Archives for category: Teachers and Teaching
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Should Teachers Do Product Promotions in Their Classrooms?

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2017 //
77

I would say the answer is no. Children are a captive audience. It seems unethical to use the classroom to promote brand loyalty. The classroom should be a place to learn and ask questions and develop ones skills, abilities, and interests.

But this story in the New York Times says that big business is moving into schools, using teachers to promote their products. Teachers need the extra money and school supplies. What do you think?

“MAPLETON, N.D. — One of the tech-savviest teachers in the United States teaches third grade here at Mapleton Elementary, a public school with about 100 students in the sparsely populated plains west of Fargo.

“Her name is Kayla Delzer. Her third graders adore her. She teaches them to post daily on the class Twitter and Instagram accounts she set up. She remodeled her classroom based on Starbucks. And she uses apps like Seesaw, a student portfolio platform where teachers and parents may view and comment on a child’s schoolwork.

“Ms. Delzer also has a second calling. She is a schoolteacher with her own brand, Top Dog Teaching. Education start-ups like Seesaw give her their premium classroom technology as well as swag like T-shirts or freebies for the teachers who attend her workshops. She agrees to use their products in her classroom and give the companies feedback. And she recommends their wares to thousands of teachers who follow her on social media.

“I will embed it in my brand every day,” Ms. Delzer said of Seesaw. “I get to make it better.”

“Ms. Delzer is a member of a growing tribe of teacher influencers, many of whom promote classroom technology. They attract notice through their blogs, social media accounts and conference talks. And they are cultivated not only by start-ups like Seesaw, but by giants like Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft, to influence which tools are used to teach American schoolchildren.

“Their ranks are growing as public schools increasingly adopt all manner of laptops, tablets, math teaching sites, quiz apps and parent-teacher messaging apps. The corporate courtship of these teachers brings with it profound new conflict-of-interest issues for the nation’s public schools.

“Moreover, there is little rigorous research showing whether or not the new technologies significantly improve student outcomes.

“More than two dozen education start-ups have enlisted teachers as brand ambassadors. Some give the teachers inexpensive gifts like free classroom technology or T-shirts. Last year, TenMarks, a math-teaching site owned by Amazon, offered Amazon gift cards to teachers who acted as company advisers, and an additional $80 gift card for writing a post on its blog, according to a TenMarks online forum.

“Teachers said that more established start-ups gave them pricier perks like travel expenses to industry-sponsored conferences attended by thousands of teachers. In exchange, teacher ambassadors often promote company products on social media or in their conference talks — sometimes without explicitly disclosing their relationships with their sponsors.

“Many public schools are facing tight budgets, and administrators, including the principal at Ms. Delzer’s school, said they welcomed potentially valuable free technology and product training. Even so, some education experts warned that company incentives might influence teachers to adopt promoted digital tools over rival products or even traditional approaches, like textbooks.

“Teachers can’t help but be seduced to make greater use of the technology, given these efforts by tech companies,” said Samuel E. Abrams, director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

“Public-school teachers who accept perks, meals or anything of value in exchange for using a company’s products in their classrooms could also run afoul of school district ethics policies or state laws regulating government employees.”

There are both ethical and legal concerns.

““Any time you are paying a public employee to promote a product in the public classroom without transparency, then that’s problematic,” said James E. Tierney, a former attorney general of Maine who is a lecturer at Harvard Law School. “Should attorneys general be concerned about this practice? The answer is yes.”

For the record, industries have always tried to place their promotional materials in the classroom to influence the views of children (the oil industry, the tobacco industry, and more). But this seems to be the first time that teachers have been hired to do their sales and marketing for them, while teaching.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Ethics, Teachers and Teaching

Alan Singer: Say NO to Unqualified Teachers in New York’s Classrooms

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2017 //
11

Influential charter operators in New York have been pressing for exemption from certification requirements for their teachers. This is a truly bad idea. Why should children have unqualified teachers?

Alan Singer writes here about the fight against this effort to lower standards for charter teachers, which is not only bad on its face, but would make these “teachers” unemployable in real public schools.

He writes:

“Politically influential charter school operators in the State of New York are on the verge of pushing through an administrative ruling that eliminates the requirement that children attending their schools be taught by certified teachers. This is happening at the same time that support for charter schools across the nation is in steep decline, probably because of Donald Trump’s endorsement of charter schools and private-school vouchers. According to a recent public opinion poll the growing opposition to charter schools is bipartisan. Support among Republicans declined by 13%. Democratic support for charter schools dropped by 11%.

“The Network for Public Education and New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) are organizing parents, teachers, and the public to flood the SUNY Trustees and the SUNY Charter Schools Institute with protests against the certification waiver proposal. Their opposition to the waiver is supported by the Deans of Schools of Education at eighteen colleges in the State University of New York system.

“Comments can be submitted online or mailed to Charter Schools Institute, State University of New York, 41 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 by September 10. You can also sign the NYSUT email letter. More information is available at the United University Professionals website.

“The Charter School teacher “decertification plan” is under review by political appointees on a sub-committee of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York (SUNY). The SUNY Charter Schools Institute is interpreting its authority to ensure the “Governance, structure and operations of SUNY authorized charter schools” as authorization to eliminate teacher certification requirements. It calls the proposal alternative certification, but it allows charters to declare anyone they want to be a teacher. In a series of Huffington Posts I explained why this decertification proposal is a threat to public education and the political forces and financial donors behind the charter school plan. In this post I examine whether the people hired under this waiver are qualified to teach children.”

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Teachers and Teaching

Nicholas Tampio: The New York Regents Should Reject the Failed, Renamed Common Core Standards

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2017 //
27

Nicholas Tampio calls on the Regents of the State of New York, the state school board, to reject the rebranded Common Core standards.

Tampio is a professor of political science at Fordham University.

He writes:

“On Sept. 11-12, the New York State Board of Regents will consider adopting the Next Generation Learning Standards for English language arts and mathematics. The standards are nearly identical with the Common Core and keep the features that parents have loudly, and justifiably, protested. New York should not keep wasting time and money on low-quality academic standards. The Regents should vote no on the renamed Common Core standards.

“The New Paltz Board of Education made a public comment describing how the “new” standards are virtually indistinguishable from the Common Core. “Of the 34 ELA anchor standards, 32 are word-for-word identical when compared to the original anchor standard,” the board said.

“Here is the first Next Generation ELA anchor standard: “Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly/implicitly and make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.” This is the first Common Core anchor standard and the basis of Common Core’s emphasis on “close reading.”

“On assignment after assignment, assessment after assessment, Common Core close reading works the same way. Students provide verbatim evidence from a text to answer questions about the text. As a professor, I know that this pedagogy fails to prepare students for college, and as a parent, I see that it leads to a dreary school day.

“The Common Core standards train children merely to regurgitate other people’s words.

“For instance, the 2017 Regents ELA examination, based on Common Core, asked that students write an essay on whether school recess should be structured play. The exam provided four texts and instructed students to “use specific, relevant, and sufficient evidence from at least three of the texts to develop your argument.”

“Three of the four texts argued for structured recess. The three that argued for structured recess were two pages; the one that argued for free play was one page.

“Parents expressed outrage on social media that this exam provided a wealth of evidence for students who argued for structured recess and little evidence for students who thought that students might enjoy free play.

“This problem is baked into the standards. The Common Core standards give students few opportunities to share their own thoughts or responses to the material. New York can do a better job writing standards and showing the rest of the country that the federal Every Student Succeeds Act really does open a door to exiting the Common Core.”

New York had far superior standards prior to adopting the Common Core standards as a devil’s bargain to win Race to the Top money.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Industry, New York, Teachers and Teaching

Peter Greene: Get Your Barf Bag Ready for September 8, When Mrs. Jobs Reveals How to Fix Education

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2017 //
40

Peter Greene has a timely warning for us. Laurene Powell Jobs has lined up multiple TV channels and a star-studded cast to tell the world how she is fixing education. Her group is called the Emerson Collective. She hired Arne Duncan to advise her, despite the fact that he wasted $5 billion of federal funds (taxpayer money) on a failed effort to “reform” public schools by privatizing them, closing them, firing teachers and principals, and making standardized tests the purpose of education.

Peter notes that no working educator helped Mrs. Jobs formulate her plans. What do teachers know about education?

He writes:

“Brace yourselves. It’s time for a star-studded ed erformstravaganza.

“Another wave of PR dropped yesterday, touting a four-network, celebrity-packed, media event, proudly trumpeted everywhere from Variety to USA Today. On September 8, a huge line-up (including Tom Hanks, Yo-Yo Ma, Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Hudson and (sorry) Common) will present “an hour-long live television special about reinventing American high schools….

“The XQ Institute is an offspring of the Emerson Collective, a Palo Alto-based do-gooding group founded by Laurene Powell Jobs. The organization is dedicated to removing barriers to opportunity so people can live to their full potential in order to develop and execute innovative solutions that will spur change and promote equality. They were one of the first groups to hire Arne Duncan after his Ed Secretary stint (do not miss his hardcore street pic here). Oh, and they just bought controlling interest in the Atlantic which, for reasons we’ll get to, is kind of a bummer.

“Jobs was always a philanthropic power player, and she’s logged time in the ed reform biz with NewSchools Venture Fund (We raise contributions from donors and use it to find, fund and support teams of educators and education entrepreneurs who are reimagining public education), but as the widow of Apple Empresario Steve Jobs, she has a huge mountain of money to work with. She is, in fact, the fourth richest woman in the world. And she has decided she would like to fix education.

“Jobs has said, “We want to make high schools back into the great equalizers they were meant to be.”

“To do that, she launched XQ Institute, which launched a big competition– XQ: The Super School Project.

“The Super School Project is an open call to reimagine and design the next American high school. In towns and cities far and wide, teams will unite and take on this important work of our time: rethinking and building schools that deeply prepare our students for the rigorous challenges of college, jobs, and life…

“Jobs doesn’t use many of the dog whistles or talking points of reformsters, except for one that she really loves:

“Jobs told the NYT, “The system was created for the work force we needed 100 years ago. Things are not working the way we want it to be working.”

“In USA Today: The XQ Institute aims to “rethink” American public high schools, which, it maintains, have remained virtually unchanged for a century while the world has transformed dramatically.

“Schools haven’t changed in 100 years” is the dead horse Jobs rides in on, a criticism that only makes sense if you don’t know what schools were actually like in 1917, and if you haven’t actually visited one in the last century….

“I also note that in all the publicity for the event that I’ve now read, there is no mention of other sponsors, so while I don’t have proof, I’m pushed to conclude that Laurene Powell Jobs just busted out her checkbook and bought a full hour of Friday night primetime television on four networks.

“What can we expect. Well, music and comedy and documentaries are billed. And we’re talking about a SuperSchool live, so presumably we won’t bother with any coverage of those dopey Clark Kent schlubby schools where the rest of us slog away. This special will just focus on Jobs’ own created reality.”

Don’t you wish that billionaire dilettantes would fix health care or save national parks or find some other pet hobby? When do they get tired of failing? Again and again and again…

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

A Message to Education Deans: Resist!

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2017 //
18

More than 200 deans of education at scores of colleges and universities have organized to resist the corporate reformers’ efforts to deprofessionalize teaching and destroy public education. They call themselves Education Deans for Justice and Equity. They work in partnership with the National Education Policy Center. If you are a faculty member, please ask your dean to sign on. If you belong to an education organization, please consider adding its support.

“Dear Education Deans:

“As the start to a new academic year unfolds, so do increasing attacks on public education. Building on the “Declaration of Principles” that was released in January of this year and signed by 235 education deans, many of us feel compelled to continue to speak out collectively, publicly, and forcefully.

“Towards this end, we have prepared a new statement from education deans, “Our Children Deserve Better,” that counters the harmful rhetoric and actions currently coming from Washington with alternatives that are grounded in an ethical foundation, sound research, and a commitment to democratic values. The statement is a project of Education Deans for Justice and Equity, in partnership with the National Education Policy Center.

“Invited to sign are all current and former deans of colleges and schools of education in the United States (or comparable positions such as chairs, directors, and associate deans in institutions where there is no separate dean of education or school of education). We urge signing by August 30, because we are planning for the public release and distribution of the statement in early September.

“Please consider signing, and please consider committing to encouraging at least several other education-dean colleagues to sign so that we reach our goal of hundreds of signatories. The statement and the form for you to sign on is here:
https://goo.gl/forms/JXR2s1LZUcd6DaNh2.

“In solidarity,

“Kevin Kumashiro, on behalf of EDJE and NEPC”

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Resistance, Teacher Education, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Robert Shepherd: How the Common Core Killed Teaching and Learning

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2017 //
179

Robert Shepherd, teacher, author, curriculum developer, assessment expert, etc., left the following comment on the blog about the deadening effects of the Common Core on teachers and students:


The biggest tragedy that has occurred in the last few decades in our schools is that they have been to an enormous extent turned into test prep organizations under the standards and testing regime. This is true in both public and charter schools. “Reformers” successfully rebranded the national standards by simply changing their name. So, for example, in Florida, the Common Core State Standards–unchanged–are now called the Mathematics Florida Standards and the Language Arts Florida Standards, but make no mistake about it, these are the CCSS.

The public largely believes that the standards and testing have been a good thing, and that’s because simple arguments can be made for them: who doesn’t want “high standards”? Who doesn’t want “accountability”? These phrases are easily promulgated sound bites. But go into K-12 classrooms, and what you find is that where in the past students were writing essays and reading novels and nonfiction books and short stories and plays, they are now doing exercise sets based on the questions on the standardized tests.

An English department chairperson recently told me that this is ALL she does until the kids take the test in April or May–test prep exercises, every day, for almost the entire school year. This teacher’s approach is now the norm.

Traditional materials for teaching English language arts have been largely replaced by ones that emphasize exercise sets in which each exercise is narrowly focused on practicing one skill described by one standard. What particular readings are involved has become largely irrelevant under this regime–any reading will do as long as it is accompanied by an exercise for practicing standard x or y. The content of these readings is often completely random–a piece about Harriet Tubman here, one about invasive plant species there–and so there is no sustained work in a particular context–that of a novel or a unit on some nonfiction topic–even though brains are connection machines, learning happens when it is connected to previous learning, and comprehension is largely contextual.

Where in the past, a teacher would announce that he or she was starting a unit on Robert Frost or the literature of the Civil War (Crane, Bierce, etc.), now it’s, “OK, class. We’re going to work on our recognizing the main idea skills.” But there’s a problem: There is no such thing as a generalized recognizing the main idea skill. Such a thing is entirely mythical, like the fairies that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed in. Meaning is contextual, and arriving at the main idea or main ideas (for often, there are several) depends upon particular knowledge of the text’s aims and context.

The CCSS for ELA give lip service to substantive reading and content knowledge, but the truth is that on the ground, where it matters, the national standards and testing regime has replaced traditional instruction in English with test prep exercises, and this has been a calamity of enormous proportions. It’s meant the end of the profession of English teaching as I knew it. I know many, many English teachers who have quit or changed fields because of this. They are sick of being pressured by administrators to do all test prep all the time. But the administrators are simply doing what they are incentivized to do. They are evaluated primarily on the test scores that they deliver, for who doesn’t want to be principal of an A school?

With this going on, worrying about other matters is like spending one’s time polishing the bright work on a sailboat when there is a hole in the hull.

Except in isolated classrooms where brave teachers are continuing to teach despite the standards and testing regime, the teaching of English in K-12 is dead.

RIP

Categories Common Core, Teachers and Teaching

Bianca Tanis: Don’t Let New York Destroy Early Childhood Education with 75 Standards

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2017 //
7

Bianca Tanis teaches young children in New York. She is a founding member of NYSAPE, New York Dtate Alliance of Parents and Educators. She is also a teacher of children with special needs.

Frustrated by the state’s indifference to the needs of young children, she wrote this post and interviewed teachers about what matters most for teaching and learning: PLAY.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Common Core, Education Industry, Play, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Joanne Yatvin: How to Evaluate Schools

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2017 //
22

Joanne Yatvin, now retired, was a teacher, principal, and superintendent, as well as a literacy specialist.

The Myth of “Our Failing Schools” and How to Destroy It

An interesting article on the public’s perception of the quality of our public schools appeared in The Atlantic on July 15. I will summarize it today and add my opinions.

As a long time reader of the Phi Delta Kappan, an education journal, I am familiar with the results of its yearly poll reports on the public’s perception of our public schools. As long I can remember, most parents have given their children’s school an A or B rating. But when it comes to rating public schools in general, the responders are not so positive. Around 70 percent of them have consistently given those schools a C or D grade.

What’s going on here? According to Jack Schneider, a researcher at the College of the Holy Cross, the answer is simple: When evaluating their own children’s school, parents know a lot about what is happening there first hand . Most of them are pleased with their children’s experiences, and what they see or hear happening for other children. But when asked to evaluate the vast number of schools elsewhere, they only know what they read in the newspapers or hear on television. And most of those sources report that our public schools are failing to teach students what they need to know to succeed in college or the workplace.

Schneider identifies the source of this belief as the “politics of education.” He says, “Beginning with the launch of Sputnik in 1957, the leaders in Washington have argued with increasing regularity that our country’s schools are in crisis.” He adds that, “The failing-school narrative has been quite effective in generating political will for federal involvement in education.” Unfortunately, that narrative is not an accurate description of any school; it is based only on a single piece of data: students’ test scores

Although the scores for their own school may also be low, parents get a much broader range of information about the progress of their children, which includes report cards, parent/teacher conferences, individual pieces of students’ work, and school events. They may also get monthly newsletters from the principal that highlight the good things happening at school. Even if their own child is not doing well academically or behaviorally, parents may very well be receiving information about the help he is getting and the progress he is making.

Although there doesn’t appear to be any change in the dominance of data in the news media, there is one thing in the new ESSA law that may give everyone a broader picture. In the plans for improving their schools all states are now required to report to the Department of Education on several other conditions beyond test scores, such as graduation rates, school attendance, and the numbers of students enrolled in advanced courses. The only trick in reporting all this information to the public is weaving it into a seamless report that will show the full quality of any school.

Unfortunately, broader pictures would still not be enough to make all schools successful. High poverty schools need better financial support to keep class sizes small enough for all students to get attention to their needs and class behavior to be manageable. They also need sufficient funding to lure in high quality teachers and give them the school structures and extra time necessary to do a great job.

In addition, testing for all schools needs to be more reasonable than it is now. Instead of tests created to match the unrealistic expectations of the CCSS, every state should be able to get a test designed to fit its curriculum and the values of its people.

Right now it is not our public schools, but the federal government that is failing to educate our children well. We must overhaul the system to allow, support, and accurately report the greatness of which this country’s schools are fully capable.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching

Russ on Reading: Expectations Should Be High But Reasonable

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2017 //
16

Russ Walsh is a literacy expert. In this post, he delves into the meaning of high expectations. Of course, he says, teachers should have high e pectations but they should not be out of reach. The four-minute mile was once a standard, but it was never achievable for most runners, only for the very very best.

No Child Left Behind set an unreasonable standard, that ALL children would be proficient readers by 2014. It didn’t happen, and it left behind many demoralized students and teachers.

Russ offers a few key principles for setting meaningful expectations. Here is one:

“Follow the Goldilocks principle. Work to find the amount of challenge that is “just right” for that individual student. This means working with the child in what Vygotsky called the “zone of proximal development”, that area slightly above where the student can function independently, but well below where the student becomes frustrated.”

Politicians confuse setting goals with achieving them. Teachers should not.

Categories Accountability, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Teachers and Teaching

In Which Checker Finn and I Part Company (Again), This Time Over (De)Personalized Learning

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2017 //
62

Back in the days when I was on the Dark side, ensconced in the well-funded right side of the political spectrum, I was very close to Checker Finn. Checker and I were like brother and sister. We wrote a book together. We wrote essays and manifestos together. We laughed together. Our families were friends.

One thing we always agreed on: students should have much more than the basics of reading and math. We criticized NCLB for its limited focus on reading and math and nothing more. We believed that students should have classes in history and literature taught by superb teachers. We were strong advocates for the humanities, and we even organized conferences promoting the humanities.

So, imagine my surprise when I saw that Checker recently endorsed computer-based instruction! Aka “personalized” learning, which I call depersonalized learning.

Checker wrote:

“I am 200 percent in favor of personalized learning, defined as enabling every child to move through the prescribed curriculum at his or her own speed, progressing on the basis of individual mastery of important skills and knowledge rather than in lockstep according to age, grade level, and end-of-year assessments. (I’m 200 percent opposed to the “let everyone learn whatever they want to whenever they want to learn it” version.)

“There is nothing beneficial to kids about declaring that every ten-year-old belongs in something called “fifth grade” and that all will proceed to “sixth grade” when they get a year older, get passing marks from their teachers, and perform acceptably on “grade-level” tests at year’s end.

“That’s not how it worked in the one-room schoolhouses of yesteryear, and it’s oblivious to the many ways that children differ from each other, the ways their modes and rates of learning differ, how widely their starting achievement levels differ, and how their interests, brains, and outside circumstances often cause them to learn different subjects at unequal speeds—and to move faster and slower, deeper or shallower, at different points in their lives, even at different points within a “school year.””

Checker is now a member of the Maryland Board of Education. So he is not just theorizing.

I wrote a note to Checker, whom I have seldom seen in the past eight years:

“Dear Checker,

“Despite our ideological and political differences, I do love you. I always will.

“That said, I could not disagree more with your article about children being taught by computers. We used to write articles and even a book together about the importance of the humanities, of humane teaching and learning. You know, I know, that children will never learn to love history and English from a computer. They get turned on by a teacher who loves literature, loves history and is passionate about sharing it with students.

“You went to a great school with teachers like that and small classes. Didn’t you sit around a table, just 12 of you, and discuss and listen and learn? Didn’t you send both your kids to the same kind of schools? Why would you want other people’s kids plunked in front of a computer all day? That’s not the kind of education we once believed in and advocated for.

“Diane”

I warned him that I planned to blog about his endorsement of computer-based instruction.

Checker responded:

“The main answer is that you misread my case for personalized learning as if it consists of strapping kids to a computer and having them learn only that way. I never said or wrote that and I don’t think it. The technology–“blended learning” style–can be a huge assist to the teacher, school and pupil and liberates the kids in part from the disadvantages of “batch processing.” One thing I’ve learned in recent years is that even high priced private schools with small classes are NOT always good at dealing with the educational needs of gifted kids and others who for whatever reason don’t fit in with the current lesson plan. Some gifted teachers manage differentiation much better than others but it’s really hard to do and the wider the spread within the class (and of course the larger the class) the harder it is to do. Technology can help a bunch but it’s not INSTEAD of teachers; it’s a supplement.

“Best, Checker”

If all he meant was to use computers in the classroom, that’s a duh moment. That’s nothing new! What is being sold these days as “personalized learning” is the use of technology for embedded instruction and assessment, all while data-mining. As New York Commissioner MaryEllen Elia once explained at a meeting of NYSAPE members that I arranged, annual tests will no longer be needed when assessments are embedded, and students are continuously assessed. That’s personalized learning: moving at your own speed through a scripted curriculum.

At best, we have a misunderstanding. At worst, Checker will lend his considerable influence to methods that will standardize teaching, remove the need for great teachers, demoralize teachers, and subvert the teaching of the humanities.

Sad. So sad.

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching, Testing
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