A Teacher's Letter to the President

In this heartfelt letter, a teacher explains why one size doesn't fit all. Does President Obama get it? I think he does...I think he's ignoring it.

His plan, the corporate-political-Democratic-Republican plan is:

Punish teachers and students for the failings of society.

A Letter to My President—The One I Voted for...

Published in Education Week
02/02/2011
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/02/02/19karrer.h30.html

Dear President Obama

I mean this with all respect. I'm on my knees here, and there's a knife in my back, and the prints on it kinda match yours. I think you don't get it.

Your Race to the Top is killing the wrong guys. You're hitting the good guys with friendly fire. I'm teaching in a barrio in California. I had 32 kids in my class last year. I love them to tears. They're 5th graders. That means they're 10 years old, mostly. Six of them were 11 because they were retained. Five more were in special education, and two more should have been. I stopped using the word "parents" with my kids because so many of them don't have them. Amanda's mom died in October. She lives with her 30-year-old brother. (A thousand blessings on him.) Seven kids live with their "Grams," six with their dads. A few rotate between parents. So "parents" is out as a descriptor.

Here's the kicker: Fifty percent of my students have set foot in a jail or prison to visit a family member.

Do you and your secretary of education, Arne Duncan, understand the significance of that? I'm afraid not. It's not bad teaching that got things to the current state of affairs. It's pure, raw poverty. We don't teach in failing schools. We teach in failing communities. It's called the ZIP Code Quandary. If the kids live in a wealthy ZIP code, they have high scores; if they live in a ZIP code that's entombed with poverty, guess how they do?

We also have massive teacher turnover at my school. Now, we have no money. We haven't had an art or music teacher in 10 years. We have a nurse twice a week. And because of the No Child Left Behind Act, struggling public schools like mine are held to impossible standards and punished brutally when they don't meet them. Did you know that 100 percent of our students have to be on grade level, or else we could face oversight by an outside agency? That's like saying you have to achieve 100 percent of your policy objectives every year.

It's not bad teaching that got things to the current state of affairs. It's pure, raw poverty.

You lived in Indonesia, so you know what conditions are like in the rest of the world. President Obama, I swear that conditions in my school are akin to those in the third world. We had a test when I taught in the Peace Corps. We had to describe a glass filled to the middle. (We were supposed to say it was half full.) Too many of my kids don't even have the glass!

Next, gangs. Gangs eat my kids, their parents, and the neighborhood. One of my former students stuffed an AK47 down his pants at a local bank and was shot dead by the police. Another one of my favorites has been incarcerated since he was 13. He'll be 27 in November. I've been writing to him for 10 years and visiting him in the maximum-security section of Salinas Valley State Prison. He's a major gangster.

Do you get that it's tough here? Charter schools and voucher schools aren't the solution. They are an excuse not to fix the real issues. You promised us so much. And you want to give us merit pay? Anyway, I think we really need to talk. Oh, and can you pull the knife out while you're standing behind me? It really hurts.

Sincerely yours,

— Paul Karrer

Paul Karrer is a 5th grade teacher at Castroville Elementary School in north Monterey County, Calif. He is a union negotiator and was the League of United Latin American Citizens' 2009 teacher of the year for north Monterey County.

Can't they hear?

Editorialists, politicians, and pundits...non-educators all...can't seem to hear or admit out loud that one of the biggest problems facing American schools in the 21st century is poverty. It's been said over and over and over again, yet it needs to be repeated again and again. Thank goodness that Stephen Krashen keeps saying it.

Not Just Cleveland

Poverty is the major factor everywhere, not just Cleveland.

Sent to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Feb. 5, 2010

When discussing the Cleveland schools, Brent Larkin understands that it is hard to improve school achievement in the presence of "abject poverty" ("Peter Raskind starts atop bottomed-out Cleveland public schools," Feb. 5). But when Larkin discusses American students' performance on international tests, he appears to be unaware that the same factor is at work.

On the recent PISA tests, American 15-year-olds attending schools with less than 10% of students living in poverty averaged 551 on the reading test, second in the world. Our overall scores are unspectacular (tied for 10th out of 60 countries on the reading test) because we have a high percentage of children living in poverty, over 20%. This is the highest among all industrialized countries. In contrast, child poverty in high-scoring Finland is less than 4%.

For Cleveland and for the US as a whole, the major problem is poverty. Before we worry about teacher quality, institute longer school days, and increase testing, we need to make sure that all children are protected from the effects of poverty: This means adequate health care and nutrition, and access to books. When we do this, American test scores will be at the top of the world.

Stephen Krashen

Original article at:
http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/02/raskind_starts_atop_bottomed-o.html

The Company he Keeps

Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Bennett, has been telling teachers what they're doing wrong since he was elected. He's knee deep in the "Schools are failing and it's because of bad teachers and their unions" reform movement and is pushing for charters, teacher pay based on test scores, union-busting, and experience doesn't matter pay schemes for Indiana public schools.

Now he has a "situation" on his hands which throws some light on what happens when the business community moves into public education. Profit and money become the bottom line...not students and learning.

Karen Francisco wrote in Fort Wayne's Journal Gazette on Sunday, February 6,

One year ago, the Indiana Department of Education hyped 2010 as the “Year for Science Education Reform” and kicked off with a science summit featuring State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett, Eli Lilly officials and “national experts.”

Among those experts was Michael Klentschy, Ph.D., a researcher and retired superintendent of schools in California’s El Centro Elementary School District. Panelist information for the summit touted his research in the “longitudinal effects of inquiry-based science education on language minority populations and with the science-literacy connection in North Carolina, Idaho, New Mexico and California.”

It also noted that he served as principal or co-principal investigator on several National Science Foundation-funded elementary science initiatives.

Over the next few months, references to Klentschy appeared on numerous education department notices, including an October reminder in Bennett’s weekly mailing to school superintendents that Klentschy would speak at a $140 teacher workshop at the Wabash Valley Education Service Center. “This is a chance to hear and ask questions about notebooking, inquiry, and best practices utilizing science kits,” Bennett’s e-mail said.

Klentschy was named a budget partner in the $18.4 million proposal for the federal Investing in Innovation (i3) grant competition. Purdue University was lead partner in the request for an Indiana Science Initiative program to “validate a statewide K-8 science education reform based upon scaffolded guided inquiry.” Other partners included the Indiana DOE, Ball State University and several school districts.

A link to a video featuring Klentschy boasting of the results of his “inquiry-based science curriculum” work still can be found on the website for NISTEM, the Northeast Indiana Education Resource Center.

But Klentschy’s name appears on another interesting document: a federal indictment from a 2009 grand jury inquiry alleging that he and two colleagues stole $5.4 million in grant money from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education. A separate indictment naming Klentschy alone alleges that he falsified standardized testing results supporting his own “special” kit based on “scaffold guided inquiry” in teaching elementary school science.

This reminds me of the Reading First scandal of a few years back where the Federal program was only accepting certain programs and assessments from states...which "just happened" to be in the economic interest of some of the Reading First developers.

Francisco went on...

Since he took office in 2009, the superintendent has made unrelenting demands on Indiana schools to adopt his approach or face consequences.

He fired most of the experienced educators in his department and assembled a young team of officials who spout the current buzzwords in school improvement. The “we’ll work with you” style of his predecessor has been replaced by “trust us – we know best.”

To me this looks like Tony Bennett is just another anti-public education politician who wants to convince the public that teachers don't know anything about education, that training doesn't matter, and that the business community knows best. It looks like he's in it for the money and we all know there's a bundle of money in school budgets. People like him -- the Duncans, Gates, Broads, Waltons, Obamas and other "reformers" -- want their cut of the education loot and they're willing to throw public education under the bus to get it.

Retention, Promotion and the Testing Frenzy

I've discussed Grade Retention before (See HERE and HERE) and I have a section in the menu to the right devoted to it (which I updated today). It's time to look at it again and see what's changed...if anything.

The quick answer is...nothing's changed. No new research shows that grade retention helps students.

Recent reports tell the same story. Children who are retained don't achieve more than if they were promoted.

In a 2005 study on Kindergarten retention the authors concluded that,

According to our analytic results, the average effect of the kindergarten retention policy, as compared to a policy that banned retention, was null or very small. Nor did we find any evidence that the policy would benefit those children who would be promoted if the policy were adopted. These results cast doubt on the proposition that a policy of grade retention in kindergarten would improve instruction by creating classrooms that are more homogenous in academic ability.

We did find evidence, however, that children who were retained would have learned more had they been promoted. This was true in both reading and math.

Hong, G. & Raudenbush, St. (2005). Effects of Kindergarten Retention Policy on Children's Cognitive Growth in Reading and MathematicsEducational Evaluation and Policy Analysis Fall 2005, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 205-224

The result is the same...and the recommendations are the same. Don't retain students. Social promotion doesn't work either, so don't promote failing students. Once more the average classroom teacher is stuck -- retention hurts the student -- or at best does not help -- and promotion doesn't really help either.

The suggestions which are always made are to provide intense intervention for struggling students before they fail. With budget cuts, program and personnel reductions, finding ways to help struggling children is difficult. There's little if any funding for extra help for students.

The big push now is for more accurate referral of students for special education...tightening up the requirements and using a Response to Intervention (RtI) process which provides high quality general education instruction to children who are having trouble. The burden is more likely than not on the classroom teacher. In this time of budget cuts, class sizes are growing...in response to No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, classroom documentation is also growing. Teachers have more to do than ever...with less support.

Intense intervention could be provided using a variety of programs. The US DOE web site, What Works Clearinghouse, has reviewed programs and graded them. Things like Reading Recovery can help, but they cost money.

Stephen Krashen, quoted in Anthony Cody's Living in Dialogue blog has a way to come up with some of the money for these and other programs.

the exit exam costs the state [California] about $600 million per year. Studies of high school exit exams show that they are useless: They do not lead to higher employment, higher earnings, or improved academic achievement. In fact, researchers have yet to discover any benefits of having a high school exit exam.

$600 million a year can buy a lot of Reading Recovery teachers. At an average salary of about $50,000 a year California could afford about 12,000 Reading Recovery teachers. End the standardized testing frenzy and let's go back to teaching.