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Peter Greene on President Obama’s Two Proclamations This Week

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2016 //
52

This week was for some years Teacher Appreciation Week. Now, thanks to President Obama, it is also Charter Appreciation Week. I earlier reported that the latter replaced the former. I was wrong.

 

Peter Greene analyzes the two proclamations and notices a different tone in each.

 
“There’s something to be learned about this administration’s feelings about both charters and teachers from looking at these two proclamations, so let’s do that. Spoiler alert: there will be no pleasant surprises forthcoming.
“Here’s the first line from one of the proclamations. See if you can guess which one:

 

“Our Nation has always been guided by the belief that all young people should be free to dream as big and boldly as they want, and that with hard work and determination, they can turn their dreams into realities.

 

“That would be the opening sentence from the proclamation in praise of charter schools.

 

“The proclamation is laudatory, leaving one with the impression that charter schools are the whole education show. Schools are awesome, and “we celebrate the role of high-quality charter schools” in achieving this awesomeness. Also, “we honor the dedicated professionals across America who make this calling their life’s work by serving in charter schools.”

 

“Charter schools “play an important role in our country’s education system” and work in our underserved communities where they can “ignite imagination and nourish the minds of America’s young people” while finding new ways to do the education thing. Obama reinforces the notion that charters experiment and find new ways to help underperforming schools (though we must close them when they don’t do well). This language continues. “Forefront of innovation.”

 

“Also, “different ways of engaging students” including personalized instruction, technology and rigorous/college-level coursework. This administration has supported charters big-time because Obama has remained committed to “ensuring all of our Nation’s students have the tools and skills they need to get ahead.” All of which leads me to wonder A) what he thinks public schools are doing and B) if he knows that charters don’t serve all students and actually sap the resources for many other students still in public schools.”

 

Where did he get the idea that charter teachers dedicate their lives to this work? TFA?

 

What do you think he said about public school teachers?

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Obama, Teachers and Teaching

John Richard Schrock: Virtual Reality is not as Good as Reality

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2016 //
7

John Richard Schrock is a professor at Emporia State University in Kansas, where he teaches science and prepares science teachers.

 
———————————————————————————————————————————————-
Virtual Unreality

 
Headlines have declared that this spring has seen the breakthrough in “virtual reality” (VR) media. Facebook released the Oculus Rift headset on March 28. Right behind it was the HTC Vive and the SONY PlayStation VR.
The hype behind VR is that it creates an “immersive environment” similar to the real world. First pitched in the 1990s—VR was poor quality and an immediate failure. But this new technology has Goldman Sachs predicting the VR industry will become bigger than television in the next ten years.

 
The new VR systems provide goggles with high definition resolution and a flicker speed far beyond what the human eye can detect. This is combined with movement sensors that detect head tilt and give the wearer the impression that they are in a real visual environment. Stereo headphones provide directional sound. A person wearing this head mounted display can “look around” and believe that they are in an artificial world.

 
More advanced “haptic” systems add the senses of smell and touch, the later through wired gloves or other devices. The goal is to convince the user of their “telexistence” or “telepresence.” So far, all of these expensive headsets also require expensive and specialized personal computers.

 
The industry hype that these “virtual worlds” possess all of the qualities of real world interactions has not been lost on the educational futurists who can hardly wait to have the first school on their block to brag about having this advanced technology.
Unfortunately, this simulation technology is worse than useless. Besides being orders of magnitude more expensive than genuine learning experiences, it lacks three important properties that real experiences have: true interaction, test-truthfulness, and real consequences. We know this because computer simulations invaded our classrooms as soon as personal computers became commonplace.

 
They all claim to be “interactive.” This was printed on the label of every simulation from 8-inch floppy discs to current thumb drives and cloud-based media. But the “interaction” of typing a keyboard or clicking a mouse to crossbreed fruit flies is nothing like actually handling the real flies (and having most of them drown in banana culture). And while we may lift our kids into the “seat” of a video-arcade “racing car,” we certainly know not to accept this performance as readiness to drive a real car.

 
Only the real world provides “test truthfulness.” Cross a hundred generations of fruit flies with dominant and recessive traits in simulation and the 3-to-1 ratio comes out textbook perfect. Not so in the real world. The value of real labs and other real experiences is that there is variation from the norm. Sure you can “program in” the variation; but the students’ know that variation was scripted as well. The real world is not scripted.

 
“Real consequences” are vital to learning in the real world. Even the student who flunks out of high school is careful to drive on the right side of the road. Why? To not stay in the lane is to face the real consequences of crashing. Get “killed” in a videogame or VR simulation and you just quit and walk away.

 
We can blindfold students for a day and tell them that this is what it is like to be blind. But it is not! At the end of the day the student can remove the blindfold. The blind person cannot.
Woody Allen once said: “I hate reality, but it’s still the best place to get a good steak.”

 
Reality is also be best place to get a good education.

Categories Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching, Technology

It’s Teacher Appreciation Week! Beware of False Praise

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2016 //
19

Does our society value teachers? By objective evidence, you may say no. After all, teachers are not paid as well as lawyers or doctors. And we can’t ignore the fact that quite a few legislatures have passed laws to remove teachers’ due process rights or to tie teacher pay to student test scores. Indeed, the Obama administration has forced this noxious idea on most states as a condition of getting Race to the Top funding.

 

Consequently, many teachers suffered the humiliation of getting a rating based on student scores,then seeing their rating posted in public. That happened in Los Angeles, and one teacher–Rigoberto Ruelas–committed suicide. That happened in Néw York City, at the in sustenance of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and the teacher with the city’s worst rating was featured on the front page of Mr. Murdoch’s tabloid. But as it turned out, the “worst teacher” was a very fine teacher of immigrant students who cycled in and out of her class all year. And, sadly, Arne Duncan praised the act of creating and published these lists of teacher ratings.

 

We can be grateful that Race to the Top is defunct, but its worst effects linger on. The charter industry expanded at the behest of RTTT, leaving behind a voracious sector that absorbs limited education dollars but evades accountability or transparency.

 

Evaluation by test scores has been debunked time and again, yet it continues because the state laws are still on the books. And many states continue to pursue ways of limiting teacher pay, increasing class size, or otherwise manipulating the conditions of teaching without improving them.

 

What does it mean to appreciate teachers? It means respecting their professionalism. It means turning to teachers as experts on their work, not to people who study teaching or think about teaching.

 

John Ewing, who heads Math for America, makes this point in this good article. He writes about the many times he participates in conferences about how to improve teaching, but no teachers are I cited to participate. He counts the number of times major journalists write articles about teaching and schools but never interview a teacher. How many teachers were included on the panel that wrote the Common Core? The typical news story about education includes quotes from the same think tank experts, even though few have ever taught.

 

Ewing writes:

 

“When it comes to talking or writing about education, we do not view teachers as experts. We do not trust them as professionals. Can you imagine an engineering conference without engineers as speakers? Can you imagine a science article with no input from scientists? Or a report on some breakthrough in medicine without a quote from a doctor? We treat the profession of teaching differently from all others.

 

“The teaching profession needs two things in order to thrive—respect and trust. The two go together. You can say nice words and be grateful to teachers, but if you do not trust them as professionals, you are not showing them respect. Trust means giving teachers (appropriate) autonomy in their classrooms, but it also means giving them influence over policy—real influence, not a few token teachers on some committee—and it means giving them control over their own professional growth. We need to stop fixing teachers and create environments in which teachers themselves fix their own profession. We need to trust them to do so.”

 

Categories Teachers and Teaching

Retired Principal: Think of the Talent Lost When We Try to Standardize Children

By dianeravitch
April 27, 2016 //
64

Lynn Stoddard, a retired educator, writes about the damage done by trying to standardize what is inherently non-standard: a human being.

 

His solution: Let teachers teach. Encourage them to recognize and magnify individual differences. Standardization doesn’t work for unique human beings, which each of us is.

 

He writes:

 

Perhaps the largest damage to our culture is the countless people who have died with their music still in them because they attended schools devoted to standardizing students. An eighth-grade boy in Farmington composed music for full orchestra, with 29 instruments — brass, woodwinds, percussion and strings — a piece that was so good it was chosen to be played at the State Music Educators Conference. Sadly, he did not go on to become another phenomenal composer like Mozart or Andrew Lloyd Webber, because he had to spend so much time with higher math and other required subjects.

 

What would American culture be like if teachers had been respected and trusted enough to determine the learning needs of each student and help him or her develop unique talents and use them to benefit society? What would have happened if, instead of trying to make students fit a standardized curriculum, teachers had helped students magnify their positive differences?

 

We can get some answers from the only teachers who are now allowed to personalize education: athletics coaches and arts teachers. These teachers see benefit in letting students try out for positions on the athletic team or for a part in the school musical. Coaches understand why sprinters should not be required to throw the shot put, or weightlifters to high jump. Choir teachers understand why high tenors cannot sing the bass part.

 

Let teachers teach, and let every child attain his or her full potential.

 

 

 

Categories Common Core, Reign of Error, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers and Teaching

A Lesson from Upper Darby in How to Demoralize Teachers

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2016 //
25

The Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, school board gave a $30,000 contract to a consulting firm for advice. The advice was to turn a certain number of elementary school teachers into “at-large” teachers in their school. This would make them into floaters, permanent subs.

 

Guess what? Teachers are furious. They will lose their classrooms.

 

A special meeting of the Upper Darby School Board Thursday night to discuss the educational specifications committee turned into a standing room only plea to keep teachers in their classrooms.

 

Purple T-shirts with “Let us Teach” filled the board room at the high school as teachers let the board know that they want to teach in their own classrooms and not be designated floaters throughout the district under proposed new elementary school schedules.

 

These schedules, made up by the consulting firm District Management Council for $30,000, are slated to be presented to the public on Monday night, but teachers who have seen or heard about the schedules are against an alleged idea of having five teachers being “at-large” in schools.

 

“I cannot see myself going back to being a teacher-at-large,” said Primos Elementary teacher Kristina McBrearty, “which, to me, is a glorified building sub. I want a classroom, that’s where I want to be, that’s where I’m going to make the difference.”

 

Somebody better start coming up with ideas about how to help teachers, how to retain teachers, how to make teachers feel appreciated.

 

How can we have better education if we drive away our teachers?

Categories Pennsylvania, Teachers and Teaching

A Disillusioned Teacher Responds to the Tilson-Ravitch Exchange

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2016 //
58

Whitney Tilson received many comments on our dialogue. Many were positive. Others were not.

 

Here is a comment he received from a teacher who is disgusted with the attacks on the profession. She plans to leave. I showed her comment to a veteran teacher in NYC, who found them offensive to teachers like him who make a career of teaching. What he took from her comment was, “what does that make me? Lazy? Incompetent? Uncreative?”

 

I hope Whitney and his readers and fellow reformers learn from her comment. She is their ideal teacher, an Ivy League graduate, the “best and the brightest.” When even their favorites say “Enough is enough,” they should listen. The reform attacks on teachers–the test-based evaluations, the paperwork, the BS rubrics, the data-driven analytics, the litigious efforts to eliminate all job protections– are crippling teacher recruitment and retention.

 

 

She wrote to Tilson’s blog:

 
“So glad that you opened dialogue with her and acknowledged the nuances of the union challenge.

“You powerful rich people who have so much say over our daily lives scare the crap out of us teachers who have so little say over our own lives. =)

“It’s nice to hear you sound a bit more nuanced and respectful in your language.

“As a teacher who will probably quit soon, I just would add that the harder we make teaching and the more disrespectful we are to teachers, the more we lower the bar for what standard we hold teachers to. If ed reformers’ language about teachers and ideas about teachers continue to make more people like me quit (I’m a Yale grad, and I know of at least 6 Stanford grads and one other Yale grad who are all leaving the classroom at the end of this year), the only people who stay will be people who have little ambition, don’t really care, aren’t very creative, and don’t mind the constant indignities or the pervasive denial throughout the whole system. No offense, but you’re not going to make awesome teachers out of them. You need us.

“And this is an indictment of the WHOLE system, not public, not charter. Because let’s be honest: the public v. charter debate is just a giant distraction from the fact that we have a segregated school system and no one is doing anything about it. The only reason we have charter schools is because white people are so relieved they don’t have to integrate their kids with the poor kids of color… what white person wouldn’t support charter? It’s separate but equal! (Please forgive the sarcasm. But no one seems to be talking about the real issue any more).

Sincerely,

 

XXXXXXXXX

“A disillusioned, intelligent, innovative, caring, competent, and excellent urban public school teacher who is not going to last much longer”

 

 

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching

Nebraska Educator: A Letter to Teachers Everywhete

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2016 //
3

Ferial Pearson is a college instructor in Omaha and a former teacher in the public schools who has embarked on a mission of kindness. In this newspaper article, she wrote a letter to the teachers of Omaha to thank them for their hard work and their many successes. The letter got a lot of buzz in Nebraska and on social media because some politicians have been bad-mouthing the public schools, as part of their cpaign for vouchers.

Change the name of the city and state and the letter would sound right in every district.

***

Dear Omaha Public School teachers,

I see you. I see your work. I know you are doing innovative, creative, pedagogically sound things. I know how much you care about your students and how hard you love them. I know this because I’ve been in dozens and dozens of your schools in the past three years and have been blown away by your talents, skills and resilience. I know because I taught at Omaha South High School for 10 years and Ralston High for two, and I lived it. I know because I have now taught more than a hundred of you in my classes at the College of Education at the University of Nebraska at Omaha over the past six years.

We have laughed and cried together about our work and our students. You have been brave and vulnerable in sharing your struggles and insecurities, and we have grown, so much, together. I know because I go to IncluCity Camp with your students and hear about how much they are learning and how much they look up to you. Are there some bad eggs? Absolutely. But the good ones outshine the bad. By far.

On Monday, I read about an Omaha South High student from Mexico who was accepted to Harvard. Two years ago, while observing a practicum student at Omaha North High, I met an African American student who was trying to decide between two Ivy League schools that he had been accepted to, one of which his brother was already attending. I have seen my own students go to Yale, the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Creighton, University of Nebraska at Omaha, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and many, many other schools.

Some have doctorates, others are Licensed Mental Health Care Professionals, teachers with graduate degrees, social workers, social justice advocates, rock star chefs, phenomenal mechanics, welders, professional artists, utility line workers, day care providers, professors, lawyers, medical doctors, writers, business owners, professional musicians, fashion designers, funeral directors, athletes, mentors, and the list goes on. I could tag them all here, but you’d be reading until next year.

These are students of different races, abilities, backgrounds, sexual orientations, genders, and nationalities. Last week, I met a young man who now works Centris Credit Union, thanks to the innovative work of staff at Omaha South High who collaborated with Wells Fargo to open a branch in the school so that kids could do actual banking and that provided him with a direct line to his career today. I remember the Packasso Project, the brainchild of Fairouz Bishara and the Art Department at Omaha South High School getting talented artists off the streets and giving them legitimate canvasses and artist mentors from across the community. There are stories like this in almost every school in this city.

So, dear OPS teachers, when the education reformers tell you that you are failing at your job based on test scores, or that your schools are “bad” or “failing” please tell them the stories of your students. Never stop bragging about your students. Tell them that the ones don’t make it aren’t suffering from an achievement gap; they are suffering from an opportunity gap and that is something that the community needs to help us with.

We do what we can with what we’ve got, and when the soil is fertile and the sun shines and there is enough water, our seeds thrive and bloom into gorgeous blossoms. Sometimes, we plant a seed in a child, but that child is in dry and barren soil, is traumatized, and doesn’t know when it will rain next, and so we nurture them as best we can. They may get that sunshine and rain and food years after we let them go and we’ll never see the fruits of our labor, but they come back, sometimes, and they show us their flowers. Some never do, and that’s sad, and we do our best anyway.

Tell the education reformers that rather than taking our resources away to try and do better than us in a different place with our kids, whom we love, that there are already great things happening here, and we could use those resources to become even better. We are not perfect, but we are doing great things and willing to improve. Tell them to work with us to care about the whole child. To help us get those children their sunshine and soil and food and water. We’ll take care of their brains and hearts if the community will help us take care of their bodies as well.

Thank you for doing what you do and being who you are. You are my heroes.

(Note: This goes for ALL my public school teacher friends, not just in Omaha, and to the paraprofessionals and custodians and administrators and media specialists and cafeteria workers and office assistants and..and…)

Sincerely,

Ferial Pearson

Categories Nebraska, Teachers and Teaching

Julian Vasquez Heilig: Truth for America, Episode 6

By dianeravitch
April 25, 2016 //
0

Julian Vasquez Heilig recorded this podcast at the Network for Public Education in Raleigh. I was part of the discussion. This podcast was blocked twice on iTunes. I hope it is working now. Let me know if you can’t open it.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Teach for America, Teachers and Teaching

EduShyster: Why Teachers at a Cleveland Charter School Formed a Union

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2016 //
5

EduShyster interviewed teachers at the University of Cleveland Prep School about why they decided to unionize. Charters have a reputation for expecting teachers to work long hours. Because of working conditions, charters have high teacher turnover.

 

She writes:

 

 

“For Jacqueline Lehane, it was the teacher demerit system at her Cleveland charter school that was the last straw. Teachers who’d been heard talking in the hallway, or whose students had been spotted with an untucked shirt, would be called out via an official email entitled *Quick Hits,* on which teachers, school and network administrators were copied.

 

*It’s just public humiliation,* says Lehane, whose *hits* included having a messy classroom after her first graders completed an art project. To Lehane, this top-down shaming was a symbol of everything that was wrong with the school. *Once I even asked a dean, ‘do people who are higher up than you treat you the way you treat us?’

 

 

“If all you know about unions is that they are protectors of the status quo, responsible for everything that’s wrong with public education, I’m guessing you have no idea how hard it is to actually organize one. By the time Lehane and her colleagues at the University of Cleveland Preparatory School, part of the I CAN network, voted 18-4 to join the Ohio Federation of Teachers, the teachers had spent two years trying to form a union. Administrators responded, first by attempting to intimidate teachers into changing their minds, then firing the teachers who they’d identified as leading the effort. Seven teachers at the school were fired as punishment—such a clear and blatant act of retaliation that the National Labor Relations Board ordered I CAN to reinstate the teachers and give them full back pay….

 

 

‘This can’t be good’

 

 

“Lehane started teaching at UCP in 2015. A week after the school year started, she found herself in front of 32 first graders, with no training. *I think it took me about an hour to figure out that there were some serious problems,* says Lehane. One of the first things she noticed was how high the teacher turnover rate was at the school. Teachers were constantly quitting, replaced by brand new teachers, some of whom weren’t even licensed to teach. Lehane was struck by how different this was from the public schools she’d attended growing up in suburban Cleveland. *My teachers were there for my three sisters and my brother, but no one ever stays at I CAN. I just remember thinking ‘this can’t be good,’* says Lehane.

 

 

“When a group of teachers at the school approached Lehane about coming to a meeting to talk about organizing a union, she was in. At that first gathering, the teachers listed off their concerns and identified problems that they thought needed to be fixed. Like the sky-high turnover among teachers. And the fact there seemed to be no accountability for administrators. Work hours and expectations were outrageous, even though teachers lacked the most basic supports and resources to accomplish what was expected of them. *It was such a relief to hear that everyone was frustrated by the same things, and that we all wanted to fix them,* says Lehane.”

 

About 90% of charter schools are non-union. Some funders underwrite them to get rid of unions. This must be very disturbing to the Walton Family Foundation, the Eli Broad Foundation, and many others who want schools to be free of unions.

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Teachers and Teaching, Unions

PBS: Advice for White Teachers Who Teach in the ‘Hood

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2016 //
40

Kenya Downs interviews Professor Christopher Emdin of Teachers College, Columbia University, about his new book, called “For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood … and the Rest of Y’all Too.” 

 

Downs writes:

 

“There’s a teacher right now in urban America who’s going to teach for exactly two years and he’s going to leave believing that these young people can’t be saved,” says Dr. Chris Emdin, associate professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College. “So he’s going to find another career as a lawyer, get a job in the Department of Education or start a charter school network, all based on a notion about these urban youth that is flawed. And we’re going to end up in the same cycle of dysfunction that we have right now. Something’s got to give.”

 

Emdin, who is also the university’s associate director of the Institute for Urban and Minority Education, has had enough of what he calls a pervasive narrative in urban education: a savior complex that gives mostly white teachers in minority and urban communities a false sense of saving kids.

 

“The narrative itself, it exotic-izes youth and positions them as automatically broken,” he says. “It falsely positions the teacher, oftentimes a white teacher, as hero.”

 

He criticizes the “white hero teacher” concept as an archaic approach that sets up teachers to fail and further marginalizes poor and minority children in urban centers. In “For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood … and the Rest of Y’all Too,” his new book released this month, Emdin draws parallels between current urban educational models and Native American schools of the past that measured success by how well students adapted to forced assimilation. Instead, he calls for a new approach to urban education that trains teachers to value the unique realities of minority children, incorporating their culture into classroom instruction. I talked with him about the book and why he says the stakes are too high to continue with the status quo.

 

Emdin says:

 

I think framing this hero teacher narrative, particularly for folks who are not from these communities, is problematic. The model of a hero going to save this savage other is a piece of a narrative that we can trace back to colonialism; it isn’t just relegated to teaching and learning. It’s a historical narrative and that’s why it still exists because, in many ways, it is part of the bones of America. It is part of the structure of this country. And unless we come to grips with the fact that even in our collective American history that’s problematic, we’re going to keep reinforcing it. Not only are we setting the kids up to fail and the educators up to fail, but most importantly, we are creating a societal model that positions young people as unable to be saved.

 

I always ask my teachers why do they want to teach and I can tell by their responses how closely the white savior narrative is imbued in who they are or who they want to be. I always say, if you’re coming into a place to save somebody then you’ve already lost because young people don’t need saving. They have brilliance, it’s just on their own terms. Once we get the narrative shifted then every teacher can be effective, including white folks who teach in the hood.

 

Downs asks “What are the risks of continuing urban education as is?”

 

Emdin replies:

 

The repercussions are around us every day from criminal justice to engagement with the political process, to higher incarceration rates and low graduation rates. The outcomes are right in our faces today. I’m not absolving communities from blame or parents from blame. But we know that schools that have more zero tolerance policies, youth are more likely to get involved with the criminal justice system. We know that schools that have these hyper rigorous approaches to pedagogy, youth are less likely to take advanced placement classes. So the place where the magic should happen is inside the classroom.

 

It’s not a tale of doom and gloom. I’m simply saying this is why it’s bad but there’s a way forward. And the way forward doesn’t cost a million dollars! It doesn’t require you to give an iPad to every kid in the school district or a $3 million grant. It’s free! Teaching differently is free. Going into the communities and finding out how to do things better is free, man! It’s not an issue of finance or an issue of wealth. It’s an issue of identifying that what we’ve been doing before just ain’t working.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Discipline, Race, Students, Teach for America, Teachers and Teaching
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