2017 Medley #19

Politics of Privatization, Bullies,
Accountability, On Teaching,
June is Internet Safety Month

THE POLITICS OF PRIVATIZATION

As Governor of Indiana, Mike Pence made no attempt to hide his preference for private education. His school-based photo ops were nearly always at parochial schools. His state budgets favored private schools and charters, and his friends in both the Indiana General Assembly and the State Board of Education followed his lead.

Betsy DeVos joins Pence in the current administration as an unapologetic advocate for privatizing education and the destruction of public schools. She doesn't hide the fact that her intent is to provide as much money for private schools as possible. She couches her preference in terms which imply support for students, but when we dig deeper we find that she doesn't consider all students worthy of support.

Her budget cuts millions from programs designed to help the neediest students. She passes the buck to the states and private donors to pick up the monetary slack. The fact that the states don't have the money doesn't matter. With the continued tax cuts for America's wealthiest citizens, money for education is scarce and DeVos prefers to direct it towards the children attending private schools rather than those attending public schools.

In her recent appearance before a Senate committee, DeVos refused to take a stand against discrimination. Instead she repeated the same inane statement about supporting federal antidiscrimination laws. Would she take a stand against discrimination when the federal laws were vague? No...

This is what happens when a know-nothing, anti-public education billionaire, buys her way into the highest education office in the land.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos Again Fails to Say Voucher Programs Shouldn’t Allow Discrimination

From American's United for Separation of Church and State

At a minimum, DeVos’ answers reveal that she knows her desire to let private schools discriminate with federal dollars is unpopular. Students deserve better than private school vouchers that undermine civil rights protections.

The issue of discrimination is one of the many reasons Congress should reject any efforts to impose a federal voucher program. Rather than diverting funds for private schools, we should be funding the public school system, which educates all students.

Betsy’s Choice: School Privatization Over Kids’ Civil Rights

From Steven Singer

Betsy DeVos seems to be confused about her job.

As U.S. Secretary of Education, she is responsible for upholding the civil rights of all U.S. students.

She is NOT a paid lobbyist for the school privatization industry.

Yet when asked point blank by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) whether her department would ensure that private schools receiving federal school vouchers don’t discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) students, she refused to give a straight answer.

She said that the these schools would be required to follow all federal antidiscrimination laws but her department would not issue any clarifications or directives about exactly how they should be doing it.

“On areas where the law is unsettled, this department is not going to be issuing decrees. That is a matter for Congress and the courts to settle,” DeVos said at a hearing before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education yesterday.

“I think you just said where it’s unsettled, such discrimination will continue to be allowed under your program. If that’s incorrect, please correct it for the record,” Merkley replied.

DeVos did not correct him.

The Demolition of American Education

From Diane Ravitch

The most devastating cuts are aimed at programs for public schools. Nearly two dozen programs are supposed to be eliminated, on the grounds that they have “achieved their original purpose, duplicate other programs, are narrowly focused, or are unable to demonstrate effectiveness.” In many cases, the budget document says that these programs should be funded by someone else—not the US Department of Education, but “federal, state, local and private funds.” These programs include after-school and summer programs that currently serve nearly two million students, and which keep children safe and engaged in sports, arts, clubs, and academic studies when they are out of school. They have never been judged by test scores, but the budget claims they do not improve student achievement, and aims to save the government $1 billion by ending support for them. The budget assumes that someone else will pick up the tab, but most states have cut their education budgets since the 2008 recession. No mention is made of how other sources will be able to come up with this funding.

BULLIES

Kids Are Quoting Trump To Bully Their Classmates And Teachers Don’t Know What To Do About It

President Trump has made bullying great again.

Donald Trump’s campaign and election have added an alarming twist to school bullying, with white students using the president's words and slogans to bully Latino, Middle Eastern, black, Asian, and Jewish classmates. In the first comprehensive review of post-election bullying, BuzzFeed News has confirmed more than 50 incidents, across 26 states, in which a K-12 student invoked Trump’s name or message in an apparent effort to harass a classmate during the past school year.

ACCOUNTABILITY

State Board Votes to Allow Voucher Schools to Bypass Accountability

The accountability laws in Indiana are a waste of time and money. The criteria used to judge a school, its students' test scores and attendance, are inadequate and invalid. Tests and attendance do not indicate the quality of a school. The school climate and the involvement of parents are equally, if not more important to a school than how high the students score on a given achievement test. Student achievement tests should be used (if they're going to be used at all) to assess student achievement, not the quality of a school or its teachers. Student attendance has very little to do with a school's quality, and more to do with the economic status of the families of the students (for that matter, so do the achievement tests).

For decades, "reformers" have used poor test scores as the basis for claims that America's public schools were "failing," and to lobby for charters and vouchers. Now that they have charters and vouchers, the state rules about "accountability" are getting in the way of the smooth flow of tax dollars into private, parochial, and corporate pockets. The solution? Get the corporate stooges on the state board of education to "suspend" accountability for private, parochial, and corporate schools.

Just because Mike Pence is no longer in the Governor's seat doesn't mean that the state preference for privatization is gone...

Kudos to my former colleague, Steve Yager, for being one of the two votes against this.

Four private voucher schools previously cut off from accepting new voucher students because of academic failure, have been given a reprieve from the Indiana State Board of Education.

Due to receiving a grade of D or F for two consecutive years, the private schools had lost their ability to take on new voucher students. The schools can retain their current population of voucher students.

The schools were given permission to bypass accountability laws created for failing private voucher schools thanks to a new law signed by Gov. Holcomb. ISTA strongly opposed the bill throughout the legislative session, because it gives failing voucher schools a pass for low performance and allows a new voucher pathway via new school accreditation – schools with no track record.

ON TEACHING

On Teaching Well: Five Lessons from Long Experience

From an experienced teacher and teacher educator...Russ Walsh gives us the benefit of his years as an educator. You'll notice the five lessons he presents have nothing to do with teaching to the test. Instead he deals with relationships between teacher and student, teacher as coach, pedagogical content knowledge, using student errors to guide teaching, and teacher self-reflection. This, along with his book, A Parent's Guide to Public Education in the 21st Century: Navigating Education Reform to Get the Best Education for My Child, are essential reading for parents, teachers, and anyone who is interested in improving public schools.

At its most basic, teaching is about building individual relationships with children. If children trust you, they will be willing to follow you in your flights of instructional fantasy and if they follow you they will learn from you.

STAY SAFE ONLINE

Be Internet Awesome

June is Internet Safety Month. Share these tips from Google with your family.

To make the most of the Internet, kids need to be prepared to make smart decisions. Be Internet Awesome teaches kids the fundamentals of digital citizenship and safety so they can explore the online world with confidence.

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There's More to Teaching Than Telling

It's important for teachers to have content knowledge before they try to teach. Peter Greene – Curmudgucation – wrote,

Expertise

Yes, teaching is both a skill and an art and to do a good job, you have to know the skill and the art of teaching. But just as you can't have waves without water or air, you cannot have "teaching skills" without content knowledge-- and all the teaching skills in the world will not make up for lacking knowledge. You cannot make an awesome lesson about adding two plus two if you do not know that the result is four. You cannot lead your students through an illuminating and inspiring study of Hamlet if you have never read the play yourself.

This is true, absolutely.

It's also true for teachers of young children. Early childhood educators and elementary teachers need to understand the reading, math, social studies, and science they teach, just as much as a physics teacher needs to understand physics. Curmudgucation agrees...

Content knowledge is the foundation of everything else. You cannot be an expert at teaching without being an expert at subject matter. Yes, even teachers of the littles, who in particular need the security of knowing they are in the hands of a grownup who Knows Things.

However, what is often misunderstood by non-educators who think they know all about teaching (I'm looking at you, "reformers") is that content knowledge is only one part of the teaching skill set.

Elementary teachers – and most educated people in general – are already experts in elementary school content. The average college graduate, for example, can already read, do basic arithmetic, and is familiar with basic science and history. This is the likely reason that non-educators think teaching elementary school is "easy." As one parent said to me when I was explaining why his son was struggling in first grade, "Just tell him. Just tell him what he needs to know."

Indeed, many people think that you "just tell" children information and they learn it. They don't understand that learning is more than information. They don't understand that teaching is more than simply teaching content. Elementary students need more than someone who "tells" them stuff.

In the early 1980s I had been teaching for about 5 years...and had started on my masters degree. I was discussing this with a group of people and someone asked, "When you get your masters, will you be able to teach high school then?" I tried to explain that teaching elementary school was more than just telling kids stuff. The misunderstanding was, and still is, pervasive.

This ignorance about learning has led to things like REPA III (Rules for Educator Preparation and Accountability) in Indiana which allows people with no education training to start teaching content areas in high school. If you have a degree in biology (and a B average), for example, you can teach biology. According to REPA III, there is no education degree required...no need for pedagogical training...no need to learn about classroom management, child development, teaching methods or student discipline. Those are things you can apparently pick up while you're teaching.

The same sorts of rules are now in force in other states like Arizona and Utah.

But that's wrong. Teachers need training before they can take on the sole responsibility of a classroom. That's why legitimate educator training programs include a significant amount of time in classrooms as well as a full semester (or more) of student teaching.

Of course, content knowledge is important, but it's only part of the teaching story...

One of the comments to Expertise contained an excellent list of what knowledge is necessary to teach...

NY Teacher June 6, 2017 at 7:39 AM

...Might I add, the importance of knowledge goes beyond subject area content:

Knowledge of pedagogy and methodologies
knowledge of child and adolescent psychology
knowledge of mob psychology (Ha!)
knowledge of cognitive learning theory and brain development (and damage)
knowledge of local community and families
knowledge of school community and happenings,
knowledge of your students - as people
knowledge of your limitations
knowledge of classroom management techniques and policies

And that's just the knowledge side of of being a good teacher.
Work ethic, professionalism, judgement, personality and many more come into play. Maybe the clueless tweeter and all the other know-nothing reformers that came very late to this 150 year old party will begin to understand just how complex and nuanced the skill set required to a "good" teacher. It's no wonder they don't grow on trees.

A child is more than a test score. A teacher is more than a purveyor of information.

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Listen to This #7

PRE-SCHOOL

Building a Better Pre-School: Finding the Right Balance

Russ Walsh looks at two recent studies of preschool instruction, one focusing on academics in preschools, the other on social and emotional learning. The unsurprising results of the research? Developmentally appropriate instruction. [emphasis added]

From Russ Walsh

"In order to ensure that our pre-schools are finding the right balance between academics and play, we need to be sure that we are employing the best teachers available and we need to make sure that these teachers are getting the finest, best informed professional development possible. No program, no research, no policy can come close to matching what the well-informed, well-prepared teacher can provide for children in the classroom.We cannot do pre-school on the cheap just because the children are small. We cannot run pre-school, as is often the case now, with poorly trained, poorly compensated para-professionals. The answer, ultimately, is not in the false dichotomy between academics and play, but in the will of our policy makers to make sure that every child has access to teachers who are prepared to do the job well and who are compensated appropriately for it.

AMERICA'S SCHOOLS ARE NOT FAILING

The purported failure of America’s schools, and ways to make them better by David C. Berliner

I posted twice in the last couple of months about the lie promoted by politicians, privatizers, and "reformers" which claims that America's schools are "failing."

• The Myth of America's Failing Public Schools

• The Myth of America's Failing Public Schools - Part 2

David C. Berliner, Education Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University, writes that real improvement will cost money. He wrote, paraphrasing Dewey –“What the best and wisest (among the wealthiest) parents want for their children, that must we want for all the children of the community. Anything less is unlovely, and left unchecked, destroys our democracy.” [emphasis added]

From David C. Berliner

...“fixing” the schools, about which so many of our editorialists and political leaders talk, needs deeper thinking than a knee-jerk reaction to our mean score on any international test. That mean score hides the diversity of our scores by social class and housing tract, and easily misleads us about what solutions might exist. When our leaders say teachers are not good, we need to point out to them how well some of our students are doing, and that a recent Mathematica report for the U.S. Department of Education states that the quality of teachers working in low-income schools is about the same as the quality of teachers working in high income schools. So blaming teachers won’t fix schools that need fixing!

A PLACE TO VENT

Angry (tl;dr)

During the second half of my teaching career one of my roles was that of (co-) test coordinator for my school. It didn't take long for me to realize that classroom teachers were being forced to spend more and more time "teaching to the test," a practice which had previously been avoided.

Each year more tests were added, taking up more and more instructional time, with less and less diagnostic information returned to the teachers. Each year it took longer and longer for the information to be returned to the classroom so that, by the time the results came back, the students had moved on.

I complained loudly...bitterly...obnoxiously. Other teachers agreed with me...even the principal agreed with me, but there was nothing to be done. I complained to the administration, who passed the buck to the State Department of Education...who passed the buck to the State Legislature...who passed the buck to No Child Left Behind.

In 2006 I decided that I needed a place to vent, so I started this blog.

If I were a better writer I could have written this post by Peter Greene.

From Peter Greene

My colleagues at school were, by and large, not interested. They complained when we were gored by the tip of the iceberg that passed by us, but they had no particular interest in finding out what the tip was attached to, or how big and wide the iceberg really was. And I was turning into the staff crank. So I turned to the outlet that has always served me in the past-- writing-- and for a number of reasons (mostly admiration of the bloggers already out there) I turned to blogging.

It did not occur to me that anybody would read my stuff. My goal was to vent, to rail about policies and articles that struck me as foolish, destructive, blind, ignorant.

POLITICS

Trump dumps Paris climate deal: reaction

The first two quotes need no comment...

From Dave Reay, chair in Carbon Management and Education at the University of Edinburgh

“The United States will come to rue this day,” said Dave Reay, chair in Carbon Management and Education at the University of Edinburgh, in a statement. “President Trump has argued that his decision puts economic interests first, that it will cut out interference from foreign bureaucrats and help U.S. business. In fact this move puts all business and economic interests at much greater risk. Climate change knows no borders, its impacts are blind to national flags. If global efforts to limit warming fail then we are all in trouble. From climate change, Mr. President, you can run but you can't hide.”

We Aren’t Number One…Not Even Close

From Sheila Kennedy

It’s enough to make you think American policymakers put a higher priority on the bottom lines of Big Pharma and Big Insurance than they do on the health of average citizens.

But then, what do we expect when we elect people so corrupt and self-serving they don’t even care about the health of the planet their children and grandchildren will inherit?

MIKE PENCE – OBTUSE AND IGNORANT

Mike Pence: ‘For Some Reason’ Liberals Care About Climate Change

Is Vice President Pence really this obtuse?

From Mike Pence

“For some reason or another, this issue of climate change has emerged as a paramount issue for the left in this country and around the world.”

It seems that Vice President Pence hasn't heard anything about climate change. He doesn't seem to know why it's an issue for "the left," which in this case means anyone who wants to prevent the catastrophic destruction of the earth's ecosystem by global warming. He hasn't heard that, with the rise of greenhouse gasses,

• the earth gets warmer,
• the oceans get warmer,
• the ice at the poles melts,
• the life in the ocean is at-risk,
• the sea-level rises threatening coastal cities,
• more moisture is in the air making storms wetter and stronger,
• causing flooding and more...

The Vice President has apparently not talked to the Secretary of Defense who believes global warming is a threat to national security...or the former Secretary of the Navy...or the U.S. Army...See also, the planet Venus.

Yet we really shouldn't be surprised. This is the same person who said...

..."2 out of every three smokers does not die from a smoking related illness and 9 out of ten smokers do not contract lung cancer."

and

"The truth is, [evolution] always was a theory, Mr. Speaker."

A few years ago, when he was in the House of Representatives, Pence was scientifically ignorant about smoking...or maybe he was getting money from the tobacco companies.

His ignorance also showed in his use of the word theory when talking about Evolution. In science, a theory is an explanation of a natural process which encompasses facts, laws, inferences, and hypotheses. Pence, like so many other ignorant creationists, confuses the popular meaning of the word theory with its scientific meaning. For an explanation of why theory is not "just a guess" see, Definitions of Fact, Theory, and Law in Scientific Work.

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Your School in a Market Economy

DISRUPTION

Betsy DeVos thinks this is a good way to run America's public education system...allow for the privatization of public education and let the market decide whether or not a school remains open. DeVos thinks the marketplace provides all the safeguards schools need.

In the meantime, school privatization is providing the "disruption" so important to free-market types because schools that close before the school year ends are a feature, not a bug.

Southfield charter school closes shocking students, staff

In just one of many daily stories about fraud and corruption in the mostly unregulated charter industry, students in this Michigan town got to school last week to find that their school closed -
just three weeks before the end of the year.

Teachers were seen packing their belongings. They say they will get paid Friday but the school is not able to pay them through August.

Teacher pay is often budgeted throughout the year. A contract is generally for the length of the school year – 9 or 10 months, but the pay is spread out over the entire length of the calendar year. In other words, teachers won't receive the pay for days they have already worked.

Taylor International has been beset by money problems since 2013 and according to Renaissance School Services, the company managed it and things came to a head.

"The board has resigned and we terminated our relationship with the school because we haven't been paid in about six months," said Richard O'Neill, Renaissance School Services.

The school didn't pay the management company, so it was closed down. The bottom line for privately owned and operated schools is profit, not children. Was there any governmental oversight of the taxpayer funds spent for this school? Were the books open to all? Where did the money go? Who got paid? Who didn't?

The resulting "disruption" which free-market "reformers" prize so highly, interferes with learning. School closures can have a negative effect on students.

Ben Kirshner and his colleagues at the University of Colorado at Boulder documented numerous negative effects of school closure, including higher dropout rates, lower achievement, loss of friendships, and weaker emotional ties between students and teachers.

STABILITY

When schools close before the school year ends, there's no closure to the year. Students and teachers have no chance to say goodbye to each other and their friends. Teachers are left without a complete year of student work needed to compute grades. In some cases, teachers are left without their full pay and parents are left without a place to send their children for the remainder of the year. The taxpayers' money is gone - and without public oversight, no one knows where it went.

Russ Walsh, in Creative Stability: A Better Plan for Public Schools, writes,

Every teacher knows that children learn best in a stable environment. That is why teachers spend the first several days of school establishing routines and norms for the smooth functioning of the classroom.

The disruption of a school closing gets in the way of that stability.

Public schools – real public schools, not privately owned and publicly funded charter schools - provide stability. They are part of the community and are owned by the community. The focus is on the students, not profit. The bottom line is education, not stock holders.

The free-market means competition and competition means there will be winners and losers. There should be no losers in public education.

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