Dear Member of Congress, Please Step Into My Class Room

Teachers, NEA has a web site at which you can invite your member of congress to visit your classroom to see what's really going on in public education today.

Have you ever thought, "If my representatives in Congress spent just one day in my shoes, they would understand better what they can do to help me – and where federal laws and regulations hamper rather than help."

Here's your chance to tell them what they would see in your classroom or school, and how they can help your students succeed. Congress is getting ready to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Act, known as NCLB, so your input is timely.

Sounds like a good idea.

~~~

Support ASCD's Petition for a President's Council on the Whole Child.

If you think a child’s worth is more than a test score, sign the petition to create a President’s Council on the Whole Child.

Click the button below...

ALEC's War on Teachers

If Diane Ravitch gave us The Most Important Speech on Education in Years, then Anthony Cody might just have written The Most Important Blog Entry on Education in Years.

In ALEC Reports on the War on Teachers Anthony Cody gives us a good look at what is happening to the teaching profession. The war being waged on teachers by corporate leaders, billionaires, and politicians (Republicans and Democrats) is being lost. The amount of money being invested in crushing public school teachers is enormous. The job of public school teachers is being redefined. Public Education is being redefined.

As state after state rewrites their education laws in line with the mandates from Race to the Top and the NCLB waiver process, the teaching profession is being redefined. Teachers will now pay the price - be declared successes or failures, depending on the rise or fall of their students' test scores. Under NCLB it was schools that were declared failures. In states being granted waivers to NCLB, it is teachers who will be subjected to this ignominy. Of course we will still be required to label the bottom 5% of our schools as failures, but if the Department of Education has its way, soon every single teacher in the profession will be at risk for the label.

NCLB brought us the guarantee that every school in the country beginning with those serving students in poverty, would be branded a failure. Race to the Top guarantees the death of public education itself. The Obama administration is pushing their pro charter agenda to the delight of the anti-public school politicians. Those anti-public school politicians, who took over state legislatures and state executive houses in the last election, are slashing funding for public education and increasing funding for charter schools and, through voucher schemes, private schools. To guarantee the complete demise of public education, states are passing laws as fast and as hard as they can to destroy the labor movement, beginning with teachers unions, in the United States.

And no state, it seems, is doing as much to further their agenda than Indiana.

The greatest success story cited in this report is Indiana, where the corporate reform "alliance" succeeded in passing comprehensive "reforms."

Gov. Daniels detailed the reforms to the American Enterprise Institute audience, describing how Indiana lawmakers limited collective bargaining to wages and benefits. Indiana law ended the illogical practice of LIFO (Last In, First Out) in layoffs, mandating a determination of merit-- based in part on student test-score gains--rather than simply seniority be used as the basis for making layoffs.

The report describes many other reforms enacted by the Indiana legislature, including expansion of vouchers, charter schools, "virtual schools," and a parent trigger so that parents can petition to convert neighborhood schools into charters.

But it was the introduction to the report, written by Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, that brought this into focus for me. He writes:

Prior to this session, 99 percent of Indiana's teachers were annually rated "Effective." If that rating were actually true, 99 percent--not just one-third--of our students would be passing national tests. From this point on, because of the diligence and fortitude of our reform-minded legislators, teachers will be promoted and retained based on performance rather than seniority. Teacher evaluations, which will be locally formulated, will rely on student improvement. Successful educators will be rewarded, while those whose students lag behind will be asked to find work elsewhere. Additionally, schools will now be graded on an A-F scale and they, too, will be held accountable for student advancement; and the state will not hesitate to intervene in those schools that fail repeatedly.

According to this logic, the individual teacher's accountability for student performance is absolute. Governor Daniels apparently believes there ought to be a one to one correspondence between student achievement and teacher effectiveness. This is rather incredible, but there you have it. Most systems base between 25% and 50% of the teacher's evaluation on test scores...

Rational thought didn't have any say in the concept of 100% of students being proficient in Reading and Math by 2014 in No Child Left Behind, and rational thought doesn't seem to be present in Mitch Daniels contention that teachers ought to be 100% responsible for the increase in student test scores. Poverty and a child's home life, of course, doesn't matter.

In addition, as if posing for the poster child for the old saying of Mark Twain's that there are "lies, damn lies, and statistics," Daniels claims that only a third of Indiana students passed national tests. He's referring to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and what he calls "passing" is scoring at the proficient level (State summaries of scores can be found here).

The late Gerald Bracey explained years ago why scoring Proficient on the NAEP was a poor way of judging...well...proficiency. Read here, here and here.

In any case, using test scores to rank teachers has been denounced by those knowledgeable in the field of testing.

As a letter from the National Research Council's Board on Testing and Assessment stated in a letter to the US Department of Education:

"VAM estimates of teacher effectiveness ... should not used to make operational decisions because such estimates are far too unstable to be considered fair or reliable."

Is anyone listening? Teachers, it's time to wake up!

Of course this is all taking place against a backdrop of rising class sizes and cuts to support services such as school libraries and health programs. But teachers alone are held accountable for the results of their students, on the narrowest of measures. How many more teachers will we lose as these policies spread? How far will this corporate reform war on our profession go? At the end of the day, this will hurt the most vulnerable students the most, as it will speed up the revolving door of their teachers and create a dynamic in which teachers with options will try not to teach in the schools and classes where poor students and English Language learners predominate.

It seems that ALEC considers itself engaged in a battle of epic proportions, yet many teachers are too busy working to even realize that their profession is being redefined in state after state.

~~~

Support ASCD's Petition for a President's Council on the Whole Child.

If you think a child’s worth is more than a test score, sign the petition to create a President’s Council on the Whole Child.

Click the button below...

2012 Medley #2

State of the Union, California, No Excuses, Reformers, Testing, Teachers Unions

Obama on education in State of the Union address

Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.

If we stop teaching to the test (which would be wonderful) does that mean that we'll identify "good teachers" some other way than by student test scores? If so, how?

Does "reward the best" teachers mean that they get paid more? If so, are we going to continue to use test scores as the measure for a "good teacher?" What's to keep teachers from "teaching to the test" if "the test" is going to determine their pay and job status?

If "teachers matter" why doesn't the President honor teachers by appointing a teacher as the Secretary of Education? He appointed a doctor as Surgeon General...an attorney as Attorney General...isn't the Department of Education important enough to warrant a professional as it's head?

See, The Facts That School Reformers Ignore.

Another critique of President Obama's Education content from the State of the Union speech is Anthony Cody's Teachers Offer the Wealthy an Escape from Poverty.

The...problem is a glaring contradiction, a logical flaw so huge it has been overlooked by almost every journalist apparently too polite to challenge the administration on it. If you do not wish teachers to teach to the test, if you want them to be passionate and creative, then how can you insist that their performance be measured by the use of test scores?

Let us be crystal clear. The Obama administration has made the use of test scores to evaluate principals and teachers a pre-condition for federal aid. Both Race to the Top and the NCLB waivers require that states develop evaluation processes that incorporate this data. Furthermore, the administration proposes to continue to identify and target for closure or "turnaround" the bottom 5% of schools, once again based on these same test scores we are told should not be taught to.

Will California Start a National Revolt Against Bad Ideas?

Gov. Jerry Brown's State of the State message, in which he announced his intention to reduce the amount of testing across the state. Standardized testing in California has spun out of control. Children in 2nd grade spend five hours on mandated state tests, for no reason at all. And it is no better, even worse, in other grades! He also made this remarkable statement: "My hunch is that principals and teachers know the most..." Can you believe it? He acknowledges that the people who do the work may know more than those who sit on the sidelines taking pot shots at them.

Behind the "No Excuses" Mask: "Evidence Is Not Policy"

The "No Excuses" Reformers have remained committed to several alternatives to what they call the status quo: Teach for America (TFA), charter schools, and school choice. What do all three have in common?

A lack of evidence for pursuing any of them as policy.

• The evidence against TFA.
• The mixed, at best, evidence about charter schools (and the reasons "no excuses" charters such as KIPP are inexcusable).
• The most recent failure of market forces/school choice in education reform.

The facts that school reformers ignore

President Obama should have read this before his State of the Union speech.

Education “reformers” have a common playbook. First, assert without evidence that regular public schools are “failing” and that large numbers of regular (unionized) public school teachers are incompetent. Provide no documentation for this claim other than that the test score gap between minority and white children remains large. Then propose so-called reforms to address the unproven problem — charter schools to escape teacher unionization and the mechanistic use of student scores on low-quality and corrupted tests to identify teachers who should be fired.

Careful examination discloses that disadvantaged students have made spectacular progress in the last generation, in regular public schools, with ordinary teachers. Not only have regular public schools not been “the great discriminator” — they continue to make remarkable gains for minority children at a time when our increasingly unequal social and economic systems seem determined to abandon them.

Testing Band and Music is on its Way

...but teaching to the test is bad...

...New York won the largest federal grant, $700 million over the next four years. In that time, roughly $230 billion will be spent on public education in the state. By adding just one-third of one percent to state coffers, the feds get to implement their version of education reform.

That includes rating teachers and principals by their students’ scores on state tests; using those ratings to dismiss teachers with low scores and to pay bonuses to high scorers; and reducing local control of education.

Second, the secretary of education, Arne Duncan, and his education scientists do not have to do the dirty work. For teachers in subject areas and grades that do not have state tests (music, art, technology, kindergarten through third grade) or do not have enough state tests to measure growth (every high school subject), it is the state’s responsibility to create a system of alternative ratings.

Why Rhee is wrong on collective bargaining and teachers’ unions

Using their own measures, standardized tests, the states with the highest scores are the states with the strongest teachers unions. This is not a question of what's best for students. It's simply another way to blame teachers and their professional organizations for the problems the country is facing.

“Critics of American education are sometimes disapproving of the teachers’ unions and of how they perceive these unions as interfering with promising school reform programmes by giving higher priority to the unions’ “bread and butter” issues than to what the evidence suggests students need to succeed. But the fact is that many of the countries with the strongest student performance also have the strongest teachers’ unions, beginning with Japan and Finland. There seems to be no relationship between the presence of unions, including and especially teachers’ unions, and student performance. But there may be a relationship between the degree to which the work of teaching has been professionalised and student performance. Indeed, the higher a country is on the world’s education league tables, the more likely that country is working constructively with its unions and treating its teachers as trusted professional partners. Witness the reports of Ontario in Canada or Finland.”

Quote of the day:

"Poor people have $h*tty lobbyists." -- Jon Stewart

~~~

Support ASCD's Petition for a President's Council on the Whole Child.

If you think a child’s worth is more than a test score, sign the petition to create a President’s Council on the Whole Child.

Click the button below...

Lessons Learned: Kimberly's Story...continued

May, 2011

There was an automobile accident last May in which a young woman, Kim, was injured. She was hospitalized with serious and life threatening injuries. Her mother, Beverly, shared Kim's story in snippets and photos on a web site for photographers -- 365Project.org. I first shared this last July (Click HERE to read it).

Beverly's comments reflected the fear of a parent whose child is in danger...

"Third surgery in two weeks, this time for a tracheotomy in her throat rather than through her mouth. Still unresponsive. Three parts of her brain have been affected by the strokes."

"...her neurologist felt that she should be given only two more weeks to respond before she should be taken off her feeding tube."

"...neurosurgeon is worried about her eyesight and the entire left side of her body as that still doesn't appear to be making any kind of progress with either."

Later comments reflected the hope of a parent whose child is working hard to recover.

"...my motto has always been 'It ain't over til it's over,'"

"Can you see me smiling from where you are...I haven't felt this positive in two months!"

"Where there's life, there's hope."

"My child never fails to amaze me. This young woman, who was virtually given up on by some doctors less than two months ago, is nearing the date when she will be coming home to her family and friends..."

Facing Challenges

When I posted about this in July there were still significant problems which needed attention...and for the last 6 months, while the rest of us have been going about our ordinary day to day lives, Kim has been working hard at healing. Here are some recent entries...pictures from Project365 and comments.

November 23 Determination

Kim is progressing well, now doing 7 hours of rehab a week -- physical, occupational and speech...still struggling with her left arm and her index finger on her right hand, but she certainly is showing improvement. They have localized her visual problem. It is called "left neglect" and it has been impairing her comprehension when she reads. Imagine a book page with a line down the middle and you were only reading the words to the right of that line...

The index finger problem affects lots of things, from being able to dress herself and putting on socks to writing. Her left arm and hand are being worked on and she can now raise it to almost shoulder height by herself, but the fingers and actual arm control are still a problem.

This is not a great photo, but I just noticed the poster on the wall and thought it very fitting so posted it anyway.

~~~

I disagree. It's a great photo...emphasis on determination.

November 24 Thanksgiving

I am thankful for roses in late November...thankful I have a home, family and enough to eat, but most of all I am thankful that Kim was at our dinner table this holiday. It's been a long and arduous seven months.

And some good can come from even the most difficult experiences...

November 26 Changes to ER policy

Due to Kim's case, Greenville Memorial Hospital has changed it's procedure for admitting trauma patients. They will now all have scans of their carotid arteries to detect any damage. Hopefully this can prevent something like this happening to someone in the future. Although airbags can save lives, they can also cause serious damage.

December 12 Update on Kim

...her newest "trick" -- being able to raise her left arm, place it on a table and rest her chin on it. They are doubling-down on working on her left arm and it is paying off.

She is still struggling with the fingers on her right hand and her speech, but both do show signs of improvement with each passing week.

She will be spending the days this week and next at "the farm" with her son Hayden. Her husband leaves them lunch each day so neither of them have to worry about anything other than resting and relaxing (I understand 3rd grade is difficult according to Hayden).

~~~

Having taught third grade for many years I can relate to Hayden's feeling about its difficulty. Perseverance helps with that, too.

Notice, also, the small improvements...arm movements, vision, speech...slow, but steady improvement.

January 3 2012 - New Beginnings

Today is a very, very special day. Kim is officially moved back to her home...

Today is the first day she will be spending completely by herself from the time her husband went to work until he comes home this afternoon.

Her hard work has payed off for her. There's still plenty to go, but this is a proud day for me as she has come so far since this spring.

January 4 The Balance Board

Kim at physical therapy on Monday. I'll bet this is harder to do than it looks.

Her husband reports that when he came home from work yesterday she had loaded and run the dishwasher, cleaned all the countertops and made the kitchen shine.

Her father bought her fresh blueberries today as she wants to try to make blueberry muffins tomorrow. She is certainly finding entertaining things for herself while she is alone all day.

~~~

Children and the Development of Courage, Perseverance and Resilience

So, why have I taken the time to blog about Kim and her family? This is an education blog. My entries, with very few exceptions. have focused on my own career and on the things I believe need to change in Federal, State, and even local public education policy. Where does Kim fit in with this?

As educators we try to help our students grow, not just academically, but emotionally and personally. The most important moments in a student's school life are generally not when he or she gets an A in a course or on a test. Just like in "real life" the most important moments in school come when children are challenged. Developing a positive response to those challenges is more important than any test or grade.

The ability to face challenges is perhaps the most important skill we learn in life. Developing the courage to face obstacles can mean the difference between a successful life and an unsuccessful one. Courage is not the absence of fear...it doesn't mean you're not afraid. Courage means you face what life offers you despite the fear which threatens to immobilize you.

Facing challenges is a common theme in children's literature...finding the strength and courage to face life's challenges appears in book after book...The Little Prince...Stone Fox...Maniac Magee...Summer of the Swans...Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (I could continue for pages and still be accused of leaving out excellent examples). Facing challenges as a theme is common because life presents us with challenges every day...and we gain inspiration from reading about people who overcome those challenges.

Developing the courage to face life's challenges begins in childhood...it begins when someone stands up to a bully on the playground...or when someone overcomes the fear of speaking in class or making a mistake. Still more difficult challenges are placed on children each day...surviving a divorce or the death of a parent...facing serious illness or injury...going hungry or homeless...being alone. Those are the bases for developing the courage to face life. That is where perseverance, determination, and resilience are built.

Kim's Story

Kim's story is one such story of perseverance, determination, and courage. It's not unlike the stories told in literature...and in the daily news...of people overcoming life's difficulties. It's important to her family because it's her story, but it's important to the rest of us because of the example it represents.

Three generations are brought together in this story. The mother is challenged with a threat to her child. Beverly knows that her daughter needs her support and help. The daughter struggles to overcome the challenges she faces. Kim works hard to heal, not just for herself, but for her family as well. The grandchild is challenged with the knowledge that his parents are vulnerable...mortal. More important, however, is the lesson Hayden learns as he sees the adults in his life working together without giving up. His parents and grandparents (not to mention the wider community of friends and relatives) support him...while he learns the lesson of perseverance.

In this way, the ability to meet life's challenges is passed from parent, to child, to grandchild. Each of them, in turn, shares that experience with others -- friends, family, coworkers, classmates -- and by doing so, everyone grows. Sharing the experience inspires the rest of us...

~~~

The last photo I posted in July was one of Kim's hand in her son's...as much a comfort to her as it was to him. Today's last photo, is chronologically out of order, but its message is the one I'd like to leave you with. Here is the family...each holding the others for support and strength, getting stronger every day, ready to continue the process of recovery together.

...and one last comment from Beverly...

December 24 Christmas Eve 2011

My beautiful little family...