I've been doing the challenge because why not? Mostly I've been answering as my pre-retirement self, but we may mix it up a bit this week. Here's the prompt:
Check-in on where you are in your summer learning journey and your overall professional journey.
When I was still teaching, I was always... somewhere. Every summer I read and I did various projects (because you can't help students learn how to Do Stuff if you have no first hand experience Doing Stuff) and I also operated on the theory that teachers owed their community a certain something in the summer in return for the taxpayer support on which we live. YMMV.
But this week I'm sending you a bulletin from the other side of retirement, because in unlearning some Teacher Things, I've come to better appreciate them. Here are some things I have had to learn.
* Measure out time in increments larger than 30 seconds. It is not necessary to squeeze achievements into every second of the day, particularly when you could be using the time to interact with the other carbon based life forms in your home.
* Eat a meal in more than five minutes.
* Read a book without repeatedly thinking, "I could use this in class for my unit about X."
* Read a book that you couldn't possibly use for class ever.
* Visit an interesting location without grabbing pamphlets for your classroom.
So apparently, thanks to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, we're all going to talk about busing some more. That's a conversation many Americans have been having, sort of, for a long time.
When Joe Biden was a freshman congressman, I was a high school junior. In my rural small town and mostly white high school, we were aware of racial and racist strife as something that happened somewhere else. Probably someplace Southern, we assumed. But when my senior year started in the fall of 1974, we were amazed to see a huge blow-up over forced busing--in Boston. Because that was in the news, one of my classes was assigned an essay about busing, or as it was more commonly called at the time, "forced busing." I can remember the broad strokes of what I wrote--something about how if black and white students sat in classes and grew up together then racial strife, like the riots that we remembered from our childhood days, would be a thing of the past. I was, like many white kids of my generation, a poster child for extreme ignorance about the history of segregation and racism in this country. Heck, in my own small town it would be decades before I learned about a petition circulated in the sixties to keep black home buyers out of certain neighborhoods. At the time, I thought that if children of all races just grew up together, we'd all treat each other with respect and kindness and the world would be a better place. It seemed so simple; but then, most things seem simple if one is ignorant of the weight of history.
I was a college freshman when Joe Biden was denouncing forced busing as racist. It was in college that I first heard a black classmate say that he didn't want desegregation--he just wanted the same resources and opportunities the white kids had without giving up his own culture. I was starting to understand that busing and segregation were way more complicated than my high school self had ever suspected.
I now sum up what I have learned about this small Oakland high school and render a judgment about its “success.” As I have stated “success” is not an either/or verdict. It has as many facets as does the crown of a cut diamond. Depending upon the available light, these facets shine brilliantly. MetWest’s ”success” is multi-faceted, highly political, yet marked by flaws.
Surely, the media accounts of MetWest have been positive, suggesting “success” in the number of high school graduates entering college and students learning through internships. That the small high school has been around for nearly two decades and now has a waiting list of 150 students eager to attend the school is further evidence that effectiveness in reaching particular goals, longevity and popularity, mainstream markers of “success,” seemingly apply to MetWest. [i]
Here I apply a two-part effectiveness criterion of whether the school has achieved its goals with minimum political conflict. On the latter point, the answer is yes. Although there was initial political skirmishing and opposition, the finesse that the teacher founders displayed in getting this small high school adopted by the school board and its continuity for nearly two decades even with much principal turnover has generated little pushback from the community.[ii]Where there is an emerging conflict, it comes not from the community but from within the district.
There have been internal political battles over expanding the school to 320 students split between two sites. District officials have pressed the current principal and staff to establish another MetWest school to double its enrollment in order to reduce the current high per-student cost of maintaining the small CONTINUE READING: The MetWest High School Story (Part 6) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
Six years ago, in another somewhat futile attempt to reduce the backlog of resources I want to share, I began this occasional “” post where I share three or four links I think are particularly useful and related to…ed tech, including some Web 2.0 apps. You might also be interested in THE BEST ED TECH RESOURCES OF 2019 – PART ONE , as well as checking out all my edtech resources . You might also w
Each year, I re-post my favorite blog posts, and then collect the links into one. This post is for my favorites from the first six months of 2019. You can see my choices for each of the past ten years here. And you can also see a list of my My All-Time Favorite Posts! I’ve also been highlighting some of the “best-of-the-best” in the “A Look Back” series. Here are My Favorite Posts In 2019 — Part
This blog has recently gained many new readers. Because of that, I thought it might be worth sharing a “A Look Back” where I periodically share my choices for the most important posts from the past twelve years. You can also see all of my choices for “Best” posts here . geralt / Pixabay I publish a lot of “Best” lists. You can see all 2100 of them here . Are my choices for the “Best of the best”
Andrew-Art / Pixabay You may have seen recent media attention to protests by Native Hawaiians against a decision to build a telescope there. I thought it was definitely worth a “Best” list, especially with the The International Day Of The World’s Indigenous People coming up. I’ll be adding this list to The Best Sites For International Day Of The World’s Indigenous People . You might also be inter
geralt / Pixabay I’ve just mailed out the August issue of my very simple free monthly email newsletter . It has over 3,000 subscribers, and you can subscribe here . Of course, you can also join the eighteen thousand others who subscribe to this blog daily. Here Are 8 Ways You Can Subscribe For Free…
They Shouldn’t Have to, But What Are Ways Teachers Can Raise Private Money for Their Classroom? is the new question-of-the-week at my Education Week Teacher column. Feel free to leave responses in the comments here or there…
I’m fairly active on Pinterest and, in fact, have curated 18,000 resources there that I haven’t shared on this blog. I thought readers might find it useful if I began sharing a handful of my most recent “pins” each week (I’m not sure if you can see them through an RSS Reader – you might have to click through to the original post). You might also be interested in My Seven Most Popular Pins In 2018
Clker-Free-Vector-Images / Pixabay TED-Ed has just published a lesson and video on cannibalism that will likely be high-interest in secondary classrooms:
I regularly highlight my picks for the most useful posts for each month — not including “The Best…” lists. I also use some of them in a more extensive monthly newsletter I send-out. You can see older Best Posts of the Month at Websites Of The Month (more recent lists can be found here ). You can also see my all-time favorites here . I’ve also been doing “A Look Back” series reviewing old favorite
Here’s my regular round-up of new “The Best…” lists I posted this month (you can see all 2,061 of them categorized here ): THE BEST RESOURCES, ARTICLES & BLOG POSTS FOR TEACHERS OF ELLS IN 2019 – PART ONE THE BEST SCIENCE SITES OF 2019 – PART ONE THE BEST COLLECTIONS OF DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES’ POLICY POSITIONS THE BEST ARTICLES (& BLOG POSTS) OFFERING PRACTICAL ADVICE & RESOURCES TO T
As regular readers know, at the end of each week I share the five most popular posts from the previous seven days. I thought people might find it interesting to see a list of the ten most popular posts from the previous thirty days. You might
State Takeovers: Radical Seizure of School Districts vs. Organic, Community Grounded School Improvement
This blog will take a one-week, mid-summer break. Look for a new post on Monday, August 5.
We are in the midst of a wave of state school takeovers.
On Tuesday evening In Providence, Rhode Island, the state Council of Elementary and Secondary Education granted the authority for Rhode Island’s recently appointed State Education Commissioner, Angelica Infante-Green, to take over the Providence Schools. A new and scathing report by a team from John Hopkins University had criticized the current operation of the school district—already under mayoral governance. For the Providence Journal,Linda Borg reports: “Under a 1997 statute, Infante-Green now has the power to revamp the teachers’ contract, revise how the school district is governed, even make decisions over hiring and firing… Infante-Green also confirmed that she will hire a superintendent to takeover the schools by early November. In fact, she is already speaking with several individuals, although no one has been named.” Diane Ravitch provides some background about Angelica Infante-Green: “Infante-Green has never run a school district. She has never been a school principal. She entered education through Teach for America, then ran bilingual programs in Bloomberg’s (NYC) Department of Education. She belongs to Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change.”
In Benton Harbor, Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer continues to threaten to close Benton Harbor’s high school or take over the school district. In a commentary for Bridge Magazine, Tom Watkins, the state’s school superintendent from 2001-2005 warns that shutting down the high school or taking over the district won’t solve the core problem: “The Benton Harbor school crisis is ground zero for a dysfunctional educational funding model and a state government that has been pretending to address the problem going back decades… If you have a hole in your roof, pretending to fix it does not keep the rain out. Our system of funding our schools is fundamentally, structurally unsound….” In a recent podcast (link includes a transcript), the education writer Jennifer Berkshire and Massachusetts education historian Jack Schneider add that Michigan’s system of cross-district open enrollment conspires with structural racism to undermine poor school students by driving out students, each one carrying school funding away from places like Benton Harbor. The system is set up to CONTINUE READING: State Takeovers: Radical Seizure of School Districts vs. Organic, Community Grounded School Improvement | janresseger
