Live Long and Prosper...: Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education

"Somewhere along the line we've forgotten that education is not about getting this or that score on a test, but it is about enlarging hearts, minds, and spirits. It's about fulfilling human potential and unleashing human creativity. It's about helping children understand that the world is a place full of wonder, truly wonder-full. It's about giving children the tools they will need to participate in a complex global world where we can't imagine today what the next twenty years, let alone century, will bring"

-- Susan Zimmerman in Comprehension Going Forward

Monday, February 20, 2012

Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education

The Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education (NEIFPE) has announced some events of interest to everyone concerned about Public Education.

Diane Ravitch author of The Life and Death of the Great American School System and a strong advocate for public schools will be speaking at the Auer Auditorium on the IPFW campus at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 13. Dr. Ravitch will be part of the Omnibus Lecture Series. Tickets, though free, are needed for this event. Call the IPFW box office at 481-6555 for further information.

As a prelude to Dr. Ravitch's appearance, NEIFPE has arranged for the showing of two films at the downtown Cinema Center.

Waiting for Superman will be shown on Sunday, February 26 at 4:15 p.m and on Monday, February 27 at 4:00 p.m.

As a response to "Superman," Cinema Center is showing The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman on Sunday, March 4 at 4:00 p.m. and on Monday, March 5 at 4:00p.m.

Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Educations will lead a discussion of the two films following the two Sunday showings. There will be no charge for these showings, but donations will be accepted to help the producers of The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman defray their production and distribution costs.

A flyer with information about NEIFPE will be distributed at the Cinema Center events. You can download a copy HERE.

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Important Quotes

How About Professionals?

I was in a doctor's office in Manhattan last year getting tests done to try to determine the origin of some weird chest pains when the doctors asked what I did for a living. I told them, and they asked if I was in Teach for America. My expression must have betrayed my feelings because they asked what problems I had with the organization. I just shook my head. "Who's going to teach those kids if not for TFA?" they asked. "How about qualified professionals?" I said coldly. "I wouldn't feel very good right now if you two were just out of undergrad and about to go to med school, would I?" -- James Boutin in An Urban Teacher's Education - Teach for America: Here We Go Again

What Motivates Teachers

Teachers are neither mercenaries nor missionaries. They do the best they can in spite of - not because of - the salaries they receive. Reformers who have never taught do not understand what motivates teachers. I don't think they ever will. All the more reason to be skeptical about "innovative" merit pay plans. -- Walt Gardner

Time to Throw Money at the Problem

It’s a well-worn phrase: you can’t just throw money at the problem. Well, what if the problem is a serious lack of money? -- David B. Cohen, Accomplished California Teachers

Ending Poverty’s Influence on Education

"To ignore [the reality of poverty] and make bold assertions that all children can achieve while doing nothing to address the outside-of-school challenges they face is neither fair nor a sound basis for developing public policy." -- ‘Broader, bolder’ strategy to ending poverty’s influence on education by Pedro Noguera

Campbell's Law

"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." -- Donald Campbell

Thinking Better

"Kids can’t be taught to think better using tests that can’t measure how well they think." -- Marion Brady

Unleash Human Creativity

It's Not an Excuse, It's a Diagnosis!

Our achievement gap is an opportunity gap. Our education problem is a poverty problem. Test scores don't scream bad teaching. They scream about our nation's systematic neglect of children who live in the wrong zip codes.

Listen to me, Arne Duncan: It's poverty, stupid. And that's not an excuse...it's a diagnosis. We must as a nation stop assuaging the symptoms and start treating the disease. -- John Kuhn, Superintendent of superintendent of Perrin-Whitt Consolidated Independent School District, Perrin, Texas

Science is True

"The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it." -- Neil deGrasse Tyson

We Help Them More

"...John Jackson of the Schott Foundation for Public Education. He said that he had recently visited some high-performing nations, and at each stop he would ask someone from the ministry of education: 'What do you do about bad teachers?' The answer invariably was, 'We help them.' And he asked, 'What if you help them and they are still bad teachers?' And the response was, 'We help them more."

-- Diane Ravitch in What Works Best: Help or Punishment?

Whose Fault?

Remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in TARP money, spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes?

Yeah, me neither.

-- Jill Gorman (who got this quote from a friend, who got it from a friend...)

The Irrelevance of Teachers
The school curriculum is where the world (could be) explained to the young...it is where...academic knowledge meets the neighborhood, where the abstraction of knowledge encounters the concrete specificity of students. The crucial character of the school curriculum is why even "democratic" governments have taken hold of the schools. Not explicitly, as that would disclose political agendas. Instead, 'democratic' states take hold of schools indirectly, through standardized examinations whereby the curriculum becomes a means to an end. Rendered irrelevant in such 'accountability' schemes is teachers' professional obligation to interpret their subjects - and through such subjects, the world - to their students. In Orwellian language, 'Leave No Child Behind' is disguised as the political agenda to control what children know and think: No child shall be left behind in the charge of intellectually independent teachers, now consigned to speak others' scripts

-- William Pinar" in The Worldliness of a Cosmopolitan Education: Passionate Lives in Public Service

Everyone is an Expert
It’s hard to think of another field in which experience is considered a liability and those who know the least about the nuts and bolts of an enterprise are embraced as experts.

-- Pedro Noguera and Michelle Fine in Teachers Aren't the Enemy

John Kuhn
Bail out the bankers and bankrupt the school teachers -- we will still teach...I will never follow the lead of those who exclude the kids who need education the most so that my precious scores will rise. I will never line up with those whose idea of reform is the subtle segregation of the poor and desperate. I want no part of the American caste system.

-- John Kuhn, Superintendent of superintendent of Perrin-Whitt Consolidated Independent School District, Perrin, Texas

A Moment of National Insanity
"Our schools remain subject to a failed federal accountability system. We are packing children into crowded classrooms, ignoring the growing levels of child poverty (the U.S. now leads all advanced nations in infant mortality), and putting fear into the hearts of our nation's teachers. Who will want to teach? How does any of this improve schools or benefit children? Do you understand it? I don't."

-- Diane Ravitch in A Moment of National Insanity

Educators Should Be Heard
"I know Obama's heart is in the right place when he urges young people to become teachers; but I am finding it harder and harder to see why anyone would want to go into teaching, given the outrageous abuse the profession is enduring from the politicians, the press, and the choruses of amateur edubabblers that are drowning out the voices of real educators at every level."

-- by ahasting0, commenting on the blog, Race to the Top of What? Obama On Education, By STANLEY FISH

Who Do We Blame?
"Breathtaking. We continue to go through the worst recession since the depression in which the American taxpayer bailed out some of the most wealthy people who ever lived and it's labor unions who are given the blame. The people who teach your kids take the blame. The people who plow your snow take the blame. The recipients who we bailed out, get richer and richer and they serve no tangible purpose. They exist to create their own wealth. What a country."

—Reader Comment, New York Times, 1/4/2011, quoted inNotable Quotes by Susan Ohanian

1/5 of American Students Live in Poverty
"The relationship between SES [socioeconomic status] and achievement was consistent across all 20 countries. Students with highest levels of SES, as measured in this study, had an educational advantage over their lowest SES counterparts. This reinforces the associations previously documented in the literature both in the United States and abroad between SES and student educational achievement."

— U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES, April 2006)

A Major National Fraud!
"I now freely concede that I was wrong to support the expansion of testing and accountability. I believe that this approach has created a major national fraud, as the more we rely on testing, and the more we emphasize accountability, the less interest there is in anything that you [Deborah Meier] or I would recognize as good education." -- Diane Ravitch, Bridging Differences, Ed Week, 11/2/10

On NCLB
"Don't label a school as failing one day and then throw your hands up and walk away from it the next. Don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend too much of a year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles in a standardized test...You didn't devote your lives to testing. You devoted it to teaching, and teaching is what you should be allowed to do." -- Barack Obama, Summer 2007

Not Reform
"I just wish that people wouldn't refer to this as reform, because when we talk about Race to the Top, we're talking about a principle that is antithetical to the fundamental idea of American education. The fundamental idea, which has been enshrined at least since the Brown decision of 1954, was equal educational opportunity. Race to the Top is not equal educational opportunity. It is a race in which one or two or three states race to the top to have more privatized schools, more test-based accountability, more basic skills, no emphasis on a broad curriculum for all kids, and no equal educational opportunity. I think that's wrong. I think it's also not the role of the federal government to do what's being done and to call it reform." — Diane Ravitch, Democracy Now, March 5, 2010

No Child Left

"When Congress passes No Child Left Unfed, No Child Without Health Care and No Child Left Homeless, then we can talk seriously about No Child Left Behind." -- Susan Ohanian

Lower the Standards
"In a prime example of Orwellian logic, Arne Duncan's corporate bosses have declared that the best way to getting test results in the poor schools that need the most highly qualified teachers is to lower the standards for teacher education..." -- Jim Horn at School's Matter

Always the Teacher's Fault!

"...DID ANYONE ANYWHERE EVER STOP TO THINK THAT MAYBE JUST MAYBE NOT EVERYTHING THAT IS WRONG WITH EDUCATION IS THE FAULT OF THE TEACHER? Or that constantly blaming teachers is like beating a dead animal...nothing is going to change if it's already dead, people! The horse is not going to jump up and run away. And the teacher is not going to suddenly stand up and say, 'You're right, thanks for beating me senseless with your incessant criticism yet odd lack of viable suggestions! Let me revolutionize my teaching on my own time with little to no support.'" -- Mrs. Mimi

Higher Test Scores

"If people want higher test scores, they'll get higher test scores. I just hope they don't complain when that's all they get." -- Richard Mandl

Education is a Civil Right

"...states and districts should not have to compete for federal funding to guarantee the civil rights of their students....But, as we saw in Race to the Top, the children in 39 states saw no benefit at all from billions in federal education spending...If the money were truly intended to strengthen education as a civil right, then it should have gone to those who needed it most, not to those who wrote the best proposal or had the best consultants." -- Diane Ravitch

No Excuse

When people have said "poverty is no excuse," my response has been, "Yes, you're right. Poverty is not an excuse. It's a condition. It's like gravity. Gravity affects everything you do on the planet. So does poverty." - Gerald Bracey

Authenticity

"I continue to believe that everyone who opines about education should first be required to spend several months in a public school classroom...Only that way can their writing have authenticity. It's called walking around in the other person's shoes." -- Walt Gardner

Can We Afford the Losers?

"I had the opportunity last night to download and look at the blueprint, and my concern as I read through it is the number of times competition and competitive grants is mentioned in it -- that monies would be allocated by competition. Whenever we have competition, we have winners and losers. I don’t believe that we can afford to have losers in education." —- Gary Anhalt, Cedar Rapids Board of Education, 3/14/10

Imagination

"Accumulation of material should not stifle the students' independence. A society's competitive advantage will come, not from how well schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate the imagination and creativity...Imagination is more important than knowledge." -- Albert Einstein

Children Are Not Shoes

"[The Chamber of Commerce] says the public school system, the country’s most important civic institution, should be run like a business, a philosophy championed by some of the most high-profile school reformers today.

"It would be a good idea if it could work, but it can’t, because teaching children of all varying abilities and backgrounds and isn’t like selling shoes. Business people can wish it were all they want, but education is a far more complicated process that can’t be reduced to spreadsheets and charts of data.

"The effort to do so -- now being supported by the Chamber of Commerce, some of the country’s biggest philanthropists, and the Obama administration -- is weakening the public schools and, ultimately, will make it harder to build a dedicated cadre of effective teachers and improve the achievement rates of minorities."

-- Valerie Strauss

Live Long and Prosper...

Monday, February 20, 2012

Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education

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