or other authorities. That’s a demanding, real-world, intellectually challenging task that parallels the responsibilities of adult citizenship.
Taking action: The young face an unprecedented, accelerating rate of technological, demographic, environmental, economic, and social change. If they’re to have a fighting chance of coping with the collisions of differing societal worldviews which those changes will trigger, they’ll need much more than traditional schooling can give them.
Keeping the effort small, bottom up-and voluntary, here’s how to demonstrate that meaningful academic reform is possible inside existing bureaucratic boundaries and expectations:
1. Start at the middle school level. Middle schools began with a commitment to integrating knowledge, but stumbled by assuming that integrating knowledge meant integrating school subjects. Wrong assumption. All humans routinely integrate knowledge, and making deliberate use of this subconsciously known skill radically simplifies just about everything of consequence about educating.
2. Don’t lose sight of the big picture. Covering secondhand material to be remembered shouldn’t be schooling’s primary objective. The ancient Greeks had it right: “Know thyself.” Every person on the planet has a mental model of how the world works that shapes their thoughts and actions. Schooling should lift awareness of those models so they can be examined and refined. The core curriculum eats most of the school day without doing that because it breaks reality apart and studies the parts but doesn’t put it back together. Integrate knowledge systemically, study the real world rather than textbooks about it, and the general education component of the curriculum will do in a couple of hours what presently isn’t being done at all. The instructional time made available will allow identification, attention, and development of individual interests and abilities to an extent not previously possible.
3. Small work groups are optimal. They facilitate dialogue, the main class activity when active learning replaces passive learning.
4. The most effective teachers don’t teach, they engineer experiences from which learners learn,* then back away, dealing with roadblocks with questions, not answers. If teachers with differing skills are teamed, the quality of questions will be better.
5. Stop fixating on data. When improving the quality of learner thought replaces recalling secondhand information as schooling’s primary aim, data-producing standardized tests—unable to quantify quality—are useless.
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*Sequenced instructional materials that illustrate holistic, systemically integrated, reality-based active learning, written for middle school and older learners and using traditional content in non-traditional ways, are available free of cost or other obligations when used by teachers with their own students. The materials can be downloaded from the link below. If policymakers will remove obstacles to their voluntary use, and teachers, worldwide, work together, continuous improvement of the general education curriculum will follow.
The fact that bottom-up improvement is possible despite the curse of
standardization and high-stakes testing is indicated by years of
thousands of downloads of files from http://www.MarionBrady.com
Governor Andrew Cuomo just announced that he has tapped a second billionaires to “reinvent”
education in New York state after the pandemic. According to the New York Post, Cuomo sees distance learning as “the wave of the future,” so who better to enlist as his advisers than Bill Gates and now Eric Schmidt of Google.
Reporter Rebecca C. Lewis of “City and State” just tweeted this report:
Cuomo has announced the third billionaire to lead state efforts amid the coronavirus crisis: former Google CEO Eric Schmidt will be focused on new technology utilization. He joins Michael Bloomberg, who’s doing contact tracing, and Bill Gates, who’s doing education
Neither Bill Gates nor Eric Schmidt is an educator. They made their fortune selling software. Selling stuff to schools does not make you an education expert.
Obviously Cuomo thinks that the future of education is online.
He seems oblivious to the eagerness of parents and students alike to return to real live teachers in real school buildings. Parents want to return to work, students want to see their teachers and their friends, and they want to return to their activities and sports. Teachers want to see their students. No one but Cuomo—and probably Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt—wants remote learning to become permanent.
Please someone tell Governor Cuomo that the state Constitution and laws delegate all authority over education to the Board of Regents, and gives zero authority to him.
The pandemic is turning into a grand opportunity for the foxes to raid the henhouse under cover of darkness. Parents, teachers, and students want a safe and orderly return to real education taught by real teachers in real schools.
Why doesn’t the Governor listen to parents and teachers and students, who will tell him to reinvent schools by fully funding them? They want smaller class sizes, well-maintained facilities, experienced teachers, a well-stocked library with a librarian, programs in the arts, a nurse and social worker and guidance counselor in every school. They don’t want the massive budget cuts that the Governor has in store nor do they want the distance learning that they are currently experiencing to become permanent.
John Ogozalek teaches high school in upstate New York.
I was outside a good part of yesterday. There are lots of jobs to do here in the country when winter starts to really end. I also went and uncovered the old spring out in one of our fields. No cell phone works there so I was truly out of touch.
The idea is that if there’s a typical, garden variety power outage due to something like a bad storm, the line crews could be stretched thin the next few months If they’re shorthanded, our corner of the world might have to wait much longer than usual for the lights to come back on. And the pump that draws the water up for our house to kick back into service.
So, I was cleaning up the spring. It’s been there for generations. Nearby there are trees much older than the last major pandemic in the U.S. 100 years ago. I was way beyond the range of anyone hearing me even if I shouted at the top of my lungs, standing there in the cool, mountain breeze. It kind of put this current global disaster in a bit of context -at least for a few moments.
And the thought came to me there on that hillside: it’s incredible how WARPED our priories have been for our schools -and our entire society. Less than two weeks out of the usual school routine and it is so clear how warped and demented so many things have become.
I’m heading back down there later this morning. There’s still a lot of work to be done.
The sun is out today and it’s getting stronger every spring day that goes by.
Take care.
Paul Lockhart wrote a brilliant essay called “A Mathematician’s Lament,” in which he competed the teaching of music to the teaching of mathematics. What if children spent years learning how to identify and describe colors and art forms but were not allowed to draw or paint until they got to college?
I was reminded of a critical description of the teaching of science in the late nineteenth century. Children learned to memorize the parts of a flower but never to study the natural world around them. All they knew of nature was what they memorized in dry textbooks.
Thanks to Steve Nelson for recommending Lockhart’s essay.
Today is “pub day,” as they say in the trade.
I started writing SLAYING GOLIATH in February 2018 as I watched and read news reports about the teachers’ strike in West Virginia.
I watched in awe as every school in the state was closed by every superintendent so that teachers were technically not breaking the law that prevents them from striking.
I watched in amazement as teachers and support staff assembled in the state capitol, decked in red T-shirts, carrying homemade signs, and declaring their allegiance to #55Strong, a reference to the 55 school districts in the state.
I saw them stand together proudly and defiantly, insisting on fair wages and decent working conditions.
I realized as #Red4Ed spread from state to state that something fundamental had changed in the national narrative about education.
The media were no longer talking about “bad teachers” and “failing schools,” but were actually listening to the voices of those who worked in the schools.
In January 2019, I marched in the rain with teachers of the UTLA in Los Angeles.
And I saw the national narrative change.
I read stories about how poorly teachers were paid instead of blaming them for low test scores.
Suddenly the press woke up to the massive neglect and underinvestment in education that was creating a teacher shortage.
Demoralization was replaced by jubilation as teachers realized that they were not merely passive bystanders but could take charge of their destiny.
Many teachers ran for office. Some won and joined their state legislature.
I began to see the world in a different light.
I looked at the latest NAEP scores and read the lamentations about flat scores for a decade (that was before the release of the 2019 scores, which confirmed that the needle had not moved on test scores despite billions spent on testing).
So many changes were happening, and suddenly I realized that the so-called reformers were on the defensive. They knew that none of their promises had come through. They were on a power trip with no expectation anymore of “closing the achievement gap” (which is a built-in feature of standardized tests, which are normed on a bell curve that never closes). No more expectation that charter schools were miraculous. I began checking and realized that the number of new charter schools was almost equaled by the number of charter schools that were closing.
Something new and different was in the air: Hope!
Arne Duncan wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post saying that “some people claim that reform is failing, don’t believe them.” Then I knew it was all over.
I knew that the “reform” project was nothing more than a Disruption movement. It had succeeded at nothing.
Yet it was the Status Quo.
And this behemoth had the nerve to claim it was opposed to the “status quo.”
The behemoth–Goliath– controls all the levers of power. It controls federal policy, it is steered by billionaires, it has the allegiance of hedge fund managers, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and a long list of foundations. One of my sons, a writer, read an early version of the manuscript, and he said there were too many names in the chapter about the Disruption Movement. I explained the importance and necessity of naming names. Every one of them was documented.
Arrayed against this daunting assemblage of the rich and powerful were parents, educators, students, people who wanted to protect what belongs to the public and keep it out of the hands of corporations and entrepreneurs.
I decided to tell the story of the Resistance and to zoom in on some of the heroes. There was Jitu Brown in Chicago, who led a hunger strike of a dozen people on lawn chairs and forced Rahm Emanuel to capitulate. There were Leonie Haimson Rachael Stickland, who organized other parents and defeated Bill Gates and his $100 million project called inBloom, which was all set to gather personally identifiable student data and store it in a cloud managed by Amazon. There were the valiant and creative members of the Providence Student Union, who employed political theater to stop the state from using a standardized test as a graduation requirement. There was Jesse Hagopian and the brave teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle, who refused to administer a useless test, risking their jobs. There were the parents, students, and activists in Douglass County, Colorado, who fought year after year until they ousted a far-right board that wanted to be first in the nation to offer vouchers for religious schools. There are individuals, like Ed Johnson in Atlanta, who keeps telling the school board how to approach reform as a system rather than as an opportunity to punish people. There were many more, and many that I did not have space to include.
Goliath is not dead yet. But he is propped up solely by the power of money. Goliath has no ideas, no strategies, no plans that have not already been tried and failed.
I loved writing the book. I wrote it to give hope and encouragement to all the Davids still fighting to preserve and improve public schools and the teaching profession.
Goliath will always have more money. But take heart: Goliath may be standing but he will not be there forever. Every act of resistance adds up. Goliath stumbled. He will fall.
Even billionaires and oligarch tire of pouring millions and millions into failure after failure after failure.
Please give a copy of SLAYING GOLIATH to school board members and legislators. Give a copy to your local editorial writer.
On my book tour, I will be in Charleston, West Virginia, on February 22 to celebrate the second anniversary of the historic West Virginia teachers’ strike.
And I will personally thank them for changing the national narrative!
Let me confess that I have a mad crush on Audrey Watters although I have never met her. I love her fearlessness, her keen intelligence, and her unapologetic humanity.
I wrote a few days ago that her recent post on the 100 Biggest Worst Ed-Tech Debacles was the best post I had read in the last decade.
She got a lot of feedback to that zinger of a post, and some readers asked her if she could name the 100 best things that happened in Ed-tech.
She answers that question boldly in this post.
I paraphrase: Ed-Tech has enough marketing, branding, shills, and paid mouthpieces. Hers is not one of them.
How often have you learned something for a test, then promptly forgot it?
One of the goals of education surely is to instill a love of learning and to build a foundation of knowledge that one can draw upon and increase in future learning.
Steven Singer notes that a steady diet of standardized testing may actually undermine learning.
He begins:
The main goal of schooling is no longer learning.
Raising them. Measuring growth. Determining what each score means in terms of future instruction, opportunities, class placement, special education services, funding incentives and punishments, and judging the effectiveness of individual teachers, administrators, buildings and districts.
We’ve become so obsessed with these scores – a set of discrete numbers – that we’ve lost sight of what they always were supposed to be about in the first place – learning.
In fact, properly understood, that’s the mission of the public school system – to promote the acquisition of knowledge and skills. Test scores are just supposed to be tools to help us quantify that learning in meaningful ways.
Somewhere along the line we’ve misconstrued the tool for the goal. And when you do that, it should come as no surprise that you achieve the goal less successfully.
A great victory for real education in Milwaukee, where the business community and politicians have been obsessed with “choice” for 30 years. From the FB page of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association.
This is a victory for students!
This is a victory for real education!
This is one of the best of Jan Resseger’s many brilliant posts.
In it, she quotes a surprising source, who explains the importance, centrality, and necessity of public schools as anchors of their communities.
As you may have guessed, I am a huge admirer of this insightful, wise woman.
Please print this out, email it, tweet it, put it on Facebook, share it with your friends.
I never quote a post in full. I want you to go to the source and add page views to the author. This is an exception because I can’t find a word to cut.
She writes:
The 2019-2020 school year is now underway, and in an ironic twist, in a business journal, the academic dean of the college of education at the for-profit University of Phoenix has penned a beautiful reflection on the meaning of public education. Dean Pam Roggeman understands the meaning for families and for communities of their public schools.
Roggeman writes: “This early fall, I’d like to honor the millions of parents who… send their kids to school for the first time. Critics, possibly a bit removed from their neighborhood public schools, at times try to paint public education as a nameless, faceless bureaucratic institution that is riddled with faults. And like many other institutions, our public schools do have flaws. However, those of us rooted in our communities, with or without school-age kids, do not see our schools as faceless institutions. Rather, we associate our schools with our child’s talented teacher, or the principal greeting kids at the door, or the coach waiting for kids to be picked up after practice, or the mom who became this fall’s crossing guard, or the front office staff who commiserate with us as we deliver the forgotten lunch, and… also with the friendly bus-driver who will not move that bus until every child is safely seated. We rely on and embrace our neighborhood public schools as a community enterprise on which we deeply depend.”
Roggeman defines the reason public schools are one of our society’s best opportunities for establishing systemic justice for children: public schools are required by law to serve the needs and protect the rights of all children: “(T)here is one thing that our American public schools do better than any other schools in the country or even in the world: our public schools commit to addressing the needs of every single child. Our public schools are open to ALL children, without prejudice or pause. Our schools attempt to educate EVERYBODY. American students are students who are gifted, students with disabilities, students who need advanced placement, students who have experienced trauma, students who are learning English, students who are hungry, affluent students, students who live in poverty, students who are anxious, and students who are curious.”
Reading Roggeman’s reflection on public education as an essential civic institution caused me to dig out a Resolution for the Common Good, passed by the 25th General Synod of the United Church of Christ more than a decade ago, when I was working in the justice ministries of that mainline Protestant denomination. The resolution was passed unanimously in 2005, in the midst of a decade when an ethos of individualism was accelerating.
The values defined in the introduction to the resolution mesh with Roggeman’s consideration of public schools as the essence of community: “The Twenty-fifth General Synod calls upon all settings of the United Church of Christ to uphold the common good as a foundational ideal in the United States, rejects the notion that government is more unwieldy or inefficient than other democratic institutions, and reaffirms the obligation of citizens to share through taxes the financial responsibility for public services that benefit all citizens, especially those who are vulnerable, to work for more equitable public institutions, and to support regulations that protect society and the environment.”
The introduction of the resolution continues: “A just and good society balances individualism with the needs of the community. In the past quarter century our society has lost this ethical balance. Our nation has moved too far in the direction of promoting individual self interest at the expense of community responsibility. The result has been an abandonment of the common good. While some may suggest that the sum total of individual choices will automatically constitute the common good, there is no evidence that choices based on self interest will protect the vulnerable or provide the safeguards and services needed by the whole population. While as a matter of justice and morality we strive always to expand the individual rights guaranteed by our government for those who have lacked rights, we also affirm our commitment to vibrant communities and recognize the importance of government for providing public services on behalf of the community… The church must speak today about the public space where political processes are the way that we organize our common life, allocate our resources, and tackle our shared problems. Politics is about the values we honor, the dollars we allocate, and the process we follow so that we can live together with some measure of justice, order and peace.”
Recognizing “significant on-going efforts to privatize education, health care, and natural resources, and to reduce revenues collected through taxes as a strategy for reducing dependency on government services,” the delegates resolved “that the United Church of Christ in all its settings will work to make our culture reflect the following values:
Since that resolution passed in 2005, we have watched an explosion of economic inequality, the defunding and privatization of public institutions including K-12 public education, the defunding of social programs; the growth of privatized and unregulated charter schools, the abuse of power by those who have been amassing the profits, and the abandonment of policies to protect the environment.
A just and good society balances the rights of the individual with the needs of the community. I believe that the majority of Americans embrace these values. I wonder how we have allowed our society stray so far.
Diane Ravitch's blog 