by Doug Martin
My talk from a few days ago with BATS member Dr. James Avington Miller Jr. on his show the War Report on Public Education is now up as a podcast. Some of the topics covered include:
My book Hoosier School Heist which focuses on the corporate-theocratic school movement in Indiana and across the country.
FBI.
How the Indiana Democratic Party needs to do more than lip-service to support public education.
Speaking with local Republicans about corporate-theocratic school reform.
How US Indiana Republican Larry Bucshon needs to gets over the fake skills gap and create jobs by passing a law to build a new wing on the federal prison in Terre Haute to put all the corrupt billionaires in jail.
Neuroscience and the evolution of language.
Poetry.
America's spiritual void.
Listen here: http://www.bbsradio.com/content/talk-show-episode-war-report-public-education-july-20-2014
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Why the push to make students "Career Ready"?
Why the push to make students "Career
Ready"? Because companies are doing
much less training.
We often hear that public schools are failing
because they do not prepare students for jobs.
Employers complain, we are told, that recent graduates are unprepared
for the real world of work.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal
explains what is really going on: "Companies complain that they can't find
skilled hires, but they aren't doing much to impact these skills , economics
and workforce experts say. U.S. companies have been cutting money for training
programs for decades, expecting schools and workers to pick up the slack"
(p. B1).
" ... one rough measure, the percentage
of staffers at U.S. manufactures dedicated to training and development, has
falled by about half from 2006 to 2013, according to research group Bersin by
Doloitte" (p. B1).
The WSJ quotes MIT labor economist Paul
Osterman's study showing that "manufacturers' spending on training has
been essentially flat for the last five years. 'Firms have gotten lazy [about
training]. They're looking for somebody else,' such as community colleges,
for-profit schools and online courses to that for them." (p. B5)
The WSJ also points out that the number of
formal apprenticeship programs "fell about 40% between 2003 and 2013,
according to the Labor Department."
(p. B5)
Lauren Weber, "Whose job is it to train
teachers? Wall Street Journal July 17,
2014, pages B1, B5.
Opt Out: Stop the Education Genocide
by Ira Shor
Opt-Out: The REAL Parent Revolution
We parents can stop the destruction of our public schools. We can stop the looting of school budgets by private charters and testing vendors. We can stop the abuse of our children by the relentless hours of testing. We can stop the closings, the co-locations, the mass firings, the replacement of veteran teachers with short-term Teach for America newbies, the shameful indignity of public schools told they have 24 hours to clear out so a charter can seize their classrooms. To do this, we have to opt-out our kids from the new testing regimes—refuse to let the schools test our kids with PARCC or Smarter Balanced, boycott the pointless and punitive tests which make the best years of our kids’ lives into a digital hell.
I opted-out my 10-year-old son from all state tests this year and will continue to do so when the useless and costly PARCC tests arrive next year. I will encourage other parents to join me in boycotting such standardized tests, which Diane Ravitch has rightly called “junk science” because they cannot accurately report a student’s achievement, learning process, or academic needs, or a teacher’s competence. For commercial and political reasons, it pleases Duncan, Gates and Co. to spread such tools from coast to coast, but they offer no evidence that such tools can do the job they claim, despite the constant promotion financed by Gates’s millions to the two teacher unions, to the national PTA, to “Education Week” magazine, and other key players working on his side.
Neither CCSS nor PARCC can make our kids “college and career ready.” This is impossible from the rigidly-defined, narrow Common Core State Standards(CCSS) skill-sets or from the hours of standardized testing, which over-produce metrics that don’t amount to teaching or learning. First, of course, I ask, Who can predict what the job market will be like when my 10-year-old enters it? Also, school curricula which narrowly focus on skills under-develop the critical habits of mind and communication which children need to make sense of the world as they find it. Employers, in fact, report that narrow subject matter is not what they look for in candidates, preferring instead future employees who have learned how to learn, how to ask questions and to make sense of situations, how to ask for help, how to work in groups, how to learn from others by example, and how to communicate. Hours of standardized testing cannot lead to these outcomes.
The national CCSS-machine also ignores the most important factor in a child’s test scores: family income(widely-discussed since 1966 and the famous Coleman Report, reiterated again and again by social research.) SAT/ACT/high-school and college graduation rates have always correlated closely with family income. Because our society has the highest rate of child poverty of any developed nation(about 35% of Black and Hispanic kids, about 11% of white kids), our national averages on standardized tests are pulled down. The strongest policy, then for raising average scores would be an anti-poverty program, what Christopher Jencks 40 years ago called “an incomes policy,” that is, equalizing family incomes. When he proposed equal izing incomes, policy in the U.S. tilted towards the bottom 80%, especially the bottom 20% of families, as research by Saez and Piketty and by Robert Reich have shown; in that era, Black kids closed about 20% of the “achievement gap” with their white peers(see Jencks’s “The Black-White Achievement Gap.”) CCSS and its PARCC testing will fail just like NCLB and RTTT failed before them, fail to close the achievement gap, fail to produce deep learning for the vast majority of children, fail to close the huge income gap.
Because our children are in this together, so are we. Because our kids cannot defend themselves, we have to defend them. We parents must step in to stop it. We should put our foot down and say, “Do it to your own kids first before you experiment on ours!” Tell that to Bill Gates, to Arne Duncan, to Eli Broad, to David Coleman, to Michelle Rhee, to Wendy Kopp, to Eva Moskowitz, to Govs. Cuomo and Christie, to the hedge-funders in Democrats for Education Reform, who send their own kids to test-exempt private schools with small classes, well-paid veteran teachers, handsome campuses, and field trips so that their kids “feel at home in the world,” as the elite prep of certain kids is sometimes called.
If we parents opt-out, we remove our kids from the commercial machine invading and destroying public schools. We refuse to let our kids become mass subjects tested to distraction. We insist that inspired teaching and complex learning and rich arts should be at the center of every school.
Authorities count on our quiet compliance to cement their plans into place. We need defiance instead, for the sake of the kids and for the sake of the public sector without which democracy cannot survive. When we opt-out we rescue our kids, our public schools, and our society at the same time. Our opposition will force authorities to retreat, if we stick together, get tough on behalf of our kids, and insist that public schools belong to us for the public good, not to the private sector or to the commercial parasites stealing our children’s futures.
Go to United Opt Out and learn more about how to join the cause.
Opt-Out: The REAL Parent Revolution
We parents can stop the destruction of our public schools. We can stop the looting of school budgets by private charters and testing vendors. We can stop the abuse of our children by the relentless hours of testing. We can stop the closings, the co-locations, the mass firings, the replacement of veteran teachers with short-term Teach for America newbies, the shameful indignity of public schools told they have 24 hours to clear out so a charter can seize their classrooms. To do this, we have to opt-out our kids from the new testing regimes—refuse to let the schools test our kids with PARCC or Smarter Balanced, boycott the pointless and punitive tests which make the best years of our kids’ lives into a digital hell.
I opted-out my 10-year-old son from all state tests this year and will continue to do so when the useless and costly PARCC tests arrive next year. I will encourage other parents to join me in boycotting such standardized tests, which Diane Ravitch has rightly called “junk science” because they cannot accurately report a student’s achievement, learning process, or academic needs, or a teacher’s competence. For commercial and political reasons, it pleases Duncan, Gates and Co. to spread such tools from coast to coast, but they offer no evidence that such tools can do the job they claim, despite the constant promotion financed by Gates’s millions to the two teacher unions, to the national PTA, to “Education Week” magazine, and other key players working on his side.
Neither CCSS nor PARCC can make our kids “college and career ready.” This is impossible from the rigidly-defined, narrow Common Core State Standards(CCSS) skill-sets or from the hours of standardized testing, which over-produce metrics that don’t amount to teaching or learning. First, of course, I ask, Who can predict what the job market will be like when my 10-year-old enters it? Also, school curricula which narrowly focus on skills under-develop the critical habits of mind and communication which children need to make sense of the world as they find it. Employers, in fact, report that narrow subject matter is not what they look for in candidates, preferring instead future employees who have learned how to learn, how to ask questions and to make sense of situations, how to ask for help, how to work in groups, how to learn from others by example, and how to communicate. Hours of standardized testing cannot lead to these outcomes.
The national CCSS-machine also ignores the most important factor in a child’s test scores: family income(widely-discussed since 1966 and the famous Coleman Report, reiterated again and again by social research.) SAT/ACT/high-school and college graduation rates have always correlated closely with family income. Because our society has the highest rate of child poverty of any developed nation(about 35% of Black and Hispanic kids, about 11% of white kids), our national averages on standardized tests are pulled down. The strongest policy, then for raising average scores would be an anti-poverty program, what Christopher Jencks 40 years ago called “an incomes policy,” that is, equalizing family incomes. When he proposed equal izing incomes, policy in the U.S. tilted towards the bottom 80%, especially the bottom 20% of families, as research by Saez and Piketty and by Robert Reich have shown; in that era, Black kids closed about 20% of the “achievement gap” with their white peers(see Jencks’s “The Black-White Achievement Gap.”) CCSS and its PARCC testing will fail just like NCLB and RTTT failed before them, fail to close the achievement gap, fail to produce deep learning for the vast majority of children, fail to close the huge income gap.
Because our children are in this together, so are we. Because our kids cannot defend themselves, we have to defend them. We parents must step in to stop it. We should put our foot down and say, “Do it to your own kids first before you experiment on ours!” Tell that to Bill Gates, to Arne Duncan, to Eli Broad, to David Coleman, to Michelle Rhee, to Wendy Kopp, to Eva Moskowitz, to Govs. Cuomo and Christie, to the hedge-funders in Democrats for Education Reform, who send their own kids to test-exempt private schools with small classes, well-paid veteran teachers, handsome campuses, and field trips so that their kids “feel at home in the world,” as the elite prep of certain kids is sometimes called.
If we parents opt-out, we remove our kids from the commercial machine invading and destroying public schools. We refuse to let our kids become mass subjects tested to distraction. We insist that inspired teaching and complex learning and rich arts should be at the center of every school.
Authorities count on our quiet compliance to cement their plans into place. We need defiance instead, for the sake of the kids and for the sake of the public sector without which democracy cannot survive. When we opt-out we rescue our kids, our public schools, and our society at the same time. Our opposition will force authorities to retreat, if we stick together, get tough on behalf of our kids, and insist that public schools belong to us for the public good, not to the private sector or to the commercial parasites stealing our children’s futures.
Go to United Opt Out and learn more about how to join the cause.
Uninformed
To the editor:
Antonio Villaraigosa asks"Why are teachers unions so opposed to change?"(July 21). I would like to know why Mr. Villaraigosa is so opposed to learning the facts about American schools and the Common Core.
Villaraigosa claims that American students do poorly compared to students in other countries on international tests and that the Common Core will help us do better. Is he aware that when researchers control for the effect of poverty, American scores on international tests are at the top of the world?
Is he aware that our overall scores are unspectacular because of our high rate of child poverty: The US has the second highest level of child poverty among all 34 economically advanced countries (now over 23%, compared to high-scoring Finland’s 5.4%). In some big city public school districts, the poverty rate is over 80%. Poverty means poor nutrition, inadequate health care, and lack of access to books, among other things. All of these profoundly impact school performance.
Does Mr. Villaraigosa know that the Common Core does nothing to address these problems, and that there is no evidence that the standards and the astonishing amount of testing required will help children? The billions we are ready to spend on the Common Core would be much better spent protecting children from the effects of poverty.
Stephen Krashen
Sources:
Levels of poverty: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre 2012, ‘Measuring Child Poverty: New league tables of child poverty in the world’s rich countries’, Innocenti Report Card 10, UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Florence.
Over 80%:
http://www.catalyst-chicago.org/notebook/2011/02/17/more-illinois-children-living-in-poverty-risk-school-failure; http://home.lausd.net/apps/news/show_news.jsp?REC_ID=344072&id=0
Control for poverty:
Payne, K. and Biddle, B. 1999. Poor school funding, child poverty, and mathematics achievement. Educational Researcher 28 (6): 4-13; Bracey, G. 2009. The Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/Bracey-Report. Berliner, D. 2011. The Context for Interpreting PISA Results in the USA: Negativism, Chauvinism, Misunderstanding, and the Potential to Distort the Educational Systems of Nations. In Pereyra, M., Kottoff, H-G., & Cowan, R. (Eds.). PISA under examination: Changing knowledge, changing tests, and changing schools. Amsterdam: Sense Publishers. Tienken, C. 2010. Common core state standards: I wonder? Kappa Delta Phi Record 47 (1): 14-17. Carnoy, M and Rothstein, R. 2013, What Do International Tests Really Show Us about U.S. Student Performance.
Impact of poverty: Berliner, D. 2009. Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/poverty-and-potential; Krashen, S. 1997. Bridging inequity with books. Educational Leadership 55(4): 18-22.
Antonio Villaraigosa asks"Why are teachers unions so opposed to change?"(July 21). I would like to know why Mr. Villaraigosa is so opposed to learning the facts about American schools and the Common Core.
Villaraigosa claims that American students do poorly compared to students in other countries on international tests and that the Common Core will help us do better. Is he aware that when researchers control for the effect of poverty, American scores on international tests are at the top of the world?
Is he aware that our overall scores are unspectacular because of our high rate of child poverty: The US has the second highest level of child poverty among all 34 economically advanced countries (now over 23%, compared to high-scoring Finland’s 5.4%). In some big city public school districts, the poverty rate is over 80%. Poverty means poor nutrition, inadequate health care, and lack of access to books, among other things. All of these profoundly impact school performance.
Does Mr. Villaraigosa know that the Common Core does nothing to address these problems, and that there is no evidence that the standards and the astonishing amount of testing required will help children? The billions we are ready to spend on the Common Core would be much better spent protecting children from the effects of poverty.
Stephen Krashen
Sources:
Levels of poverty: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre 2012, ‘Measuring Child Poverty: New league tables of child poverty in the world’s rich countries’, Innocenti Report Card 10, UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Florence.
Over 80%:
http://www.catalyst-chicago.org/notebook/2011/02/17/more-illinois-children-living-in-poverty-risk-school-failure; http://home.lausd.net/apps/news/show_news.jsp?REC_ID=344072&id=0
Control for poverty:
Payne, K. and Biddle, B. 1999. Poor school funding, child poverty, and mathematics achievement. Educational Researcher 28 (6): 4-13; Bracey, G. 2009. The Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/Bracey-Report. Berliner, D. 2011. The Context for Interpreting PISA Results in the USA: Negativism, Chauvinism, Misunderstanding, and the Potential to Distort the Educational Systems of Nations. In Pereyra, M., Kottoff, H-G., & Cowan, R. (Eds.). PISA under examination: Changing knowledge, changing tests, and changing schools. Amsterdam: Sense Publishers. Tienken, C. 2010. Common core state standards: I wonder? Kappa Delta Phi Record 47 (1): 14-17. Carnoy, M and Rothstein, R. 2013, What Do International Tests Really Show Us about U.S. Student Performance.
Impact of poverty: Berliner, D. 2009. Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/poverty-and-potential; Krashen, S. 1997. Bridging inequity with books. Educational Leadership 55(4): 18-22.
Monday, July 21, 2014
At KIPP, "they wouldn't have desks at first" and then they are "chained to a desk 10 hours a day"
 |
| ob Andres bandres@ajc.com
Detria
Mills and Justin Campbell work on the floor with their fellow
eighth-graders at a KIPP academy in metro Atlanta. Students get
classrooms and desks when they demonstrate they have earned them by
meeting their student goals.--AJC
|
Jernigan was overseer of the Atlanta KIPP network of seven schools before his selection as Deputy Supt., and it was during his tenure as Executive Director of KIPP Atlanta that children learned to earn their desks after sitting of the floor for a week or so of school. I wrote about this phenomenon of floor sitting earlier this year, but the account or interview excerpt below was not included as part of that story. The account below is based on experiences of a former KIPP teacher who taught at one of Atlanta KIPP schools during Jernigan's tenure. Like most teachers with more concern for children than they are a paycheck for teaching in hell, he did not last long at KIPP.
Allen: At first it started off exciting because it was all new to me. I was putting together my classroom and then the children came in and it was basically us introducing ourselves and introducing what KIPP does. I didn’t really get a formal--they didn’t really take me through any kind of learning experience on how KIPP was set up, so all I had was the reading that I did with “Work hard. Be Nice.” . . . . They didn’t take me through a formal training. It was really the principal and the administration; they were the main ones that were really focused on teaching the children about KIPP.
Basically they would come in and they [the children] wouldn’t have desks at first, so they would sit on the floor and that’s how they would have class at first and then they were teaching how to SLANT, how to track the teacher and making sure that they keep their eyes on the teacher. It was conditioning I would say, so that was the main thing that they basically did--and setting them up for their homework, so how to have homework so that they would get homework for every subject and the teacher would have to come in with a checklist for every child and just mark off that they did the homework and they would have to have specific periods and capitalized letters. There isn’t really room for error, so it took away the fun, just really making mistakes and learning from your mistakes. It was more like trying to teach them to be perfectionists at the beginning.
INT: Why didn’t they
have seats? Why were they sitting on the
floor?
Allen: Because they had
to earn their desks and they had to earn that chair. They had to earn their t-shirts. They had to earn different things. . . . .
INT: Even
from the desk that they sat in, they had to earn?
Allen: Yes.
INT: How long did
this KIPPnotizing go on?
Allen: It went on for
basically I would say it went on for the two weeks, two and a half weeks that
they were there for the summer and then it continued on afterwards, after they
came back from their summer break.
INT: And how long had
this school been in operation when you came there?
Allen: I think…I can find
out, but I’m thinking it was…I know that they had been in operation for a long
time so it was probably ten years.
INT: So it wasn’t a
new school?
Allen: No sir. Between five to ten years.
INT: Your expectation
coming in had been based on what you had read and what you had found in the
Mathews book and on the web. Did the
reality match your expectation?
Allen: No it didn’t, not
at all. As I went it was basically
saying that you shouldn’t smile at the children; that you should be strict and
you shouldn’t give them any kind of leeway at all, so it was different from the
way that I am as an individual, because I love smiling; I love really
communicating with the children and allowing them to use their free minds. At the same time, the way it was set up, the
way the discipline is set up, it didn’t leave room for me to discipline the
child so they were already staying in [and missing free time].
They would stay in for the whole day because they would lose their
recess. They would stay in the whole day
because they didn’t have their homework and they would go into a room. It was somewhat of seclusion and basically
trying to make them perform to the KIPP method, but at the same time, that took
away from the teacher trying to discipline the child on their own because I am
used to coming from a school system where they have you stay after school if
you don’t do the right thing, but having them stay after school is more taxing
on the teacher than the student because it was ten hour days with the students
that you were teaching.
INT: Let me ask you
this, if I were a friend of yours interested in applying to teach at a
KIPP school and we were hanging out and I asked you well what was it like
there, what would you tell me?
Allen: I love the people
there, but I don’t love the system itself because it’s turning into a system
instead of what I would think is leeway; a way for you to change the way a
school system is set up. I would think
it is something totally different from a formal school system and that’s what I
was trying to escape, a formal school system.
But what it is doing is it is creating another system, which I don’t
really feel is the best way. But what I
would tell them is that it is hard.
Ten-hour days with students is definitely taxing on the teacher. You have no life. KIPP is your life. Even when you are down with the children at
5:00, at the same time, you might have one of them after school or at the same
time you are definitely developing lesson plans for--because the way they
have it set up, we didn’t really get time to plan our formal lessons; we just
say now we are hired in June and I started in June. I didn’t really get the time to really plan
any kind of lessons at all and then we had a week’s worth of planning but that
first week before school started we went to a KIPP Summit. You really don’t have a life at all; that is
what I would definitely tell them. . . .
INT: What kind of
person is likely to do well at KIPP and in terms of teachers, what kind of
teacher is likely to do well at KIPP and what kind of teacher is likely to have
difficulties?
Allen: We had one teacher
who basically, she knew KIPP because she had worked for KIPP for such a long
time and she saw how other teachers what I would call it was such as a drill
sergeant, so first it was drill, drill, drill the information as far as how you
want them to act in your class and then you would want them silent
constantly. The problem was I had never
had thirty children in a classroom so what seemed to me having thirty children
in the classroom was more like cattle driving.
You couldn’t really mold the line, allow them to…as a teacher you are
supposed to pull information out of them that they already have within them,
but more so you were pouring information in them, which was focused on
discipline first and then testing next.
That was the focus of it. If you
are about the money I would say it will be better. If you are more about discipline and just
learning to control them it was a better experience for you and just mean. You have to be mean in an area like
that.
INT: Did you have difficulty?
Allen: Yes sir. Definitely.
That is why I only stayed a short tenure, which was only _____ months
sadly to say, but it was the way the children were grouped, you had all of them
all together and then you had the lows, the highs and you had the people in the
middle. With it like that and thirty
children in a classroom and that means thirty different personalities that you
have to deal with and you have to find some kind of way to get the information
to all of them so that you are meeting them where they are, which is the
hardest thing in a classroom. Really it
can’t be done I don’t think. But we were
trying to do that. Yeah. It was definitely hard.
INT: How do you think
that KIPP achieves its purpose and it’s aim?
Allen: You said how do
they achieve them? By testing them,
constantly testing them. We were
constantly testing the children. Once
you give children problems, which are found on the state test eventually
it becomes normal for them to test so it is more like initiating and not
allowing them to think. . . .
INT: It’s more like
conditioning than anything else?
Allen: Yes sir. Definitely conditioning because eventually
after they had been tested and 8th grade is where they perform the most and me
personally, I am not a person on data because it can always be fudged. Unless you can show me a child and allow me
to really test them and test their knowledge through questioning and their
answer, which are more or less the Socratic method more so than the
testing method. So questioning and then
having them answer the questions; we go back and forth just like that because
with the debate, I think that’s the best way a child and an individual period
learns.
INT: If I were to
follow you through a typical day at KIPP, what would I see you doing? What experiences would I observe you having
and how would I see you interacting with the students?
Allen: A typical day
during that time period, it was my first year teaching and having thirty
children was painful. You would come
into my classroom and you would have some disruptive students because I didn’t
know how –
INT: Take me from the
beginning. What time did you get to
school and walk me through your day?
Allen: From the beginning
I would get there probably around 6:00 and I would prepare for the day. I would start making my board, because our
classes were set up that children stayed in class and the teachers wrote
things. So I would have to carry all my
books that I had for the children. I
would carry those in basically a buggy and then I would have to carry my work
with the books and all the worksheets that I had for them and I would also have
to carry the board that I had laid out. That’s the way that we set it up
and so I would do that until the children came in so I was prepared and I would
put the morning work on the board and the children would eventually come in
after breakfast and they would come in and sit down and start doing the morning
work and put the homework in the homework basket.
From there I would have a person come in, because if you think about it, you have thirty children in the classroom and you are checking four subjects so there are four piles so you are checking over a hundred and twenty pages a day with the homework and sometimes more. They would have their homework packet and you would have to go through and try to check and see if they had correct grammar as far as punctuation and stuff, correct punctuation and see if they showed their work with their math work.
You would go through checking off and you would give them the amount of money that they earned throughout the day because you would have to calculate it. On Monday morning, so I will do the beginning of the week on the Monday morning. After the announcement they would go and have the Monday morning meeting and basically they would try to prepare them for the week and they would either have it as a full school or just 5th grade itself. From that point on you would start switching. The children would go back to the class after the Monday morning meeting.
They didn’t teach me classroom management. I didn’t learn as far as setting routines and procedures so at the beginning of the year I was basically thrown into the deep end and I was trying to swim, but I was constantly drowning. I would come to the administration and constantly tell them that I was drowning because I wasn’t able to hold the children up; I couldn’t teach because of all the chaos that I was having in the classroom. . . . .
From there I would have a person come in, because if you think about it, you have thirty children in the classroom and you are checking four subjects so there are four piles so you are checking over a hundred and twenty pages a day with the homework and sometimes more. They would have their homework packet and you would have to go through and try to check and see if they had correct grammar as far as punctuation and stuff, correct punctuation and see if they showed their work with their math work.
You would go through checking off and you would give them the amount of money that they earned throughout the day because you would have to calculate it. On Monday morning, so I will do the beginning of the week on the Monday morning. After the announcement they would go and have the Monday morning meeting and basically they would try to prepare them for the week and they would either have it as a full school or just 5th grade itself. From that point on you would start switching. The children would go back to the class after the Monday morning meeting.
They didn’t teach me classroom management. I didn’t learn as far as setting routines and procedures so at the beginning of the year I was basically thrown into the deep end and I was trying to swim, but I was constantly drowning. I would come to the administration and constantly tell them that I was drowning because I wasn’t able to hold the children up; I couldn’t teach because of all the chaos that I was having in the classroom. . . . .
INT: Did you have
children with IEPs?
Allen: Yes sir. As a matter of fact, almost half of them had
IEPs.
INT: Were those needs
being –
Allen: I think if I am
not mistaken, more than half of them had IEPs.
INT: Were those needs
being met?
Allen: Definitely not. No sir. Not as far as math
was concerned because when I left, which was in __________ the principal took
over because she eventually tried to take ove--not take over, but she tried to
help me because she saw that I was struggling and I constantly came to
her. I was quitting in August because I
saw that I wasn’t moving the children and it is not about money; it’s about educating
for me. That’s the only reason that I
went into the field. When I came to them
basically they said we will help you form out the lessons and then after that
they [saved] me and they saw some of the problems that I was having and
eventually she came in and tried to teach the classroom and show me how it
should be done. But she was the
principal so it is a totally different feel for the children than having a
regular teacher that they see everyday in class, because she can suspend
them. . . .
INT: How would you
describe the children's way of being together?
Were they hostile? Were they
happy? Were they excited? How would you describe -?
Allen:: I would describe
it like this. If you never saw outside
until 5:00 pm, I think anybody would be hostile and we saw constantly
those four walls and those children what I call…it was prison for them; the
desks were their prison. They would sit
at those desks all day at that same desk all day, so they were definitely
hostile.
INT: They were at the
desks all day. How about lunch?
Allen: Some of them, they
had lunch in the classroom so some of them would sit at their own desks but at
the same time, they would go to the cafeteria.
To start off most of the time they couldn’t talk so they were silent at the
lunch tables.
INT: They were silent
from the time that they arrived at school until the time they left at the end
of the day a lot of the time?
Allen: That was the
means. That’s what they wanted to do.
INT: You described it
as their desk was their prison.
Allen: Yes sir.
INT: This affected
the way that they acted toward one another and they acted toward the teachers
too?
Allen: Yes sir. How can you keep a person inside for ten
hours out of the day? . . . .
INT: Can you tell me
about your low point and your high point while you were at KIPP?
Allen: As far as what?
INT: As far as your
own experience as a teacher?
Allen: What I liked about
it and what I didn’t like or my low point as a teacher as far as what I was
good at?
INT: Yes. When you think of the worst thing that comes
to mind when you think about KIPP what was your low point and then at the same
time, on the flip side when you think about KIPP at it’s best, what comes to
mind?
Allen: The low point it
was we didn’t teach them morals and I feel that’s been taken out of a lot of
the classrooms, even the public school setting because everything is taught to
the test. At KIPP it was more to the
test because ten hours they were basically focused on that test so the low
point was just basically we weren’t able to teach them how to interact with one
another so a lot of our students would go off to high school, a private high
school and they wouldn’t make it because they weren’t able to interact in an effective way, because they were either too mean or they weren’t able to adapt
to the surrounding that they were in.
That was the low point and the low point was that I felt that I wasn’t able to really build relationships with the children because there were so many of them in the classroom and I saw ninety children a day. Not at all was I able to build a relationship with them and at the same time, I was tired. You talk about burning out on some of your articles. I was that teacher that was definitely burning out because my whole life; I was there on Friday nights; I was coming in on Saturdays because we also have Saturday classes. Those were the low points of my life with KIPP, and eventually I was on the verge of what I would say going crazy, because I wasn’t pulling the students like I wanted to and if I taught any subject it would either be social studies or reading because I am not a great at _____ person because in school they didn’t really teach us how to teach math.
The high points were teaching them about college, so teaching the 5th graders about college was one of the things that I think a public school should pick up. It shouldn’t just be in 5th grade and I know that it isn’t. We are just now getting an elementary school so this will be my first time really observing the elementary schools and the relationship that I have built with the teachers there. We had wonderful teachers, wonderful teachers. We saw each other all the time so basically I would call that my home and I still talk to the teachers still today. Even though I don’t like the KIPP model, I do love the teachers that we had there.
That was the low point and the low point was that I felt that I wasn’t able to really build relationships with the children because there were so many of them in the classroom and I saw ninety children a day. Not at all was I able to build a relationship with them and at the same time, I was tired. You talk about burning out on some of your articles. I was that teacher that was definitely burning out because my whole life; I was there on Friday nights; I was coming in on Saturdays because we also have Saturday classes. Those were the low points of my life with KIPP, and eventually I was on the verge of what I would say going crazy, because I wasn’t pulling the students like I wanted to and if I taught any subject it would either be social studies or reading because I am not a great at _____ person because in school they didn’t really teach us how to teach math.
The high points were teaching them about college, so teaching the 5th graders about college was one of the things that I think a public school should pick up. It shouldn’t just be in 5th grade and I know that it isn’t. We are just now getting an elementary school so this will be my first time really observing the elementary schools and the relationship that I have built with the teachers there. We had wonderful teachers, wonderful teachers. We saw each other all the time so basically I would call that my home and I still talk to the teachers still today. Even though I don’t like the KIPP model, I do love the teachers that we had there.
INT: When you say
that you felt like you were going crazy, what was that like? How did you know that and what brought about
your leaving in November?
Allen: It was a lot of
stuff. . . . I had one child that basically had one of
those little skateboards, finger skateboard; I took that away from him and he
took my clipboard and that’s when I say that I snapped because I have never
been disrespected by a child like that.
And then another girl, she just threw her notebook on the ground and for
me to try to control, because I am thinking I have to be mean to the children
and so I took the desk and I looked into the corner of where I was going to
throw the desk. I was aiming for the
ceiling. So I didn’t do it but I did
move the desk and that scared her and for me doing that, I thought that I was
losing myself in the process; I wasn’t doing what I felt like I was sent there
to do, which was educate children and have them love learning. Those children did not love learning at all
and will they ever? I hope so, but from
the way it was looking, they are testing constantly so they will learn how to
test. That is what they will learn.
INT: You felt like
you were losing it so that’s when you decided that this was when you were going
to leave?
Allen: Yes sir and the
children they weren’t learning from me, but to find out only I think thirty to
forty percent of them I think were able to pass the test, so the _______portion
of the test. A lot of them went to
summer school so I am thinking sixty percent of them went to summer school.
INT: How did that
make you feel when you left?
Allen: Free. [Laughter]
At the same time, I still came in because when I build a relationship with a
child I know that when a person leaves it leaves a lasting impression on
them. It’s like divorce; the teacher is
divorcing the child. I didn’t want to
leave but in order for them to be educated, I had to leave because I don’t want
to be the reason why they weren’t educated, because I was ineffective,
definitely ineffective in a means like that.
INT: You felt free,
but what was that like, feeling free again?
Allen: I was able to
basically go back and find my passion again, because being in that predicament,
I still loved children but I didn’t love teaching. I was able to get back into more of the books
as far as reading about more educators and I found I was able to find myself
again.
. . . .
. . . .
INT: If you were
going to change anything about KIPP, what would you change?
Allen: If I was going to
change anything about KIPP? The long
hours. I don’t feel children should be
stuck in a building ten hours; I don’t feel like that’s true to learning. I would have more hands-on. I would do more field trips just to get them
outside of the classroom and what our children in the inner city don’t have is
exposure so I would expose them to more. . . .
I would have more parent involvement.
. . . .
INT: Is there
anything that you would like to talk about in terms of your KIPP experience
that I didn’t ask you about or I haven’t asked you about?
Allen: I would say that
they are a temporary fix, and what I mean by that is that right now they are
one of the best I would say and who I feel is the charter also. Who I feel is the best right now from what I
have read; I don’t know, I haven’t seen Jeffrey Canada, his program Harlem
Children’s Zone, but after Harlem Children’s Zone you have KIPP so those were
the main ones that were focused on “Waiting for Superman”.
They are a temporary fix and it is not a solution, not at all. It is only going to be partial because they are good for right now, but when you look at the long-term, those children are not thinkers, not at all because they are conditioned to take a test; they are not conditioned to love learning and to learn on their own, but to take a test.
It is good for now because they are providing opportunities that urban children wouldn’t have and they give them the opportunity to go off to school, but when they go onto those schools they are alone because they don’t know how to interact with other races. That’s a bad thing for the public schools itself because they have supposedly integrgated the schools but at the same time, they are still separated, definitely separated. They are integrated but they are still segregated.
They are a temporary fix and it is not a solution, not at all. It is only going to be partial because they are good for right now, but when you look at the long-term, those children are not thinkers, not at all because they are conditioned to take a test; they are not conditioned to love learning and to learn on their own, but to take a test.
It is good for now because they are providing opportunities that urban children wouldn’t have and they give them the opportunity to go off to school, but when they go onto those schools they are alone because they don’t know how to interact with other races. That’s a bad thing for the public schools itself because they have supposedly integrgated the schools but at the same time, they are still separated, definitely separated. They are integrated but they are still segregated.
INT: Still separate.
Allen: Yes sir.
Arizona Charter, Heritage Academy, Teaching the Benefits of Slavery for African Americans
From Atlanta Black Star:
A charter school in Arizona has come under fire after it was revealed the school is using controversial books that suggest slavery was actually beneficial for African-Americans.
Despite the backlash, the school’s principal is defending the use of the texts in the classroom, claiming that the school is not purposefully trying to change the students’ religious and political views.
The school decided to make The 5,000 Year Leap and The Making of America required reading for senior students at Mesa-based Heritage Academy.
Cleon Skousen, a conservative author who has been known for his controversial faith-based political theories, wrote both books. Now one nonprofit organization wants the texts to be taken out of the curriculum.
The Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed a complaint to the state’s school board claiming that the academy should not be teaching “sexist, racist and anti-Semitic messages” to its students.
A law professor at the University of Baltimore, Garrett Epps, appeared surprised by the schools decision to use the books as he found Skousen’s accounts to be not only be racist, but also inaccurate.
“Skousen’s account of the growth and meaning of the Constitution is quite inaccurate,” he told The Arizona Republic in an email interview.
“Parts of his major textbook, The Making of America, present a systematically racist view of the Civil War,” Epps added. “A long description of slavery in the book claims that the state (of slavery) was beneficial to African-Americans and that Southern racism was caused by the ‘intrusion’ of Northern abolitionists and advocates of equality for the freed slaves.”
Not only does Epps believe the content of the controversial books is exposing students to “religious indoctrination,” but he is also concerned whether the students would be prepared for future learning.
According to Epps, “Any student taught from these materials in a public institution is being subjected to religious indoctrination” and “is also being crippled educationally and will be ill-prepared to take part in any serious program of instruction of American government and law.”
Earl Taylor, the school’s founder and principal, insists that using the texts is in the students’ best interest.
“Our purpose is not to convert students to different religious views,” Taylor told The Arizona Republic. “It is to show them that religion influenced what the founders did.”
TURNcoats Meet in Rosemont, IL to Promote Common Core
TURN is hosting a regional summer CCSS conference July 28-29 in Rosemont, Illinois. Both NEA and AFT have representation and Fresno, CA and Nashville, TN seem heavily represented. Of course, their intellectual relic, Patrick Dolan, will be there to explain how those on the bottom should properly collaborate with those on top. The full agenda is on the TURN website:
http://www.turnexchange.net/blog.htm
http://www.turnexchange.net/blog.htm
ht to Ken Derstine.
Sunday, July 20, 2014
In Response to Bill Wraga's Review of The Mismeasure of Education
University of Georgia professor, Bill Wraga, offered a review of The Mismeasure of Education in the UGA-based Journal of Language and Literacy Education. Because we feel strongly that, while everyone has a right to his own perspective, she does not have a right to her own facts. Therefore, we offered JOLLE a corrective to the more glaring inaccuracies in Dr. Wraga's review. We received this response to our proposed rejoinder from Principal Editor of JOLLE, Michelle Falter:
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Dear Mr. Horn,
The Editorial board regrets to inform you that we are not accepting responses to book reviews at this time. I strongly encourage you to find other people to read and review your book, and have them submit their reviews to a journal that accepts book reviews. In the future we may choose to do response pieces, but at this time, we have decided not to.
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
You may download a copy of the Wraga review here. It would be good to read it before you read our response below:
In Response to Bill Wraga's Review of TMoE
Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn
In response to Dr. Wraga’s mixed
review of The Mismeasure of Education
(TMoE) in the previous issue of JOLLE, we would like to clear up some
apparent misunderstandings as to the intent and focus of our work. We never intended TMoE to provide
“the history of educational testing” (Wraga, 2014, p. 217) in American schools,
as Dr. Wraga seems to think but, rather, to place the current misuse of value-added measurement within
the broader ideological context of social sorting via testing and
the resulting social control that
gained prominence at the beginning of the 20th Century. It was
during that initial rise of the social sciences that many
leading educational reformers became fixated on high stakes quantification
methods as the most socially-efficient and “scientific” tools for labeling
children and differentiating their school experiences. We now know, of course, that much of that new
science of education was a collection of more or less elaborate superstitions
derived from social Darwinism and/or the pseudoscience of eugenics.
TMoE (Horn & Wilburn, 2013) offers a brief
evolutionary and philosophical outline for the most egregious misuses of
standardized testing and testing’s high stakes value-added offspring, which
exerts so much influence in schools today.
If we had attempted to offer a history of testing in the three or four
dozen pages that we devote to an overview of those
most egregious misuses of standardized
measurements, then surely we would agree with Dr. Wraga (2014) that our
rendering was “incomplete and oversimplified” (p. 217). It hardly seems fair, however, to be accused
of failing to accomplish a goal that we did not attempt. Dr. Wraga (2014)
goes so far as to label our work “historical exaggeration” that depends upon
“cherry picking evidence,” “ignoring evidence,” and “misrepresenting other
historical developments”:
For example, in a
section titled "Zealots for the Elimination of the Unfit," they
associate Franklin Bobbitt's (1918) The Curriculum with Tayloristic scientific management, although in that book Bobbitt
considered Frederick Taylor's principles as a management system a
"relative failure" (p. 84). They associate the Commission on the
Reorganization of Secondary Education's (1918) Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education not only with social efficiency-social control
doctrine, but also with standardized testing and even with eugenics, although
the report advocated none of these practices (p. 217).
In defending
Bobbitt’s work against the “social efficiency” designation, Dr. Wraga ignores
the context for Bobbitt’s description of the Taylor System as a “relative
failure.” Bobbitt’s (1918) criticism was
not that Taylor was too focused on social efficiency but, rather, that his
approach did not go far enough toward extending scientific management to, in
fact, “rule in the consciousness of the workmen” (p. 84):
The relative failure of the
Taylor System seems to result from an insufficient
attempt to enlist the intelligence and initiative of the men. The system claims
that both managers and men are working under the control of science; yet, as a
matter of fact, this science is mostly visible only to the management; and is
little or not at all visible to the men. They see only the orders. The system
represents a halfway step, however, toward actual and inevitable scientific
management. Science rules in the planning-room; it must also rule in the
consciousnesses of the workmen. . . . In a school system, for example, the
pupils are the ultimate workers. Using the terminology of the factory, the
teachers rank as foremen. It is their business not to do the work that
educates, but to get it done by the pupils. In doing this, they must know the
pupils: know their varying mental capacities, their interests, their aptitudes
and abilities, their states of health, and their social milieu (Bobbitt, 1918,
pp. 84-85).
Not only do we see here an
enthusiasm for social efficiency that surpassed even Taylor’s, but we see, too,
a more nuanced version of Bobbitt’s views than the ones he expressed more demonstrably
in “Practical Eugenics,” an article for The
Pedagogical Seminary, edited by G. Stanley Hall. In that article, Bobbitt (1909) advocated for
halting
“civilization’s
retrogressive policies,” by which he meant social welfare programs
and public schools: “schools and charities supply crutches to the
weak in mind and morals” that must
be eliminated for Nature’s efficient weeding process to operate freely.
Taylorism applied to schooling
(Rice, 1913) provided the technology for the social agenda that Bobbitt, among
many others, embraced, which was grounded in the ideology of Social Darwinism
and made contemporary by the crackpot “science” of eugenics. In short, Taylorism provided the “efficiency”
rationale for “social efficiency,” and
the efficiency zealots in education became fixated on cheaply
sorting students and to providing them with the “differentiated” curriculums
that their class, ethnic, and racial characteristics ostensibly demanded. Under
the banner of educational science, primitive IQ and achievement test scores
were used to justify these preconceptions.
We understand that Dr. Wraga has
devoted a good deal of his scholarly life (1982, 1994) explicating, promoting,
and defending the 1918 Cardinal Principles Report issued by the Commission on the
Reorganization of Secondary Education (CRSE).
That does not justify, however, his incorrect claim that we are off base
in suggesting a connection between CRSE and the widespread scientific racism
and eugenics enthusiasms running rampant during the early 20th
Century. The facts show otherwise.
A couple of examples should
suffice. Professor Otis W. Caldwell, who
taught at Teachers College, served as Science Chairman for the CRSE. Dr.
Caldwell was and remained an advocate of the eugenics agenda through the 1930s,
up until the rise of Nazi Germany made scientific racism less fashionable. In case any doubt remains about the
connections between CRSE and the eugenics enthusiasm of the day, below is a
clip from “Some Aspects of Instruction in Eugenics” (Caldwell, 1932) that
appeared in A decade of progress:
Scientific papers of the Third International Congress of Eugenics. Here, then, is a classic example of the
most vile social policies being promoted under the guise of progressive
education aimed to serve the needs of children who cannot be motivated by some
distant future adult role:
Thus, in eugenical education, we shall
keep in mind Galton's emphasis upon future society, but in practice we should
deal with the problems and with the individuals now concerned with education.
We need less preachment about how fine it would be to have a future society
determined by eugenics, and shall need to face the far more difficult task of
trying to incorporate sound principles of eugenics into the possessions of the
young people who are now in the process of becoming this so-called future
society whose destiny is the ultimate aim of eugenics. The biological and
social facts and their meaning in relation to young people constitute the
proper foundation for eugenical instruction. Constant admonitions about a
hopeful philosophy for future use serves a good purpose, but needs to be based
upon specific biological knowledge (p. 168).
With a eugenics
enthusiast in the Science Chair for the Cardinal Principles Report, the CRSE
chose as its Chairman for the Committee on the Social Studies the former
Hampton curriculum specialist, Thomas Jesse Jones. While at Hampton, Jones had developed a “race
development” theory that he applied in teaching African-American students the
virtues of hard labor, the duties of second-class citizenship, the dangers of
too much book learning, and the folly of aspirations to social equality. Jones
believed and taught that all races are inferior to Anglo-Saxons, and because
African-Americans are at least 2,000 years behind because of their
non-Christian history, former slaves and their offspring should devote
themselves to the lowest level of domestic, agricultural, and industrial labor
(Anderson, 1988) until such time as they have developed enough to enter into
the world of social influence. Under the
sponsorship of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, which provided huge philanthropic
donations to promote the Hampton-Tuskegee Model of industrial education, Jones
(1917) wrote Negro education: A study of
the private and higher education schools for
colored people in the United States. Published by the U. S.
Bureau of Education and lauded as providing the solution to the “Negro
Problem,” the
report advocated a subjugated role for African-Americans that included industrial
education and life roles built on the lowest forms of labor and domestic
work.
Finally, we want to clear up any potential
misunderstanding as to our intended audience or the
direction for assessment that we openly and repeatedly advocate. We did not write this book as an “academic
analysis,” which seems to demand a type of rhetorical neutering that would
hinder the immediacy of our message. We
acknowledge and own the passion we put into the book, even as we apologize for
its imperfections that eluded the eye of the copy editor. Our book was written for the literate layman
who cares about the future of public education in the United States
and around the world. One final
correction: we are not calling for ending the “overreliance on high stakes
standardized assessment” (Wraga, 2014, p. 218) but, rather, we are advocating
for the elimination of high stakes
standardized assessments. If any society
hopes to have an equitable system of schools for learning and against
segregation or inequality, the first step must be the eradication of high
stakes tests.
References
Bobbitt,
F. (1909). Practical eugenics. The
Pedagogical Seminary, 16,
385-394.
Bobbitt, F. (1918). The Curriculum. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Caldwell,
O. W. (1932). Some aspects of instruction in eugenics. In A
decade of progress: Scientific papers of
the Third International Congress on eugenics. Held at the American Museum of Natural
History, New York.
Commission on the
Reorganization of Secondary Education. (1918) Cardinal principles of secondary education. Department of the
Interior, Bureau of Education:
Washington Government Printing Office.
Horn, J., & Wilburn, D. (2013). The mismeasure of education. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc.
Jones,
T. J. (1917). Negro
education: A study of the private and higher education schools for colored
people in the United States. Department of the Interior, Bureau of
Education: Washington Government
Printing Office.
Rice, J. (1913).
Scientific management in education. New York: Hinds, Noble, & Eldredge.
Wraga, W. (1982). Democracy’s high school. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Wraga, W. (1994). The Cardinal Principles Report revisited. Education and Culture, 11 (2), 6-16. Retrieved from http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/eandc/vol11/iss2/art3
Wraga, W. (2014). Review of the mismeasure of education. Journal of Language and Literacy Education [Online], 10(1), 216-220, Retrieved from http://jolle.coe.uga.edu/
Wraga, W. (1982). Democracy’s high school. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Wraga, W. (1994). The Cardinal Principles Report revisited. Education and Culture, 11 (2), 6-16. Retrieved from http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/eandc/vol11/iss2/art3
Wraga, W. (2014). Review of the mismeasure of education. Journal of Language and Literacy Education [Online], 10(1), 216-220, Retrieved from http://jolle.coe.uga.edu/
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