National Opt Out Day January 7

From Peg with Pen:

Children are NOT Numbers: National Opt Out Day, January 7th

Teachers, as you plan how to resist corporate education reform and rebuild public schools on National Opt Out Day (Jan.7th)  - or any day for that matter - here is one way to do it - do not allow others to refer to children based on their test scores. Children cannot be called "UnSats" or "Partials" or any other label attached to a number.

It is beyond disrespectful and allows teachers to become removed from the actions they are taking, therefore, they/teachers are less likely to wake up to the pain and suffering inflicted on these children from such abusive top down mandates. If children are numbers, rather than individuals with talents, personalities, ideas, heart, pain, and joy, it becomes much easier for corporate education reformers to move forward efficiently with their plan to profit off of these children as they are tallied, divided up and scattered randomly within communities.

When the community reads about the "failing" schools and the large numbers of "unsatistfactories" where does the learner, the person, factor into that message? That story?

The learner does NOT factor into that story. The aftermath of shutting down schools, reshuffling children and destroying communities - routines - consistencies - their feelings of belonging - none of these narratives or feelings exist in those numbers. They don't care about people. People, and the stories people tell, muddy the efficiency of numbers used within the business model being implemented in our public schools

If you hear a teacher call a child an "UnSat" don't allow it, politely ask the teacher to refer to the child by name - that child - that individual - who has a heart - a will - and a desire to grow and thrive as a confident and creative citizen. Ask a question about the child and use the child's name - model the behavior and shift the culture of your school. Teachers have heart and most often will recognize the horror in designating children as numbers, but the harsh truth is that in today's schools it has become part of the culture of schools - it is common place to refer to a group of students as "UnSats." It is a shameful practice, and as a teacher who follows the Declaration of Professional Conscience for Teachers I believe calling a child by his or her name is one powerful, yet simple step, that can be taken in resisting from within the challenging confines of our teaching profession - currently held hostage by corporate education reform.

Resist from within - don't allow a child to be addressed as a number or label.  I will continue to add additional ways to resist corporate education reform, but the most simple way is to remember that the child is a beautiful being that needs to be nurtured and supported, not divided, subtracted, and slapped on a data wall. Call the child by name, and upon hearing that name, memories and stories of the child will come forth and remind us to protect the child, that beautiful soul,  from those who have no heart.

Tested to Destruction

A clip from The Guardian:

With the demise of the "big society", the coalition's claims to be anything more than an unimaginative deficit-cutter are in tatters – except in education, where it has been extraordinarily radical. Last year saw, among other things, plans to impose performance-related pay on teachers, the development of the EBacc exam, and the introduction of£9,000 university tuition fees.

What lies behind this hyperactivity? Critics accuse the government of softening up the sector for privatisation. But the education secretary, Michael Gove, and the universities minister, David Willetts, insist that ensuring accountability for taxpayers' money and driving up academic standards are their goals. Gove's own fogeyish style completes the picture of the old-fashioned, no-nonsense grammar school headmaster. But the government is not simply stuck in 1950s "3Rism", nor is it planning wholesale privatisation (yet). Rather, it is still stubbornly pursuing a discredited 1980s ideology of quasi-markets, even though 30 years of experience shows that far from improving quality, it is destroying it.

At the root of the reforms is a doctrine that, though unfamiliar to most outside thinktanks, still dominates policy circles: "new public management". According to this view, the best way to ensure high standards and accountability in public services is to force them to mimic the market. Old centralised systems were inflexible and captured by selfish "producer interests" – teachers and academics; schools and universities therefore have to be made more "competitive", by taking power from professionals and giving it to "entrepreneurial" managers who will be more responsive to "consumers' demands, be they parents, students, or taxpayers".

The problem, of course, is that education and research are not straightforward consumer services. Unlike a haircut, their quality is not simply an issue of personal taste, and the consequences for the individual and broader society will not grow out in six weeks. The new public managers accept this up to a point, and their solution is to insist on rule by league table. Children's tests, student satisfaction surveys and a five- to six-yearly exam of the nation's academics (the "research excellence framework" – REF) seek to capture the quality of education or research, and turn it into numbers. These are then published and managers strive to move up the tables, theoretically by improving quality. . . .

a comment on the Common Core from the 14th century

Hafiz, 14th century Sufi poet, comments on the Common Core:

"Dropping Keys

The small person
Builds cages for everyone
She
Sees.

Instead, the sage,
Who needs to duck her head,
When the moon is low,
Can be found dropping keys, all night long
For the beautiful,
Rowdy,
Prisoners."

(For this and other great quotes, see http://www.susanohanian.org/quotes.php)

Robert D. Skeels' responses to the Arts for LA Spring LAUSD Candidate Survey

First published on Echo Park Patch on January 2, 2013.

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"Thinking is not the intellectual reproduction of what already exists anyway." — Theodor Adorno

One of the more intriguing aspects of being a candidate for a high profile office like Member of Board of Education, Los Angeles Unified School District, is the number of questionnaires various organizations ask you to complete. Some of these are for endorsement considerations, others are just to publicize your stances on various issues. Today Arts for LA sent me a five question survey. When answering the questions, I realized it would be worth publishing the Q&A since, in my eyes, it addresses many of the fundamentally flawed issues with national standards and punitive testing regimes they engender.

Arts for LA: What meaningful experiences with the arts (visual arts, dance, drama, and/or music) did you have growing up?

Robert D. Skeels: Even though I grew up in relative poverty (food-stamps, welfare, etc), our New York schools required playing an instrument, participation in drama, and taking classes in visual arts. I was exposed to French horn, trombone, and guitar, and still play the latter to this day. One of the most memorable field trips I recall from childhood is when our class went Radio City Music Hall to see Madama Butterfly. We even had electives like music theory which relate to mathematics. Classes in fine art gave me enough skills that when I later became a graphic artist, my illustration abilities kept me in constant demand. All of those experiences were interconnected with literature, an appreciation for arts, and an understanding that there is much more to being human than test scores and salaries.

Arts for LA: What role do you think the arts can play in supporting key priorities of the district, such as closing the achievement gap, reducing the dropout rate, and preparing more students for college eligibility and the twenty-first century workforce?

Robert D. Skeels: The critical thinking skills and ability to cognate interconnectedness between disparate disciplines fostered by the arts are far more important than rote memorization for standardized tests. For the record, critical thinking skills are essential regardless of what century we are in. This is why the children of the wealthy are exposed so heavily to the arts, whereas working class children aren't. Finding things that interest and captivate students is the key to reducing the dropout rate, encouraging students to find passions that lead them to college, etc. If we were educating the whole child in addition to providing wrap around services, then the achievement gap would ameliorate.

Arts for LA: A standards-based arts curriculum is one of the five core subjects in No Child Left Behind and critical for developing job skills vital in the creative economy and the twenty-first century workforce. Yet, most often, only "what is tested is taught" in our schools. How do you envision bringing balance back for a comprehensive education and ensuring all students have access to a quality, standards-based arts education curriculum?

Robert D. Skeels: The obsession with standards and punitive testing brought on by NCLB and its descendants RTTT and CCSS, have perverted and warped curriculum. Bringing balance back means resisting standardized tests and curriculum, and insisting that our students are provided rounded, culturally relevant curricula. While we still need to push for more arts and a rounded curriculum within the current regime of standards, ultimately we need to fight for curriculum decisions being made on a local level that address the needs of students. A nationally standardized arts curriculum further marginalizes children of color and those from different cultures. We need arts that are part of ethnic studies courses in order to respect cultural heritages.

Arts for LA: If elected, how will you engage classroom teachers, arts teachers, parents, and community arts organizations to implement your district's strategic arts plan? If you are not familiar with the plan, how can the district make the plan more visible?

Robert D. Skeels: Again, the de-emphasis in the arts in our schools is a direct result of national policies that have created an abject high-stakes environment where test preparation takes precedent over teaching and learning. I would work with all the stake-holders (who are natural allies) mentioned in the question above to create widespread awareness and outreach as to the critical importance of a rounded curriculum that sees the arts, including literature, as the primary, not secondary goal of education. Such a campaign would necessitate revising the existing LAUSD arts plan, which still sees test-prep as being paramount.

Arts for LA: Over 50% of School Districts in Los Angeles County have adopted Arts Education policies and plans to restore all arts disciplines into the core curriculum of K-12 classrooms. If elected, what would you do to develop and adopt a policy and implementation plan to increase access to the arts in the district?

Robert D. Skeels: Efforts to restore arts via policies and plans are laudable. However, so long as our public schools are threatened with catastrophic consequences like closure, reconstitution, or being handed over to a privately managed charter corporations, there is little hope that they will actually be able to execute such policies and plans. National education policy has created conditions where deviation from what is required on standardized tests is impossible, despite platitudes from the Secretary of Education on the importance of the arts. Board Members on the second largest school district have a moral obligation to challenge the reasons why the arts, electives, vocational training, and anything outside the narrow confines of NCLB/RTTT/CCSS aren't considered important. In practice, really expanding our arts curricula in LAUSD would be a visible sign of resistance to the testing-industrial-complex controlling U.S. education policy.

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LAUSD School Board Candidate, public education activist, researcher, and writer Robert D. Skeels has lived, worked, and organized in District 2 for over 18 years. He and his wife, Yoon Jung Lee, make their home in Historic Filipinotown. Robert is a U.S. Navy Veteran. He attended Glendale Community College and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Robert taught Catechism at St. Teresa of Avila Church for 12 years. For the past 15 years he has volunteered ten hours a week teaching life and literacy skills at the Mary Lind Foundation. Robert is a committed member of a number of grassroots education and immigrant rights organizations including Coalition for Educational Justice, Public Education and Social Justice Advocacy, The Trinational Coalition To Defend Public Education, The Southern California Immigration Coalition, and Veterans for Peace. Robert’s articles and essays have appeared in publications including: Schools Matter, CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, Daily Censored, Echo Park Patch, and The Los Angeles Daily News.

Robert's grassroots school board campaign has been endorsed by United Teachers Los Angeles and some of the most celebrated experts on education in the nation, including Professor Diane Ravitch.

What Does a Good School Do?

Take 13 minutes to find out:

Ms. Bailey’s sad and wonderful gift to New York libraries

Ms. Bailey’s sad and wonderful gift to New York libraries
Sent to the New York Post, January 2, 2013

Mary McConnell Bailey’s gift of $10 million to New York libraries is both sad and wonderful (“Life of golden silence,” January 1).
Wonderful because Ms. Bailey understood the importance of libraries.
Sad because these kinds of donations are necessary. Libraries, school and public, are poorly supported, even though research consistently tells us that when children and adolescents have access to good libraries with plenty of good books and with adequate staffing, they read more. The result is that they do better on reading tests.
For those living in poverty, libraries are often the only source of reading material. The US now has the second highest level of poverty among all “economically advanced” countries, 23.1%: Nearly one in four children lives in poverty.
We keep complaining about children's low reading achievement, and we keep preventing them from improving by failing to support libraries.
Stephen Krashen


Sources:

Importance of libraries:
Krashen, S., Lee, SY., and McQuillan, J. 2012. Is the library important? Multivariate studies at the national and international level. Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 8(1): 26-36.
Lance, K. C. The Impact of School Libraries on Student Achievement. http://www.lrs.org/impact.php

Levels of child 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.


Original article: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/life_of_golden_silence_H1onlfmDEkFn3zpzdN26zH



Life of golden silence
Shocking $20M gift
By BETH DEFALCO
Jan 1
She gave the term hush money a whole new meaning.
For more than a half-century, Mary McConnell Bailey lived an incredibly quiet and unassuming life.
The shy widow, whose husband died in World War II, had no children, lived in a modest apartment on the East Side, and volunteered at a hospital and schools.
She died at age 88 as quietly as she lived. She never wanted an obit.
But she’ll now be remembered as a major philanthropist. She left a $20 million fortune nobody dreamed she had to her favorite New York institutions — the New York Public Library and Central Park.
She died in February 2011. The library and Central Park Conservancy recently got checks for $10 million each.
“You would have never known” she was rich, said her best friend and neighbor, Lizanne Stoll. “When we went to lunch, it was usually dutch. She was very secretive about it all.”
Bailey made it clear that when she died, she didn’t want a funeral.
“She wouldn’t consider it,” Stoll said.
Even the library didn’t know how much she was going to donate.
“I met her many times and had lunch with her twice, but I cannot remember her voice. That’s how soft-spoken she was,” said John Bacon, the library’s director of planned giving.
“She was always neat and careful, but nothing fancy. No jewelry, no nothing. And always a track suit — day, night or otherwise.’’
Half of the money she gave to the library will be used to keep local branches open, Bacon said.
Raised in North Hampton, Mass., Bailey, who came from a moneyed family, moved to the city in the 1940s. She never remarried and largely kept to herself.
She attended Columbia and briefly taught kindergarten in Chelsea, but when her mother died and left her and her siblings a sizable inheritance, she stopped working.
“I think once she had that money set aside, she didn’t give a damn [about it]. She didn’t feel it was hers at all,” Stoll said.
Bailey’s family had owned shares in the Roaring Spring Blank Book Co., which produces the marble-cover notebooks nearly every schoolkid uses.
She found no thrill in spending money on herself.
“Her apartment had that 1950s fresh-out-of-college look. She had nice antiques, but all the art on the walls seemed to be copies from MoMA,” Stoll said.
“Mary didn’t give a damn. It was quixotic. Those were not her priorities.”

New York Principals Lead Fight Against More Guaranteed Testing Victims

Please sign the petition.  From Carol Burris:

Dear friends and colleagues,

Happy holidays to all.  The spring testing season is just around the corner.  The Commissioner and Chancellor have already warned us that the 3-8  tests will be more difficult, and fewer students will reach proficiency.  We know what that means-more frustrated and upset students, more confused parents who will fear that their child is not on the road to "college readiness" and more anger directed at  schools and teachers in the press.  If a decade ago there was a good reason for NCLB testing, that reason is long gone.

Please sign the link to a petition that I began to end high stakes testing in New York State.  You can see and sign the petition by clicking  here 

Pass along this email, or send this link http://wp.me/p1W339-5h to colleagues and friends who are parents.

Superintendents of national stature are joining together to demand the same moratorium on high stakes testing.  Read the article here

And of course the "reformers" are attacking them for their courageous stand, you can read about the attack on Maryland's Josh Starr and my defense of his stand  here

Finally, you may know a new principal or teacher or a friend who did not sign the principals letter against APPR.  Please send them to www.newyorkprincipals.org so that they can sign on.  This is the direct link to sign the letter. 

http://www.newyorkprincipals.org/support-the-paper

Happy New Year and never give up fighting for the public schools and students that we love.

Bloodless Abstractionism

A dedicated advocate for putting the reality of a living being, a child, back into the actuarial equations of our political considerations, Peg With Pen posts this on the first day of 2013:

Teachers, as you plan how to resist corporate education reform and rebuild public schools on National Opt Out Day (Jan.7th)  - or any day for that matter - here is one way to do it - do not allow others to refer to children based on their test scores. Children cannot be called "UnSats" or "Partials" or any other label attached to a number.

It is beyond disrespectful and allows teachers to become removed from the actions they are taking, therefore, they/teachers are less likely to wake up to the pain and suffering inflicted on these children from such abusive top down mandates. If children are numbers, rather than individuals with talents, personalities, ideas, heart, pain, and joy, it becomes much easier for corporate education reformers to move forward efficiently with their plan to profit off of these children as they are tallied, divided up and scattered randomly within communities.

It is a common practice, describing and "equating" living, breathing beings as if they were simply the abstractions used to describe them.  By naming a being by its assigned number one then identifies it as meaningful ONLY in that abstraction.

These are not tactics though.  This is the way many of us think.  We have been trained to think statistically, to describe ourselves as trends, as credit scores, as sub-prime or triple-A.

And because this is a kind of mental "ground" or a framework it is necessary that we do as Peg suggests: shout "NO" in thunder to any attempt at this kind of abstracting of living beings.  One way to do this is to always return to our starkest example of this kind of inhuman calculation: the Nazi program abstracted as the "solution."  Undesirables, UnSats, that is Jews, were forced to wear a large yellow Star of David on their outer-garments as a "badge" of inferiority; this was superseded by the tattooed number of the concentration camps.

When living beings are numbered, when living beings are considered "sociologically" as manipulable groups (this is the way our politics works, by the way), when living beings are abstracted, then living beings are no longer living beings.  We become nothing.  Marks on a page.  Marks in a column.

Bloodless yet soon to be bloodied.

I think we are naive to imagine a change in our public "mind."  It is and has been managed and directed for so long now that we too think exactly as the managers do.  We too find ourselves lacking; we too find ourselves the bearers of the burden of failure; we too believe the economic failures (successes for some) are "our fault."  Even when we say "their fault" and so try to lay the blame elsewhere, we are only laying the blame on the "others" who are exactly like us.

I don't believe there is a public school that isn't complicit in our education towards viewing everyone else as valueless abstractions.  The very structure of the institution reveals this.

So while I agree with Peg in the above, I don't believe we do ourselves any good by positioning this as something specific to corporate reform.  This is a fight against the state too.  This is a fight against the culture, the way we are trained, the way we privilege a kind of "scientism" in our mutually insured living.

Words, discourses, inherited paradigms of belief: these were what confounded thought by forcing it into straitened terms and generating insoluble problems that were actually functions of an idiom.  Recognizing the contingency of vocabularies, however, did little to help...(Milder, Exiled Royalties, p 38.)

We must first recognize that we are operating within these idioms.  We must commit to realizing these ways of thinking and talking direct us from within--we have internalized these abstractions.

The question will be, even if we are able to admit this and see that we too contribute to this problem, will this be of any help?

Fiction/nonfiction debate a diversion from the big question: Should we have common core standards?

Posted as a comment at: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2012/12/literature_versus_nonfiction_d.html#comments

The debate over fiction vs. non-fiction in the Common Core is diverting us from a more important question: should we have common core standards?

The rational for the standards is the belief that our schools are "broken." There is no evidence this is true: Middle class American students who attend well-funded schools score at the top of the world on international tests. Our unspectacular scores are because US has such a high percentage of child poverty, 23.1%, the second-highest percentage among 34 economically advanced countries. High-scoring Finland has less than 5.3% child poverty.

Poverty means poor diet, poor health care, and little access to books; all have a devastating effect on school performance.

There is no evidence that standards and tests improve school achievement. The money budgeted for standards and tests to enforce the standards should be used to protect children from the effects of poverty.

Stephen Krashen

Sources:
Levels of child 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.

Impact of 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., and Cowan, R. (Eds.). PISA under examination: Changing knowledge, changing tests, and changing schools. Amsterdam: Sense Publishers.
Neuman, S.B. and Celano, D. 2001. Access to print in low-income and middle-income communities: An ecological study of four neighborhoods. Reading Research Quarterly, 36, 1, 8-26.

Impact of standards and tests:
Loveless, T. 2011. How well are American students learning? The 2010 Brown Center Report on American Education. The Brown Foundation: Houston.
Nichols, S., Glass, G., and Berliner, D. 2006. High-stakes testing and student achievement: Does accountability increase student learning? Education Policy Archives 14(1). http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v14n1/.
OECD 2011. Lessons from PISA for the United States, Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education, OECD Publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264096660-en

The "real hurdle" in educational reform: Poverty

Protecting children from the impact of poverty

Sent to the Chicago Sun Times, January 1, 2013

Yes, poverty is the “real hurdle to education reform” (Dec. 29).

We can protect children from some of the impact of poverty immediately and inexpensively. Poverty means inadequate diet, inferior health care, and lack of access to books at home, in school and in the community, among other things, and each of these has a devastating effect on school performance.

We are investing billions in new standards and tests, and there is no research indicating that this will help children. Instead, we should be investing in improved nutrition programs, improved health care, and a greater investment in libraries and librarians, a move that is well-supported by research.

We need to invest in feeding the animal, not just weighing it.

Stephen Krashen


Sources:
Poverty and diet: Coles, G. 2008/2009. Hunger, academic success, and the hard bigotry of indifference. Rethinking Schools 23 (2). http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/23_02/hung232.shtml
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

Poverty and health care: 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
Martin, M. 2004. A strange ignorance: The role of lead poisoning in “failing schools.” http://www.azsba.org/lead.htm.

Poverty and access to books: Neuman, S.B. & Celano, D. 2001. Access to print in low-income and middle-income communities: An ecological study of four neighborhoods. Reading Research Quarterly, 36, 1, 8- 26.
Krashen, S., Lee, SY., and McQuillan, J. 2012. Is the library important? Multivariate studies at the national and international level. Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 8(1): 26-36.
Lance, K. C. The Impact of School Libraries on Student Achievement. http://www.lrs.org/impact.php

Lack of impact of standards and tests:
Loveless, T. 2011. How well are American students learning? The 2010 Brown Center Report on American Education. The Brown Foundation: Houston.
Nichols, S., Glass, G., and Berliner, D. 2006. High-stakes testing and student achievement: Does accountability increase student learning? Education Policy Archives 14(1). http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v14n1/.

OECD 2011. Lessons from PISA for the United States, Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education, OECD Publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264096660-en


Editorial: Real hurdle to education reform is poverty
Editorials December 31, 2012
Chicago Sun-Times
There is nothing easy about trying to boost academic outcomes for poor kids.
That is why we’ve supported a range of aggressive interventions for the Chicago Public Schools over the years, including school closures, charter openings, turnarounds, improved teacher evaluations, a longer school day and changes to teaching tenure, hiring and firing rules.
We remain convinced those interventions can make the difference at individual schools, for individual kids and, across all schools, can move the needle slightly.
But until society and our schools figures out a way to deal, in a comprehensive and systemic way, with child poverty — a parent’s income and educational level is the biggest predictor of school success — the odds of major improvement are low.
The Chicago Teachers Union has been pressing this point with greater urgency in recent days — and we applaud it. It released a report this month laying out the undeniable link between a parent’s wage and school achievement.
Data from the Nation’s Report Card, a rigorous national exam, show that more than 40 percent of the variation in average reading scores across the states is associated with variation in child poverty rates. The vast majority, some 87 percent, of all Chicago public school students qualify for free or reduced lunch.
In its report, the CTU called on CPS to support efforts to lift wages for low-income workers to a $15-per-hour living wage, arguing that moving families out of poverty will improve academic outcomes. The report was commissioned by Stand Up Chicago, a labor and community group, and produced in partisanship with the CTU.
The teachers union is right to broaden the school reform lens and, we hope, help parents and policy makers see (or remember) what really drives the crisis in the Chicago schools.
We disagree with the CTU, though, that other efforts. including charters and turnarounds, should be abandoned. The CTU fails to note that deeply embedded in many of those strategies are efforts to counteract the effects of child poverty. Countless children across Chicago are benefitting from those efforts right now, today.
Still, we support the CTU’s effort to push back against a national chorus, started in the era of President George W. Bush, that accuses anyone of mentioning poverty as giving up on poor kids. Nationally, a similar effort is being led by New York University education professor Diane Ravitch, who is pushing for a direct and honest conversation about poverty as the only starting point for lasting improvement.
Ravitch and CTU President Karen Lewis aren’t caving to what Bush called “soft bigotry of low expectations.” They’re about setting high expectations but giving poor kids the support to reach them.
Lewis said it best herself when she spoke to the City Club of Chicago last month:
“We cannot fix what’s wrong with our schools until we are prepared to have honest conversations about poverty and race,” Lewis said. “Until we do, we will be mired in the no-excuses mentality [that] poverty doesn’t matter. Poverty matters a lot when you are teaching children who are distracted by their lives. Poverty matters a lot when you are teaching children who have seen trauma like none of us in this room can imagine.”
There is nothing easy about trying to boost academic outcomes for poor kids.
But there is little else that is more important.