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Johaan Neem: Will Public Schools Survive the Pandemic?

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2020 //
46

Johann Neem, historian of education at Western Washington University, wrote an article in USA Today about the threat that COVID-19 poses to the future of public education. Affluent parents, he notes, are making their own arrangements. Some have created “learning pods” and hired their own teachers. Others will send their children to private schools, which have the resources to respond nimbly to the crisis. He recounts the early history of public schools and points out that they became essential as they served an ever-growing share of the community’s children.

Neem writes that the increase in the number of charter schools and vouchers, as well as Betsy DeVos’s relentless promotion of charters and vouchers, has already eroded the stature of public schools.

He warns:

We are at a moment of reckoning. The last time public schools were closed was when Southern states sought to avoid integration. The goal then was to sustain racial inequality. Even if today the aim is not racist, in a system already rife with economic and racial inequality, if families with resources invest more in themselves rather than share time and money in common institutions, the quality of public education for less privileged Americans, many of whom are racial minorities, will deteriorate.

His warnings are timely. Others warn that home schooling will increase so long as pinprick schools stay closed or rely on remote learning.

But there is another possibility: Eventually, schools will open for full-time, in-person instruction, when it is safe to do so.

How many parents will continue home schooling when their children can attend a real school with experienced teachers and a full curriculum and roster of activities? How many parents will pay $25,000 or more for each child when an equivalent education is available in the local public school for free? At present, only 6% send their children to charter schools. How likely is that to increase when new charters close almost as often as they open?
How many parents want vouchers for subpar religious schools, when only a tiny percentage chose them before the pandemic?

My advice: Don’t panic. Take care of the children, their families, and school staff. Fight for funding to make our public schools better than ever. After the pandemic, they will still be the best choice because they have the best teachers and the most children.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization, School Choice, Supporting public schools, Teachers and Teaching, Vouchers

Nancy Flanagan: What If This Were the Best Year Ever?

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2020 //
42

Nancy Flanagan, who taught music in Michigan public schools for more than three decades, notes that journalists are referring to 2020 as “the worst year ever” for schools. She poses a question: What if teachers used this time to take control of their work and make this the best year ever?

She writes:

What if this were the year that we–students, teachers, parents—got to try everything we ever considered doing? What if you could design your own teaching-learning path and your own outcomes? Freed from the constraints of rigid curricular standards, conventional M-F schedules and tests designed to sort, rank, reward and punish—what if you got to choose what David Berliner calls ‘good learning’?

Nearly every argument against this stems from our cast-in-concrete ideas of what school is supposed to be: You are supposed to be reading in first grade. You are supposed to learn to ‘socialize’ in school. You are supposed to learn a tiny bit about multiple, discrete subjects every day, instead of spending a whole day (or week—or month) using only one or two disciplines. You are supposed to be ready for college or a career at the end of the thirteen-year race.

You are supposed to be able to focus, seated, indoors for hours at a time, without frequent breaks to stretch, use the restroom or talk to other people. Or daydream. Or read something interesting. Or doodle, look out the window or immerse yourself in a topic, skill or project that is of great interest to you.

In fact, in some schools, it doesn’t matter what you’re interested in—we have your content and your benchmarks all laid out for you. It’s aligned with the test that will tell us what classes you’ll take next year, and the year after that. Will the pandemic be over then?

Read her article and add your thoughts.

Be it noted that I know my limits. I am a historian of education. I never tell anyone how to teach. I leave that to the professionals.

Categories Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching

Teacher: This Is How I Will Teach when School Reopens

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2020 //
37

Mamie Krupczak Allegretti teaches French. She described how her teaching will change when school reopens during the pandemic. The lesson I draw from her note is that the most pressing issue facing our nation is not opening the schools but getting the disease under control so it is safe to return to school.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I am actually going to teach if we go back to school in person.

I think people might have the idea that everything will be “normal” in schools if we go back in person. Kids will be able to socialize and everything will be fine.

I imagine me standing more than 12 feet from the kids giving a lesson. I’m wearing a mask and a face shield and kids are wearing masks (hopefully). They all have their laptops in front of them. After I give my spiel, they do some work on the laptop and submit it to me.

All the windows are open regardless of outside temperature.

I am NOT circulating around the room helping kids. I will have students minimize talking so as not to spread the virus (or other cold, flu germs for that matter!!!).

I may hand out papers but to do this I will have to go into the faculty room (which is small and has no windows) to make copies. I’m NOT going to have students hand in any papers. There won’t be any group or pair work.

Since we won’t be able to do that, what will I substitute for communicative activities (I teach French.)? Maybe we will watch more French movies. Maybe I’ll read them a French book. They may do more writing on their laptops. No more art projects because even if they have their own materials, they will want to talk to each other while doing their project. I’m not encouraging that.

So, my teaching is not going to look like it normally would, and it’s possible that I’m not going to be teaching much of the same material.

I’m certainly not going to stay after school to help kids with work. And even if I did, we would have to stay far apart.

Kids aren’t going to be able to socialize as they normally would. They won’t be able to sit with friends for the most part. They may have to stay with a particular group.

I’m concerned about going into the small faculty bathrooms that have no ventilation. They are also close to student bathrooms which are small and have no ventilation.

So, just because kids are back in school doesn’t mean a whole lot of socializing will take place. Of course, it will probably be different at the elementary level.

I’ve also brought up the psychological issues of constantly being aware of the safety of one’s environment and how learning will take place therein. I’m wondering how the teachers out there are envisioning teaching in person in school. Have they thought about the logistics of this and if they will have to change their curriculum at all and if so, how? Thank you.

Categories Health, Safety, Teachers and Teaching

Jersey Jazzman: A Practical Guide to the Problems of Reopening During a Pandemic

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2020 //
24

In this post, experienced teacher Mark Weber (aka Jersey Jazzman) explains “How Schools Work” and the practical problems that will arise if and when schools open during a pandemic.

Even if schools get all the money they need (which is far from certain), there will still be the issues he raises.

Even if schools get all of the money they need, and staff show remarkable ingenuity and creativity, there are some basic, inconvenient truths we need to face about how schools work before we claim we can reopen safely this fall. So, in no particular order:

– Children, especially young children, cannot be expected to stay six feet away from everyone else during an entire school day. Sorry, even if a school has the room, it’s just not going to happen. One adult can’t keep eyes on a couple/few dozen children every second of every hour of every day to ensure they don’t drift into each others’ spaces. You certainly can’t do that and teach. And you can’t expect children to self-police. Young children are simply not developmentally able to remind themselves over seven hours not to get near each other.

– Children cannot be expected to wear masks of any kind for the duration of a school day. At some point, the mask has to come off; even adult medical professionals take breaks. And anyone who’s worked with young children knows they will play with their masks and not even realize they’re doing it. It’s simply unrealistic to expect otherwise.

– The typical American school cannot accommodate social distancing of their student population for the duration of the school day. Schools were designed for efficiency, which means crowded hallways and tight classrooms. Schools are expected to foster student and teacher interactions, which means close quarters. Expecting every students and staff member to maintain a 3 foot bubble* around themselves is not realistic given the way most school buildings are laid out.

– School staff do not generally have isolated spaces in their workplaces where they can stay when not working with children. I don’t have an office; I have a classroom. I’m only by myself when the kids leave… but everything they breathed on and touched and coughed on stays. I’m not an epidemiologist so I don’t know exactly what the consequences of this are, but I suspect it matters.

– School buses cannot easily accommodate social distancing, nor can they easily adjust to accommodate staggered school sessions. School buses aren’t as big as you remember (when’s the last time you were on one?). Social distancing is the last thing school bus engineers had in mind when designing the things. In addition: school districts often stagger the times of bus routes, usually by grade level, to get all the kids to school (this is why high school often starts much earlier than elementary school). If you go to split shifts, you are conceivably expanding a bus’s routes from, say, 6 to 12.** Unless you greatly expand the school day and pay a lot more for busing staff, it’s not going to work.

– Like every other workforce, school staff have many people who have preconditions that make them susceptible to becoming critically ill when exposed to Covid-19. The big worry I keep reading about is age — but that’s just the start. Three-fourths of the school workforce are women, and many are in their childbearing years; are we prepared to have pregnant teachers working? What about teachers who think they might be pregnant? And then all the pre-existing conditions…

– Schools are only one part of the childcare system in this country. The big worry seems to be that if we don’t get kids to school, parents can’t get back to work. But for many (most?) parents, the school day only covers part of the work day. Before- and after-school programs are a big part of the childcare system. Are we going to be able to enforce all the same restrictions on children during these hours that we will during the school day?

– Unsupervised adolescents cannot be expected to socially distance outside of the school day if schools are reopened. If we’ve got adults showing up at bars without masks in the middle of a frightening peak in Covid-19 cases, what do you think teenagers are going to do when school’s done for the day? Especially if we leave them at home, unsupervised, learning remotely while their parents work?

– Teachers are trained and experienced within an area of certification; moving them out of that area will lead to less effective instruction. When you become a teacher, you get a certification — maybe even two or three — in a particular area. Each certification requires coursework, and often a placement as a student teacher, in that area. A secondary math teacher, for example, has to study math at a certain level, and then learn how to teach it. You can’t expect a kindergartner teacher who’s been trained in early childhood education to do that job — and vice versa.***

– Even within an area of certification, moving teachers on short notice to a new subject or grade will lead to less effective instruction. How hard can it be to move from teaching 4th Grade to 3rd? More than you’d think. Every grade has its own curriculum, materials, assessments, etc. Teachers spend years developing lessons that often can’t be transferred to another grade level or subject; a choir teacher, for example, can’t just take her lessons over to the school band, even if she is a great music teacher. Expecting teachers to move quickly between grades or within areas and not face a learning curve defies common sense.

There is more. Open the link and keep reading.

Categories Accountability, Health, Students, Teachers and Teaching

Mercedes Schneider: TFA Will Send Green Teachers into the Classroom with No Teaching Experience

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2020 //
9

Mercedes Schneider, a veteran high school teacher in Louisiana with a Ph.D. in research and statistics, was stunned to learn that Teach for America teachers—recent college Gradiates—will begin teaching with no actual teaching experience.

In this time of school closures and social distancing, teacher temp agency, Teach for America (TFA), has decided to “train” its 2020 corps members online.

As former TFAer-gone-career teacher, Gary Rubinstein, writes, pre-COVID, TFA trainees actually teach on average one hour per day over the course of four weeks during the summer, in classrooms which they share with four other TFA trainees.

As such, TFA trainees have no experience teaching even one entire school day in a classroom in which the trainee is responsible for all instruction.

And now, with the social restrictions and classroom complexities introduced by the coronavirus, TFA’s 2020 trainees will have no experience being in charge of a classroom– not even an entire classroom online.

Categories Accountability, Teach for America, Teachers and Teaching

Valerie Strauss: Parents Learn to Respect Teachers Now That Children Are Home

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2020 //
19

Valerie Strauss wrote a delightful article about parents who have a new-found respect for teacher’s, now that the pandemic has forced them to become home teachers.

They have discovered that teaching is not easy. They have realized how hard it is teach two or three children and are amazed that teachers can handle classes of 24 or more at the same time.

Plenty of parents around the country — and, presumably, around the world — are finding new appreciation for their children’s teachers as they sit at home with their kids during the coronavirus pandemic and take over the role of educator.
Some 1.5 billion students around the world have been affected by school closures during the crisis, and parents whose jobs are not deemed “essential” to keep the country functioning are at home taking over as impromptu teachers. It’s a lot harder than many of them realized, as you can see from the following tweets.





One parent, Shonda Rhimes, tweeted:

“Been homeschooling a 6-year-old and 8-year-old for one hour and 11 minutes. Teachers deserve to make a billion dollars a year. Or a week.”
16 March 2020.

Categories Parents, Teachers, Teachers and Teaching

Ken Futernick: Teacher Stories

By dianeravitch
February 1, 2020 //
12

Several years ago, I met Ken Futernick, then a professor of education at Cal State University in Sacramento, where he was director for the Center for Teacher Quality. He shared with me a report he had written in defense of teachers. This was 2010, as the wave of teacher-bashing was beginning to reach new heights. I was immediately impressed that he looked at the obstacles thrown in the path of teachers that demoralized them. His report was called “Incompetent Teachers or Dysfunctional Systems?”  It was published in the Kappan, and this was the summary:

Rather than blame teachers, we must ensure that teachers work within a highly functional system that provides meaningful evaluations, high-quality professional development, reasonable class sizes, reliable and stable leadership, and time for planning and collaboration.

I was immediately impressed by his identification with teachers and his effort to see the world through their eyes.

Recently he has been collecting what he calls “teacher stories.” He thought readers of this blog would enjoy reading some of them. Feel free to share your own with him.

Elevating the Profession Through Teacher Stories 
By Ken Futernick, ken@teacherstories.org
Professor Emeritus, California State University, Sacramento
In recent years a good number of education reformers have promoted the false narrative that the decline of America’s once-envied system of public education is mainly a result of “bad teachers” and how difficult it is to get rid of them. I’ve argued that much of what looks like teacher incompetence is actually a consequence of dysfunctional school systems that prevent capable teachers from succeeding and repel many would-be teachers from the profession itself. The resulting teacher shortages, caused not just by high levels of attrition but by sharp declines in the number of new people entering the profession, have forced school districts across the country to use substitutes and underprepared teachers—a phenomenon that disproportionately harms the most vulnerable among us–poor students and students of color. 
One has to wonder why, in a wealthy, democratic society, founded on the principles of equity and social justice, teaching has become so unattractive. In part, it’s because we don’t pay teachers enough, but it’s also because teachers in America have lost respect, a disturbing trend that’s been bolstered by the “bad teacher” narrative. 
I recently launched Teacher Stories, a website and iTunes podcast, as a counter-narrative that celebrates the teachers who have elevated people’s lives, strengthened communities, inspired a passion for their subjects, and enabled students to attain what they thought was unattainable. Teachers deserve our respect and admiration because nearly every one of us has a story about a teacher who made a difference, often a profound one, in our lives. My hope is that these stories will draw more smart, committed, and caring people to the profession and remind those already in it (and the media, and the rest of us) that their work matters. 
Here are some notes about a few of the stories I’ve collected so far. Rachell Auld’s is about Dr. John Rosario, a community college anatomy professor who convinced her she could become not just an athletic trainer, but an orthopedic surgeon. And she does, but that’s not the end of the story. After practicing medicine, Rachell finds a higher calling—teaching biology to high school students. 

In a podcast episode, New York Times best-selling novelist John Lescroart says he might still be a typist in a law office, or possibly homeless, were it not for his high school English teacher, Father Stadler, who taught him what it really takes to be a good writer. Tavis Danz tells a story about teaching “mindfulness” to his 5th graders, but he worries that this diversion from the standard curriculum will lead to complaints from parents. In fact, it does the opposite.

I recently interviewed education Alfie Kohn, who has written extensively about teaching, parenting, education, and schooling. In this thought-provoking podcast, Alfie says we must be clear about our shared, long-term goals for children before we can describe what good teachers do in the classroom. If we want thoughtful, life-long learners, Kohn says, then we would want teachers who encourage their students to be questioners and challengers and in control of their learning—not passive receptacles of facts. 
I told Alfie that a common theme among the stories I was collecting was that the teachers truly cared about their students. But he pushed the point further: “Students have to experience that care as being unconditional, which means [it’s] something that they never have to earn. What I care about is how students will answer this question 10 years later, “When you were in so-and-so’s classroom, if you ever acted up or didn’t do the assignment or didn’t behave well or whatever, did you ever have the sense that your teacher cared about you less, was less excited about you?” 
I hope you will take a moment to enjoy these teacher stories and will share them with your friends and colleagues. Given the current threats to our democratic institutions, I cannot imagine a more important time for all of us to acknowledge the skill, commitment, and contributions of those who educate our youth.  

 

 

Categories California, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching

Justin Parmenter: The Rightwing Assault on Public Schools in North Carolina

By dianeravitch
January 26, 2020 //
3

Justin Parmenter is a National Board Certified Teacher in North Carolina.

In this essay, he documents the decade-long effort by Republicans to destroy public education in North Carolina and demoralize teachers. 

He writes:

Out of all the states that have struggled to provide a quality public education over the past decade, perhaps none have seen as precipitous a decline as North Carolina. Once seen as a regional model of progressive education policy, a succession of unfortunate occurrences has severely damaged our public education system. Activists now fight against difficult odds for the change students need most.

Shift of Political Power to Republicans and Impact on North Carolina Education Policy

Like many states, North Carolina was hit hard by the Great Recession and saw funding cuts that greatly impacted our schools. However, the nightmare for our public schools began in earnest in November 2010 when the Republican Party won control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives (Mildwurf & Browder, 2010) in North Carolina’s state legislature. The following year, Republicans gerrymandered electoral districts (Ballotpedia, n.d.a) to ensure they’d be able to hold onto power for the next decade and then set their veto-proof majority to work passing regressive education policies with no opposition.

The policies included significant de-professionalization of the teaching profession in North Carolina through revoking career status protection (Public Schools First NC, 2017) for teachers, terminating advanced degree compensation (Kiley, 2013), and eliminating retiree health care benefits (Bonner, 2017). The GOP majority lifted the cap (Leslie, 2011) on charter schools, worsening economic and racial segregation across the state given that charters serve an increasingly white population (Nordstrom, 2018). The legislature directed a billion dollars (Wagner, 2019) over a decade to voucher programs, despite the fact that the the schools participating in the program were not required to report on student achievement (Public Schools First NC, 2019). Additionally, the legislature cut thousands of teacher assistants (Campbell & Bonner, 2015) and created a school report card system, in which school ratings were highly correlated with levels of poverty (Henkel, 2016). Finally, state legislators passed a K–3 reading initiative (North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, n.d.), which promised to improve results through increasing assessment volume and threatening our most vulnerable students with grade retention. And when K–3 reading achievement got worse, legislators added financial pay- for-performance incentives (Clark, 2016) based on questionable value-added data.
Many of these harmful initiatives were passed in budget bills rather than being moved through deliberative committee processes, eliminating the debate and public input so essential to the creation of effective policy. In addition to promoting a neoliberal education reform agenda, North Carolina’s lawmakers passed massive tax cuts favoring corporations and wealthy individuals, which have taken $3.6 billion in potential annual revenue (Sirota, 2019) off the table, all but ensuring schools will struggle for adequate resources for the foreseeable future.

In North Carolina’s 2016 general election, Republican Mark Johnson eked out a 1% victory (Ballotpedia, n.d.b) for the state superintendency—the first time in more than 100 years the office had been won by a Republican. State legislators immediately moved to transfer power away from newly elected Democratic Governor Roy Cooper and the State Board of Education and give Superintendent Johnson unprecedented control of North Carolina’s public school system (North Carolina General Assembly, 2016).

As State Superintendent, Johnson has been a disaster. Having only two years as a TFA teacher, he was over his head. His inept leadership outraged teachers and provoked mass walkouts.

Parmenter says that teacher activism is exhausting but worth it.

This year there is an election for state superintendent. The Network for Public Education has endorsed educator Jen Mangrum for the post. There is a chance to revive public education in North Carolina.

 

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Network for Public Education, North Carolina, Privatization, Teachers and Teaching, Vouchers

John Merrow: Insect-Based Teacher Training, Parts 1 & 2

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2020 //
91

John Merrow learned about the latest trending idea in teacher training. Give a teacher a script, put a “bug” in his or her ear, and let the teacher follow instructions.

This is what he calls “insect-based” teacher training.

He decided to visit some schools to find out how it was working.

Part 1 begins like this:

The latest development in the never-ending struggle to improve teaching involves “A bug in the ear” AND “A fly on the wall.”  This insect-based approach has a highly-trained but distant observers watching (on closed circuit video) teachers at work and giving them instructions and suggestions in real time, so the teachers can modify methods and instantly improve their instruction. 

According to Education Week, what’s called ‘Bug in the Ear Coaching”  is being used in about a dozen states. “The premise is simple: A teacher wears an earpiece during a lesson, which is being live-streamed for an instructional coach who is somewhere else. Throughout the lesson, the coach delivers in-the-moment feedback to the teacher, who can add something or switch gears based on what she’s hearing in her ear.”

I reached out to some of the sources I developed in my 41 years of reporting for a closer look. One enthusiastic superintendent, who requested anonymity, said that the system would pay for itself in higher scores on standardized tests. “While the initial investment of $500,000 per school for cameras and directional microphones for every classroom, a dedicated room of monitors, the cost of a half-time tech person, and the salaries of the instructional experts who monitor the teachers, looks like a lot, once those standardized test scores go up, it’s smooth sailing.”

Are there other costs, I wanted to know?

“Our experts wanted all the teachers to wear identical loose-fitting shirts and blouses to minimize sound interference.  I had a great deal worked out with the company that makes the uniforms they wear at the federal penitentiary in the next county.”  He chuckled, “But without stripes, of course.” However, he explained, the teachers union shot the idea down. 

He (and some educators cited in Ed Week) say that most teachers like the immediacy of the system, saying that instant feedback is really the only kind that sticks.  “It was really nice to feel supported and get direct feedback in the moment,” a special education teacher in Washington State told Ed Week.

However, when I reached out to some veteran teachers I respect, I found no support for the approach.  (Stop reading here if vulgar language offends you.)

I stopped reading right there, but you don’t need to!

Then he posted Part 2, where he continued his investigation. 

Last week in this space I took a poke or two at what I called “Insect-Based Teacher Training,” specifically the practice of wiring teachers so that remote observers can hear and see what they do in their classrooms.  What they call “Bug in the Ear training” enables experts to interrupt teachers and tell them what they are doing wrong. In theory, that allows teachers to improve on the spot.  You may remember that the expert I observed in action wasn’t particularly effective.

(Full disclosure: In last week’s essay I took a small liberty with the two veteran teachers whose opinions I cited: neither of them actually referenced ‘ants in underpants’ or ‘ticks on dicks.’   I owe my readers an apology because the teachers did not say that.  I made that up, just for the fun of it. 

Why would I do that?  Well, after so many years of reporting for public broadcasting, where the emphasis is on truth, making stuff up gives me a huge adrenalin rush.

However, everything else in that essay  is 100% accurate.  You can take that to the bank.)

But I digress. What I want you to know is the morning after “Insect-Based Teacher Training” was published, I received a call from the School Superintendent whose district I had visited.   He was upset about my portrayal of the process, saying that the observer had a bad day.  Moreover, he said, I had failed to grasp the subtle, significant ways that technology improves education.  Would I come back and learn more, he asked?

I rushed out the door, and a few hours later the Superintendent and I were in the school’s monitoring room, staring at the 30+ video screens that showed all the school’s classrooms.

I wanted to hear his defense of the “Bug in the Ear” approach.  Would he have wanted to have a bug in his ear when he was teaching, I wanted to know?

“I actually never taught,” came his response. “I came up the ranks through coaching.”

Then he chuckled.  “That’s an old joke, superintendents starting out as coaches.  I was never a coach either.”

What was his background, I wanted to know?

“I studied organizational behavior in college, and then, for my MBA, I focused on management.”

He continued:  “But that’s not why I asked you to come back,” he said. “I want you to see another way that monitoring and advanced technology improve teaching and learning.”

Go on, I said.

To get the inside scoop on “insect-based teacher training,” this is a must-read.

In case you wondered, the first time I ever heard of the bug-in-your-ear approach to teaching, it was in the description of the methodology of Bridge International Academies, the private sector effort to take over schooling in certain African nations. The BIA approach was to give each teacher an iPad (or similar device) with a curriculum written by TFA teachers located in Boston. Then each teacher got a bug-in-the-ear to make sure that they were delivering the curriculum precisely as directed by the device. BIA charges a fee and was engaged in trying to turn a profit by enrolling hundreds of thousands of students in the world’s poorest countries. Its investors included Bill Gates, Pearson, Mark Zuckerberg, Pearson, and the World Bank. The problem with its approach was that it had the effect of discouraging the government from taking responsibility for building a universal, free public education system. Furthermore, if students couldn’t pay the fees, they were kicked out. BIA says it gets higher scores, which is not surprising since it accepts students only if they can pay. Strange that BIA’s methods crossed the ocean back to where it was started.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, International, Privatization, Teachers and Teaching, Technology

Arthur Goldstein: Albany Hands Down the New 10 Commandments to English Teachers

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2020 //
57

Arthur Goldstein, veteran teacher of many decades, thinks he knows a thing or two about teaching English. The State Education Department doesn’t trust him or other English teachers. So they have distributed new mandates about how to teach “advanced literacy” to make sure that he does what he is told. And he doesn’t like it. 

Frankly, it sounds like Common Core in a new dress.

Goldstein writes:

Forget everything you’ve heard and read about education. There’s a new paradigm, and it’s called Teaching Advanced Literacy Skills. This is revolutionary, of course, because it appears clear to the authors that no English teacher in the history of the universe has ever taught advanced literacy. Also, since no one in the world will ever go into a trade, and since everyone will spend their entire lives doing academic writing, we need to start work on this right away.

No, evidently we just do the whole phonics thing, and once students are able to sound out words, we give up on them for the next eleven years or so and hope for the best. Thank goodness these brilliant writers are here to let us know that students need to be able to identify a main idea, and that this indispensable skill is actually an amalgam of other vital skills.

Not only that, but we now know that it’s important students use a variety of sources to support their arguments, as opposed to just making stuff up (like the President of the United States, for example). That’s why we, as teachers, should hand them several sources on which to base their writing, as do the geniuses in Albany when they issue the NY State ELA Regents, the final word on whether or not students have advanced literacy.

Never mind that students who’ve passed the test with high grades don’t seem to know how to read or write well. Never mind nonsense like writer voice, mentioned absolutely nowhere in the book. Never mind whether or not anyone actually wishes to read whatever writing the students produce, because that’s also mentioned absolutely nowhere in the book. The important thing is that they be able to produce academic writing. Do you go out of your way to read academic writing? Neither do I.

The book is big on synthesis, that is, using multiple sources. Like the awful English Regents exam,  students are generally provided with sources. I suppose this is some sort of training to write research papers. Here’s the thing, though–if you write research papers you will have to find your own sources. I recall being in summer classes at Queens College, in their old crappy library searching through shelves with a flashlight trying to find things to write about. No such issue for our advanced literacy-trained students. Here are texts a, b, c and d. Get out there and tell me which ones are better.

We don’t need to teach students about logical fallacy either, which is good news for politicians everywhere. Students need not recognize ad hominem or straw man arguments. No guilt by association for you. We don’t need to bother showing them why some arguments are less logical than others, as per this book at least. I suppose when Donald Trump calls whatever doesn’t suit him “fake news,” that’s okay. It’s just another academic source.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this book, to me, is that the project they spend the most time on is one in which students discuss whether or not their school should adopt uniforms. I wrote in the margins, “great topic,” Why? Because this was a topic that had a direct effect on their lives. This decision would change their behavior, and perhaps change their entire school. There was an intrinsic motivation for students to be involved in this decision.

Nowhere in the book did the writers deem this worthy of mention. I have no idea whether or not they even noticed it. I did, though, and it was hands down a better topic than some of the crap students must wade through on the English Regents exam. Don’t get me wrong–I understand that students, like us, will have to wade through a lot of crap in their academic lives. To me, though, it seems smarter to make them love reading. It seems smarter to motivate them to do so on their own. Then, when they have to read some crap to which they cannot relate, they’ll be better equipped to do so, having developed the skills this book advocates in a far more positive fashion.

One thing that makes me love writers is something called writer voice. A great example of this is Angela’s Ashes, a non-fiction work (!) by the late and brilliant Frank McCourt. They made a film out of it which faithfully told the story, but was total crap. That’s because the allure and charm of this story was all about the way McCourt told it, his humor, his deft and inspiring use of language. He had me at the first sentence about childhood, and kept me hypnotized until the last sentence. I couldn’t put the book down.

Why should students today have the same pleasure? Why do experienced teachers know about teaching anyway? Nothing, by the lights of the bureaucrats in Albany.

 

Categories Education Reform, Literacy, Literature, New York, Teachers and Teaching
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