Im Just Sayin’

Guest post: Bernie Keller

Recently, a Time Magazine article spoke to the issue of education and its reforms. The article suggested that a large part of the solution lies in taking teachers from the “top third” of the college graduates to become teachers. Here’s a great question for those who advocate this proposal, “Who are the teachers you remember from your educational career?” In what third of the class were they found? Not only am I confident they would not be able be able to tell me whether or not they were in the top third, I’m sure they would be unable to tell me what third they were in at all! Despite this, they still identified those teachers as the teachers they remember best, and I’d argue they remember those teachers because they learned in those teachers’ classes.

Here’s another question for you. How can you attract the top third of any one to a vitriolic, acrimonious, flat out disrespectful and insulting treatment of teachers and the unwillingness to pay top third money? I used to tell my students, “You can’t buy a Rolls Royce with Volkswagen money.” The saying means if you want something, you have to pay whatever that thing costs. You can’t get a quality car, like a Rolls Royce if you are unwilling to pay for it. The same is true about getting quality teachers. Quality costs. If you are unwilling to pay that cost, how can you expect to attract that level of quality?

Finally, how can you tell just from the third someone is in how good he/she will actually be?

Don Mattingly, one of the best players in the major leagues during the eighties and early nineties, was drafted #500. That means 499 players were chosen in front of him. Clearly, he was not in the top third.

 

Pete Rose wasn’t even drafted. When he was signed to a professional contract as a favor to his father, he was sent to Class D in the minor leagues. Considering Class D is the lowest class in the minor leagues, he certainly was in the top third.

Who would have thought Phil Jackson, considered by many to be one of the greatest coaches of all time in the NBA, would even have become a decent basketball player. In those days when I watched him come off the bench all elbows and shoulders, he certainly was not in the top third of the players in the NBA. Hell, he probably wasn’t in the top third of the players on his own team!

Finally, let’s consider Lewis Latimer- you know, the guy who assisted Bell to invent the telephone and introduced the filament to the light bulb that would allow the bulb to burn longer than the filaments Edison, “the inventor of the light bulb”, was using – he was born to former slaves, was one of ten or eleven children and couldn’t attend school because he was Black. I think it’s fair to say he was not in the top third, either.

These examples, and I dare say millions of others, speak to the problem of just looking to the top third to find the best teachers. In fact, anyone who has ever been a student, or taught, or coached knows that simply because one has talent or superior knowledge that is no guarantee of success, that just like the people mentioned in this essay, and the millions of others just like them who are anonymous but who have nevertheless succeeded despite not finding themselves in the top third, you really never know where you will find a great teacher, coach, athlete, parent, student or person, so it might be wise not to “disqualify” anyone or to leave anyone out.

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WHAT IT TAKES. (a guest post by Bernie Keller)

My brothers and sisters and I were pretty lucky growing up because we had the opportunity to be raised by two people who were good at keeping things simple. One of my mom’s favorite sayings was, “There is more than one way to skin a cat.” Basically that means there is more than one way to do anything. This sage piece of wisdom is especially applicable to education reformers who insist their way is the only way to “fix” education. The truth is there is more than one way to make education work, but interestingly enough, for all the different ways to make education work, each of the different ways contain similar, if not the exact same elements

Recently, Augusta Uwanmanzu-Nne made news when she was accepted to all eight Ivy League schools. In point of fact, this was the second student in two years to do this as a young man named Harold Ekeh from the same school accomplished that feat in 2015. According to the article written about her, Augusta was not a genius, nor did the school have only “great teachers”, or Rhodes Scholars or Ph.D candidates. It appears they were simply committed, compassionate teachers, much like many of the people I had the opportunity to work with throughout my 40 year career. In fact, according to the young lady, her success can be credited to supportive parents, her persistence and hard work, and dedicated teachers. I daresay you’d have to add to that list a supportive administrative team that provided whatever assistance and support the committed teachers needed in order to successfully complete their jobs, (as opposed to simply being “managers” or CEO’s).

The more I listen to the “experts” and “reformers” talking about what needs to happen in order to fix education, it strikes me that what they are saying seems to be so complicated and convoluted, and I keep thinking about those simple people I was privileged to have as parents, people who tried to keep things as simple as possible.

What is necessary to make education work has always been necessary, and wherever there has been success, those elements have been present. Until and unless all of the elements necessary- parents, students, teachers, administration, community and government- do their parts and contribute their efforts, no re-configuration, no change in design, no change in curriculum or testing or evaluation, or giving schools names like academies or charters will work or change anything.

The experts talk about “best practices” and tested and “proven” techniques. Well, consider this- education in New York specifically and the United States in general, has produced the likes of President Obama, Michelle Obama, General Colin Powell, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, President Bill Clinton, Dr. Hakim Lucas, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former chancellors Harold Levy and Joel Klein, and millions of others. This means we already possess the knowledge and the answers to fix education.

While I may not have the numbers at my fingertips, (as I am not a big sabermetrics guy), I’m willing to bet you any amount of money that if you look at the people who have succeeded in education, whether we are talking about New York particularly or the United States in general, or whether we are talking about 100 years ago, 40 years ago or last week, for every 100 of them, 99 of them would have at least three, if not all four, of the elements of supportive parents, persistency and hard work, dedicated and committed teachers and a supportive administration.

Any takers?

“If you want to do something evil, put it inside something boring.”

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@anthonycody, @dianeravitch, @valeriestrauss, education, Educators, schools, students, teachers

As John Oliver said, “If you want to do something evil, put it inside something boring.”

This is now true again in the case of the wealthy fake education reform philanthropists including the Broad and Walton Foundations behind TNTP (what used to be called The New Teacher Project), The Partnership for Education Justice, and Students for Education Reform.

 

Again, the very wealthy “blame the teachers” for poverty caused issues in less successful schools. Broad is listed as the 65^th richest person in the world and the six Waltons on Forbes’ list of wealthiest Americans have a net worth of $144.7 billion. This fiscal year three Waltons—Rob, Jim, and Alice (and the various entities that they control)—will receive an estimated $3.1 billion in Wal-Mart dividends from their majority stake in the company. Meet the Family – The Walmart 1%

 

So behind what boring topic is their evil lurking? According to the New York Times, They are behind the Minnesota challenge to teacher tenure laws there.

 

“Opening a new front in the assault on teacher tenure, a group of parents backed by wealthy philanthropists served notice to defendants on Wednesday in a lawsuit challenging Minnesota’s job protections for teachers, as well as the state’s rules governing which teachers are laid off as a result of budget cuts.”

 

This is an instant replay of the California and New York attempts to do the same thing: Break unions. As Brenda Cassellius, Minnesota’s commissioner of education said,

 

“Minnesota has some of the most hard-working and talented teachers in the nation, and we are committed to ensuring every student has a dedicated and competent teacher.” “We also have rigorous laws that protect due process for teachers and that, when followed, provide school administrators and school boards with the authority to remove teachers.”

 

Two years ago I co-wrote this with a local parent, Glen Dalgleish to ease people’s minds about what Tenure is and isn’t.

 

“Since the Vergara ruling in California, there has been a lot of discussion about “tenure” but there has also been a lot of different interpretations what it actually means and unfortunately there has also been a lot of misinformation.

 

What Tenure is:

“Tenure is legal protection granted to some teachers that requires the school district to prove just cause before a termination. Tenure is obtained through a multi-year evaluation process of a teacher in a probationary track position and usually requires a vote of the governing body of the school. Once tenure is granted, a teacher is no longer considered an “at-will” employee (an employee that can be terminated for any reason at any time). Rather, to terminate an employee with tenure, a school district must show that it has “just cause” to do so, typically at a hearing before an arbitrator.”

 

What Tenure is not: Tenure is NOT a lifetime job guarantee. This is a key point to remember, as we believe this where a lot of the misinformation stems from. It is up to administrators, not boards, to make the right decision about tenure at this point. In NYS, they have 3 years to determine the quality of each of their new teachers.”

 

Why does this issue raising its ugly head? Ask John Oliver…

 

“If you want to do something evil, put it inside something boring.”

ANOTHER WISE REASON FOR WISE:

The excerpts from this “Atlantic” article give us more research to answer the question, “Why WISE?

Why Do Some Poor Kids Thrive?

Alana Semuels Apr 6, 2016

Despite the challenge of growing up in tough areas with few resources, thousands of inner city kids manage to excel academically. But even some students who seem to thrive early on run a significant risk of faltering on their quest for college degrees or the elite jobs they once envisioned. So what’s the deciding factor behind kids who meet their potential and those who wind up falling short?

That’s the question undertaken by researchers Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, and Kathryn Edin, in the book Coming of Age in the Other America.

 In 2010, the authors interviewed 150 black young men and women who were born in the late 1980s and early 1990s to parents who lived in public housing. They spent hours with the youth, talking to them in cars, in McDonald’s, in front stoops. In 2012, they followed up with 20 who were representative of the group. Coincidentally, they had interviewed the parents of one-third of the young adults through a separate study launched in 2003.

The kids were doing much better than their parents had done. While just 25 percent of parents had a high school diploma and 6 percent had a GED, nearly 70 percent of their kids had a high school diploma.

And kids who found what researchers call an “identity project,” essentially a passion or hobby that helped motivate them, went even further, onto college or decent jobs.

Where this book differs is that it looks at the other things going on in kids’ lives that can often help determine whether they will excel or not, no matter where they live.

And what helps them excel, more often than not, are these identity projects. Bob, for instance, got into Japanese anime as a kid, and then found a passion by following the musical group Insane Clown Posse. Another—whose father was shot in the courtyard of her public housing complex—was passionate about dance, which drove her to apply for and be accepted into a competitive arts school. Another reared pigeons, an interest that kept her off the streets.

About half of the youth researchers studied found this “life raft,” which helped inspire them despite tough conditions.

Out of the 116 youth studied who are not still in high school, 90 percent of those with an identity project graduated, while only 58 percent of those without one did so. And 82 percent of those with an identity project were in school or working, compared to 53 percent of those without an identity project.

The authors come away with some very concrete policy proposals for how to help students through adolescence and beyond. They suggest creating more robust mobility programs to ensure that kids don’t grow up in the same concentrated poverty that their parents did and more opportunities for “passion projects” in schools and after-schools by investing more in libraries, clubs, and other institutions, and by expanding funding for the arts.

A journey from poverty to the middle class or beyond is a birthright of many of these kids, their shot at the American dream. But the research indicates they can’t just get there themselves. Like anybody, they need a little help.

Sounds like a WISE choice.

STOP THE MADNESS: How to really know how your kids are doing.

Tags

education, High Stakes Testing, Parents, schools, teacher, teachers

Mitchell Robinson is associate professor and chair of music education at Michigan State University. I read this post on FB and he graciously allowed me to blog it for him.

 “As a parent, I sit down and talk to my children’s teachers at least twice per year at parent-teacher conferences about their work in school, and receive regular updates about their academic, social and musical development.

I check their homework, help them with projects and talk to them about their studies every day.

I can check their grades online any time of the day or night.

I attend their soccer games, band concerts, piano recitals, and school events, so that I know not just what they are doing, but have the chance to meet their friends and their friends’ parents–many of whom have become good friends.

As a teacher, I engage in continuous formative assessment, tracking my students’ progress as learners, and using the information gathered to improve my practice as a teacher.

I provide formal and informal updates on my students’ development, and offer mentoring and guidance whenever asked–and often when not asked.

I know my students as persons–their strengths and challenges, their goals, their aspirations–and am fully committed to helping them achieve their dreams.

Why would I need standardized tests to tell me anything about my children, or my students when I already know so much about them?

The only purpose for these tests is to evaluate–and punish–teachers and schools, even though we know that these tests are neither valid or reliable for those specific purposes–and to make millions of dollars in profits for the corporations that develop them.

Stop the madness. Let kids learn. Let teachers teach.

Pull the plug on standardized testing.

Gary Stern: What It Will Take to End the Opt Outs

Gary Stern and the Lo-Hud education editors and writers have been on top of this issue for a long time. They listen and do not take the Party Line (Republican or Democrat) offered by Albany or Washington DC.

Diane Ravitch's blog

Gary Stern, veteran education writer in the Lower Hudson Valley, has an insightful well-informed understanding of the New York opt out movement. He knows why it started and why it continues: parents want real changes, not promises of change.

In contrast, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post ridicules the parents as crybabies who refuse to accept that their children are not so smart after all (shades of Arne Duncan!).

Stern writes that the State Education Department imposed the new standards and tests without adequate preparation. The result was distrust and opt out.

“The state should have anticipated this year’s high opt-out rates (in some places, even higher than last year when 20 percent of kids statewide sat out exams). We had Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who once passed himself off as the state’s “lobbyist for the students,” bashing the tests and calling them largely meaningless. We saw the election of a new…

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MEDIA AND PROTEST MOVEMENTS:

What we can learn from Vietnam…

The history tells us this. From 1964-1968 protestors were in the minority and often ridiculed and put in an unfavorable light by mass media until this:

 

On February 27, 1968, Walter Cronkite closed “Report from Vietnam: Who, What, When, Where, Why?” with this editorial report:

 

“We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. They may be right, that Hanoi’s winter-spring offensive has been forced by the Communist realization that they could not win the longer war of attrition, and that the Communists hope that any success in the offensive will improve their position for eventual negotiations. It would improve their position, and it would also require our realization, that we should have had all along, that any negotiations must be that – negotiations, not the dictation of peace terms. For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer’s almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation; and for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons, or the mere commitment of one hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred thousand more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.

 

To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. “

 

That report changed everything! When media sees the truth and publicizes it, those who were called rabble rousing protestors become a real movement.

 

OPT OUT AND KEEP ON OPTING OUT!

ON MASTERY. A guest Blog by Bernie Keller

A word frequent bandied about in education today, especially as it pertains to a measurement of whether or not students have “learned” is the word “mastery”. According to the experts, learning has occurred when students can demonstrate mastery, and more often than not, the so-called experts expect to witness that “mastery” at the end of one lesson!!

Before we go any further, we need to take three things into account:

• The definition of mastery
• The fact that very few, if any, people will demonstrate mastery in everything
• The fact that mastery, by the very definition of the word, takes time, (and most certainly more than one class).

I am always frustrated and angered when people just “throw words around “without any understanding of what the words actually mean. This is especially true when the people misusing them are so called “experts”, the people I’m supposed to follow. These people misinform students who, as a result, often use that information to define themselves as “stupid” or not as smart as others. The reality is the meaning of Mastery they are given is so inaccurate, how they see themselves is equally inaccurate.

The dictionary definition of mastery is “supremacy, superiority, proficiency.” None of these words can be accomplished in one class period or in one day. Each word asserts it will take some time to reach the levels they each represent. No one reaches supremacy or superiority over night; no one becomes proficient after one or two tries. The simple fact of the matter is not everyone will achieve superiority or supremacy. Look at Michael Jordan. Jordan was cut from his JV basketball team yet went on to become undoubtedly superior on the basketball court. No matter what area you look at, some people will not reach those levels. Look at the halls of fame, presidents of the United States; great teachers-most don’t reach those levels, and those that do work hard over along period of time.

If I am the “master teacher” people say I am, I certainly didn’t reach that level the first year I taught in 1974, or the third year in 1977. In fact, I can’t even remember what happened the first time I walked into a classroom in October 1974, but I know I wasn’t anywhere close to where I am now!! It took years for me to develop and hone the skills and abilities needed to create a “master teacher.”

To demand students reach mastery in one lesson is ludicrously inane. According to Malcolm Gladwell, it takes 10,000 hours to reach the level of mastery. My friends: that is a very, very long time. Even if Gladwell is off by 5,000 hours or 6,000 hours, you are still talking about a very long time and most certainly, you are proving that those who throw the word mastery around so loosely and easily, have little or no concept of what they are saying or the misinformation they are spreading and espousing.

Mastery is certainly an impressive and powerful concept, and it is an even more powerful concept when you truly understand what the word mastery means.

Maybe now would be a good time to start using the word correctly. What do you think?