“The fundamental role of a teacher is not to deliver information, it is to guide the social process of learning. ..The job of a teacher is to inspire, to challenge, to excite their students to want to learn. The most important thing a teacher does is make every student feel like they are important,to make them feel accountable for doing the work of learning.?”
Getting the role of the teacher right is really, really important.
And getting it wrong leads to all kinds of problems.
One way our education reform movement (and, to be honest, just about everyone else) gets it wrong is imagining teachers’ function to be simply “delivering content.”
This leads to problems in the classroom. Students are treated as passive recipients of content that is then superficially assessed via tests. The students themselves, their lives, the contexts they live in, their aspirations, are not important. What becomes important is the technical question of how to best “deliver content,” and then how to measure our effectiveness in doing so. What matters is content delivery and assessment. This is what I and others label “learnification.”
It is simply bad pedagogy.
Am I overstating this? Read your newspapers, check your local district’s ranking, and get back to me.
The day after Thanksgiving, someone sent me an absolutely outrageous opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal. On-line articles in that newspaper are behind a paywall, which means that I cannot provide you a link. However, I will quote enough here from the faux-scientific piece published by New York Success Academy Charter Schools executive director, Eva Moskowitz, to give you a taste of what she said. Moskowitz has a Ph.D, or I might suspect she has no idea about collecting and presenting evidence for an argument. But she clearly knows better, which means she was intentionally and blatantly trying to deceive what she must imagine is a naive or stupid public.
Moskowitz’s article, titled “The Charter-School Windfall for Public Schools,” is followed by a subtitle to explain: “Competition is making even non-charter schools do better in New York. Yet the city is undermining school choice.” In the article itself…
Rumors of a New Orleans-style Recovery School District (RSD), aimed at Milwaukee Public Schools, are swirling around the Wisconsin political arena once again. The Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce has been lobbying for this for some time. In 2013 the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute proposed the same idea in a report titled “Pathway to success for Milwaukee schools.” (See at http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/-pathway-to-success_170815996739.pdf).
Right now there are RSD’s in New Orleans, Tennessee, Michigan and Virginia. In New Orleans it is called the Recovery School District. In Tennessee it is called the Achievement School District. In Michigan it is called the Education Achievement Authority. In Virginia it is called the Opportunity Educational Institution.
From the practice of these 4 states, the following outcomes have become evident:
• “Low performing” schools are removed from their school districts. • Administration and teachers are removed from those schools. (In New Orleans 7500 teachers were fired. A…
Why does every child half to be college/career ready and to achieve that why do we need to close public schools and standardized every child and force teachers to teach to a script?
I have long known that students are individuals, each with their own style of learning. They come to classrooms with varying degrees of competencies. They come with a wide variety of interests, motivations, hopes and dreams. They come from a wide variety of socioeconomic and family environments, even within the same towns, districts or neighborhoods. So why are public schools presently being told to teach students as if they are all the same? Why are they being taught in a substandard and homogenized way?
All of you can decide on the answers to that question, and there are many that I will don’t rant about here. I have done plenty of that. It is not the time to rant. It is, as it usually is, the time to discuss and propose options and better solutions and better solutions.
It is a lie to say schools do not have high expectations…
The members of the Administrator’s Alliance for Proven Policy and Legislation in Education (AAPPLE), have once again—unfortunately—found it necessary to attempt to hold Chicago Public Schools officials accountable. Ironically this time it is the CPS Office of Accountability that needs to answer to students, teachers, parents and school leaders across Chicago.
This office is responsible for developing and executing the system used for rating schools using CPS’s five-level “SQRP” system. However, an AAPPLE comparative analysis indicates the Office of Accountability altered the school level growth data used to assign those ratings.
Investigation
In August, AAPPLE analyzed NWEA MAP student growth results and discovered students in public schools were learning far more than their peers in charter schools. Our findings were published in a Chicago Sun-Times Op-Ed. In addition, the Sun-Times published its own independent analysis, which affirmed our findings. Our analysis was based on a…
After speaking and guiding a workshop recently, I was struck by some distinct impressions I witnessed among several hundred educators.
First, although teachers and educational leaders coming to a conference are a skewed subset of teachers, I was impressed with their passion for teaching but more so for their students.
However, I must add that these teachers repeatedly expressed a lack of agency as professionals; a common refrain was “I [we] can’t,” and the reasons were administration and mandates such as Common Core (or other standards) and high-stakes testing. That sense of fatalism was most often framed against these teachers clearly knowing what they would do (and better) if they felt empowered, professionally empowered, to teach from their expertise as that intersects with their students’ needs.
This experience came just two weeks after my trip to the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) annual convention, this year in Washington DC—where…
The Oligarch is Bill Gates. The Educator is Anthony Cody, who has gone toe-to-toe with the Gates Foundation in private conversations and publicly for several years. Cody’s book, The Educator and the Oligarch, covers what he has learned while in the trenches battling a billionaire and his vast, entrenched organization, and the book is worth reading.
Do I NEED to repeat that?
At 2:30, Saturday (12-6) afternoon, I left home to walk the two miles to the nearest BART station.
At 4:05, I walked into the Laurel Book Store in Oakland, California to hear Anthony Cody, who started talking soon after I sat down, and by then it was standing room only.
Cody has been in the fight to save democratic public education much longer than I have, and his knowledge of the issue is deeper. Back in the mid 1980’s, I started suspecting that there might be a plot to destroy the public schools—it was just a feeling I had due to the crazy and insane things that teachers were being forced to do that made no sense.
Thinking I was cooking up a conspiracy theory, I went into denial mode and continued teaching and dodging bullets from those imagined ghosts until I retired in 2005 after thirty years in the classroom. Then in November 2013, my wife came home and told me she’d heard Diane Ravtich on NPR talking about her book “Reign of Error,” and I read the book and discovered my suspicions had been true all along—but like cancer this plot has branched out and taken on a malignant life of its own and it’s spreading into every element of public education in the United States in addition to corrupting our democratic government—thanks in large part to Bill Gates.
Listening to Cody late this afternoon, I learned how Bill Gates always gets what he wants—he buys everyone and everything he can, and he has dedicated between $5 to $7 billion dollars to destroy America’s democratic public education system and rebuild it into what HE thinks it should be.
I didn’t raise my hand until the end of Cody’s talk, and after several others had asked questions and shared their thinking. It was obvious that there was a lot of passion in the room among parents and teachers.
Then I had my say—not knowing that I was going to be attacked, not by Cody, but by another person in the audience. I said that we had to stop measuring children and focus on the children who needed the most help: children from dysfunctional homes and who lived in poverty. I mentioned that France had launched a national early childhood education program managed by its own public schools in the 1970’s, and thirty years later, the French poverty rate had dropped more than 50%.
When I finished talking—one loud person—grabbed the crowd’s attention and attacked me for blaming dysfunctional parents for at risk children who were difficult to teach. She said that it wasn’t the parent’s fault their children were not succeeding. I didn’t respond to her attack maybe because I’m severely dyslexic and it takes me time to think before I open my mouth. It’s so much easier to write, revise, edit and wait a few days and then revise some more. I had no desire to get into a heated shouting match with this stranger.
When the event ended and the crowd moved from the event area into the bookstore, several people came up to me and offered support. They all agreed that I had never blamed dysfunctional parents for the problems in classrooms caused by at-risk and difficult to teach children.
I replied that dysfunctional parents can’t be blamed when their children are not learning in school, because my parents were dysfunctional—who both dropped out of high school when they were fourteen—because I was born to poverty; because when I was six or seven, my mother was told I would never learn to read, but she taught me anyway after failing to teach my older brother 12 years earlier. My brother died at age 64 illiterate and he left behind several of his own adult children who are still illiterate. My father was a gambler and an alcoholic. If he wasn’t drinking, he was a wonderful, gentle man. My brother spent about 15 years of his life in prison. He was also an alcoholic, a sometime drug user, and a heavy smoker. Like our parents, he also never had the tools to raise children who easily learned in school.
If my family wasn’t dysfunctional, I don’t know what is.
If you ask someone to fix your car who doesn’t know how to use the tools, do we blame that person for not fixing the car? Dysfunctional parents—like my parents—did not have the parenting tools to raise children that were ready to learn, and I wasn’t ready to learn until I was in my early twenties after serving several years in the U.S. Marines and fighting in Vietnam.
It was dark out when I left the bookstore and started the long ride home on BART, and it was a long ride. The BART train was delayed several times sitting at stations because of some problem down the line. What should have been a 25-minute ride stretched to about one-and-a-half hours, and this turned out to be a good thing, because the wait provided time for me to read to Chapter 4 in Cody’s book, and discover just how involved Bill Gates is in HIS own goal to destroy our democratic public schools, and replace those schools with what HE wants. For instance, if Gates was cutting open our bodies and reaching inside to do surgery to save our lives HIS way, he’d have our blood all the way to his shoulders, smeared on his face and drenching his clothing down to his shoes as he pulled out one organ after another and threw them over his shoulder to the filthy floor.
Bill Gates has bought—bribed would be more appropriate—the media, nonprofits, and institutions for education, state governments, the Department of Education, and the White House. At the moment, Bill Gates is the unelected emperor of the United States, and if he achieves HIS goals with our schools, our democracy and our freedom will be gone too.
It’s getting late. If this needs editing, I’ll fix it tomorrow. Right now, I want to publish this post, brush my teeth and relax by watching the last of the 3rd season of The Tudors . I think I see a lot of similarities between Emperor Bill Gates and England’s King Henry 8, but Bill Gates isn’t beheading wives. He is beheading teachers, children—and our democracy.
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
There are NO bad schools unless we are talking about schools that are falling apart, because they are starving for funds to repair and update the infrastructure
Americans believe a lack of financial support is the biggest problem currently facing public schools, according to the 44th annual Phil Delta Kappa International/Gallup poll of public attitudes toward public schools released Wednesday, but they also say that balancing the federal budget is more important than improving the quality of education. – Governing.com
There are NO FAILING schools except when VAM is used to measure them and VAM has been proven to be misleading and does NOT work.
As is the case in every profession that requires complex practice and judgments, precision and perfection in the evaluation of teachers will never be possible. Evaluators may find it useful to take student test score information into account in their evaluations of teachers, provided such information is embedded in a more comprehensive approach. What is now necessary is a comprehensive system that gives teachers the guidance and feedback, supportive leadership, and working conditions to improve their performance, and that permits schools to remove persistently ineffective teachers without distorting the entire instructional program by imposing a flawed system of standardized quantification of teacher quality. – Problems with the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers from theEconomic Policy Institute
There is poverty and very little is being done to deal with it
The negative effects of poverty on all levels of school success have been widely demonstrated and accepted; the critical question for us as a caring society is, can these effects be prevented or reversed? A variety of data are relevant to this question, and recent research gives us reason to be both positive and proactive. The impact of poverty on educational outcomes for children, U.S. National Library of Medicine
Most public school teachers work 60+ hours a week teaching, correcting, planning, prepping and calling parents
Annual teaching hours by education level, 2010 among OECD nations. The U.S. ranked 3rd place for most hours worked by teachers behind Argentina in 1st place and Chile for 2nd place. – Figure 4.7
The average number of teaching hours in public primary schools is 782 hours per year in OECD countries but ranges from fewer than 600 hours in Greece and Poland to over 1,000 hours in Chile and the United States. … Teaching time is defined as the number of hours per year that a full-time teacher teaches a group or class of students. … Working time refers to the normal working hours of a full-time teacher and includes time directly associated with teaching as well as the hours devoted to teaching-related activities, such as preparing lessons, counselling students, correcting assignments and tests, and meeting with parents and other staff. Data are from the 2011 OECD-INES Survey on Teachers and the Curriculum and refer to the 2009-10. How much time do teachers spend teaching? OECD
There are children who learn and children who don’t learn—for whatever reason—that has little or nothing to do with the quality of teaching, and the children who don’t learn are causing the low VAM scores Child Neglect: A Guide for Prevention, Assessment and Intervention
Just because a teacher teaches, that doesn’t mean a child will make the effort to learn and the parent or parents will support the learning process so learning takes place
Researchers have evidence for the positive effects of parent involvement on children, families, and school when schools and parents continuously support and encourage the children’s learning and development.The Benefits of Parent Involvement: What Research Has to Say
There is an overwhelming avalanche of evidence that there are MANY crooks and liars in the corporate supported public education reform movement using VAM scores to drive their goals toward more wealth and profit that has nothing to do with the learning of the most at risk and difficult to teach children, the children who cause the low VAM scores in the first place.
There’s been a flood of local news stories in recent months about FBI raids on charter schools all over the country. FBI Tracks Charter Schools
A compilation of news articles about charter schools which have been charged with, or are highly suspected of, tampering with admissions, grades, attendance and testing; misuse of funds and embezzlement; engaging in nepotism and conflicts of interest; engaging in complicated and shady real estate deals; and/or have been engaging in other questionable, unethical, borderline-legal, or illegal activities. This is also a record of charter school instability and other unsavory tidbits. Charter School Scandals
In conclusion, the case for public school success in the United States:
The average high school graduation rate, ages 24 – 65, for all OECD countries—including the United States—is 75%.
The high school graduation rate for the United States, by itself, ages 24 – 65, is 90%
The 4-year+ average graduation rate among all OECD countries—including the United States—is 37.7%.
The 4-year+ college graduation rate in the United States is 42%—the 4th highest in the world, but the U.S. has about 3 college graduates for every job that requires a college degree.
Among major English speaking countries, the United States is ranked 2nd for functional literacy.
In the United Kingdom, the child poverty rate is 17% and the adult functional literacy rate is 80%
In the United States, the child poverty rate is 22%, and the adult functional literacy rate is 65%
In New Zealand, the child poverty rate is 22%, and the adult functional literacy rate is 55%
In Australia, the child poverty rate is 10.9%, and the adult functional literacy rate is 53.6%
In Canada, the child poverty rate is 14.3%, and the adult functional literacy rate is 51.5%
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
In our Brave New World of social networking, IM, Skype and the blogosphere ,the ability of teachers to “speak” to their students, parents and colleagues knows no bounds. The number and frequency of teacher blogs seems to grow daily.
Does the First Amendment protect teachers from principal retribution for comments made on the range of Internet platforms? Does the First Amendment protect teachers from comments made directly to principals? to students? from comments made at public meetings?
The courts divide teacher speech in two categories, “protected” and “unprotected” speech.
There is considerable case law re teacher freedom of speech outside the classroom. In landmark decisionPickering v Board of Education (1968) the US Supreme Court wrote,
Free and open debate is vital to informed decision-making by the electorate. Teachers are, as a class, the members of a community most likely to have informed and definite opinions … operation…
If younger Americans, ages 18-34, are more educated than their parents’ generation but making less money, then what is the REAL agenda behind corporate public education reform and destroying teacher’s labor unions?
A few facts:
For ages 24-65, the average high school graduation rate for OECD nations is 75%, but for the United States, that high school graduation rate is 90%
In addition, the average college graduation rate for OECD nations is 38%m but for the United States, the college graduate rate is 42%
What is the real reason that U.S. and global corporations are waging war against public schools and labor unions in the United States?
Valerie Strauss has a column describing a puzzle: younger Americans, ages 18-34, are more educated than their parents’ generation, but making less money.
Your guess is as good as mine, but here is my guess. Inequality is growing; the middle class is less secure. The “reformers” want everyone to go to college, but they do nothing to address the shrinkage of jobs, especially jobs that pay what college graduates are led to expect. All their “reform” blather is a convenient way of diverting attention from growing wage inequality and growing wealth inequality.
Strauss writes:
Young adults in the United States today — those Americans from 18 to 34 years old — are on average earning less than their counterparts 35 years ago, but more have a college degree, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
This piece on the bureau’s blog says that earnings among young adults range from state…
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 