Latest News and Comment from Education

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

Toward a More Just (and Creative) Curriculum, Part I | Teacher in a strange land

Toward a More Just (and Creative) Curriculum, Part I | Teacher in a strange land

Toward a More Just (and Creative) Curriculum, Part I


Virtually all of the discussion between educators is now centered on whether it’s feasible, with any kind of plan, to return to in-person schooling in the fall. I believe this national conversation will follow the Major League Baseball template: schools will begin closing as viral clusters pop up, perhaps re-opening, then closing again for the balance of the year, as it finally dawns on the most resistant anti-mask parent and school board member: This just ain’t gonna work. It’s too dangerous.
Teachers settle into a teaching practice– gathering, testing and adopting habits and materials that are effective (and discarding those that aren’t). Many teachers had difficulty abandoning those standardized resources and pedagogies when forced to teach online. They tried to do what they always did—at first, anyway. When that didn’t work so well, they began experimenting, with personal calls and meetings, extending or modifying assignments—and plenty of other strategies.
Teachers quickly discovered that the usual deliver/practice/test model was a bust, CONTINUE READING: Toward a More Just (and Creative) Curriculum, Part I | Teacher in a strange land

Remote Delivery of Instruction–Covid-19 and Re-opening Schools | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Remote Delivery of Instruction–Covid-19 and Re-opening Schools | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Remote Delivery of Instruction–Covid-19 and Re-opening Schools




Regardless of what President Trump wants, the vast majority of American students will begin their school year with remote delivery of instruction. As the surging of infections in many southern and western states has occurred, health risks for both children and adults have again risen. (see here and here). And many parents unwilling to take risks with their children will opt for staying home and their children doing the best they can with electronic devices
Note that I avoid the phrase “remote learning.” I do so because “learning” implies that through a medium–a computer screen–students have acquired knowledge and skills, been assessed for mastery, and can apply either or both in a different situation. Sitting at home in front of an Internet-connected device and listening to a teacher conduct a ZOOM session or completing and submitting an assigned worksheet, or partnering on-screen with a small group, or have small groups of students collaborate on-screen separately from the teacher can be (and are) worthwhile tasks leading to learning. But the medium has severe limitations as anyone knows who has taken online courses and experienced it since lockdowns and sheltering in began in March. And veteran and novice online teachers, are familiar with both strengths and shortcomings of distance education.
Nor am I romanticizing in-person classroom teaching. Rest assured as someone who has taught for 14 years, headed a school district for seven years, and have studied how teachers have taught over the past century I know full well the CONTINUE READING: Remote Delivery of Instruction–Covid-19 and Re-opening Schools | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

NYC Public School Parents: Today's "Talk out of School": the need for more nurses before reopening NYC schools, and how the COVID shutdown threatens the future of public education

NYC Public School Parents: Today's "Talk out of School": the need for more nurses before reopening 

Today's "Talk out of School": the need for more nurses before reopening NYC schools, and how the COVID shutdown threatens the future of public education



In today's "Talk out of School" podcast, I spoke to Kim Watkins, NYC parent leader, about the need to ensure all schools have nurses before they can reopen safely next year. Then Prof. Johann Neem joined us to explain why he fears that the Covid shutdown of schools could hasten the end of support for public education nationwide. 

You can listen here. Links to more resources, including Kim Watkin's piece for Gotham Gazette and Prof. Neem's oped in USA Today are below.
 

NYC Public School Parents: Today's "Talk out of School": the need for more nurses before reopening 

Ashley McCall: What If We Radically Reimagined School? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Ashley McCall: What If We Radically Reimagined School? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Ashley McCall: What If We Radically Reimagined School?




Ashley McCall is a bilingual third-grade teacher of English Language Arts in Chicago Public Schools. She asked in a recent post on her blog whether we might seize this opportunity to reimagine schooling for the future, to break free of a stale and oppressive status quo that stifles both children and teachers.
She writes:

“What if?” I thought. What if we did something different, on purpose? What if we refused to return to normal? Every week seems to introduce a new biblical plague and unsurprisingly, the nation is turning to schools to band-aid the situation and create a sense of “normalcy”–the same normalcy that has failed BIPOC communities for decades.


In her memoir, When They Call You a Terrorist, Patrisse Khan-Cullors states that “our nation [is] one big damn Survivor reality nightmare”. It always has been. America’s criminal navigation of the COVID-19 pandemic further highlights the ways we devalue the lives of the most CONTINUE READING: Ashley McCall: What If We Radically Reimagined School? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Sarah Lahm: The Hijacking of Police Reform by Wealthy Opportunists Resembles the Harm Done to Public Schools | Ed Politics

Sarah Lahm: The Hijacking of Police Reform by Wealthy Opportunists Resembles the Harm Done to Public Schools | Ed Politics

SARAH LAHM: THE HIJACKING OF POLICE REFORM BY WEALTHY OPPORTUNISTS RESEMBLES THE HARM DONE TO PUBLIC SCHOOLS



The Minneapolis City Council voted to disband the city’s police department on June 26, a little more than a month after George Floyd died after a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes. Chauvin, along with three other officers who were there when Floyd was killed, has since been fired from the force and is now awaiting trial for Floyd’s death.
The city council vote does not automatically mean Minneapolis will no longer have a police department, of course. After a series of steps, the public will be asked to vote in November on an amendment regarding whether or not this course of action is the right one.
n June, a competing vision of police reform had been on the table in Minneapolis. Just as community-led initiatives were gaining traction, Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo announced in June that his department would be using “real-time data” to overhaul its operations.
The work would be driven not by local grassroots groups, but instead by a Chicago-based company called Benchmark Analytics. Chief Arradondo announced on June 10 that the Minneapolis Police Department “would contract with Benchmark Analytics to identify problematic behavior early,” according to local NBC affiliate KARE 11.
Red flags flew up instantly, however, when this arrangement was made public.
For one thing, Benchmark Analytics is a private firm that promises to deliver an “all-in-one solution to advance police force CONTINUE READING: Sarah Lahm: The Hijacking of Police Reform by Wealthy Opportunists Resembles the Harm Done to Public Schools | Ed Politics

NYC Educator: Be a Role Model. Risk Your Lives and Those of Your Students to Set an Example

NYC Educator: Be a Role Model. Risk Your Lives and Those of Your Students to Set an Example

Be a Role Model. Risk Your Lives and Those of Your Students to Set an Example



You may or may not have noticed that I don't write about nursing here. I once had a girlfriend who was a nurse, though. Sometimes she'd bring me a stack of magazines and books and have me write a term paper for her. I got As on my nursing papers.

Still, you wouldn't want me as a nurse. I don't know nursing. This notwithstanding, The Atlantic had no problem having a nurse write a column on what educators ought to be doing during a raging pandemic.

My issues with this article begin with the title:


I’m a Nurse in New York. Teachers Should Do Their Jobs, Just Like I Did.

As far as I know, teachers in New York worked straight through April, May and June. Not only that, but we worked an entire week we were supposed to be off. You'd think someone writing an article about us would know that. I suppose being a nurse was her first qualification, or it wouldn't be right there in the title. Let's look at her second:


....my husband, a public-school teacher in New York City...

I sat through a Presidential forum in Pittsburgh last year. Candidate after candidate was married to a public school teacher, had a mom who was a public school teacher, or knew a CONTINUE READING: 



Biden Offers Hope for Turning Around Awful DeVos Education Policy | janresseger

Biden Offers Hope for Turning Around Awful DeVos Education Policy | janresseger

Biden Offers Hope for Turning Around Awful DeVos Education Policy



This summer some people have said it seems like deja vu all over again. In 2009, right after Barack Obama was elected President, Education Secretary Arne Duncan used over $4 billion of the public education dollars Congress had appropriated as part of a huge federal stimulus package and attached rules that made states adopt Duncan’s own pet programs in order to qualify for the money.  Now Betsy DeVos and the Trump administration have distributed CARES Act dollars in a way that favors DeVos’s favorite charter schools and private schools at the expense of what she calls “government” schools—the ones our society counts on to serve 50 million of our children.
The Secretary of Education—and in the case of Payroll Protection Program dollars, the Small Business Administration—can control the distribution of education stimulus dollars, because dispersing relief money is administered by the administration without direct Congressional oversight unless prohibitions for particular practices are written into the enabling legislation.
You will remember that as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Arne Duncan administered a $4.3 billion Race to the Top Program, a $3.5 billion School Improvement Grant program, and a $650 million Innovation Grant program. Duncan and  the U.S. Department of Education conditioned these grants on getting states to change their own laws to adopt what were later recognized as the most controversial priorities of Arne Duncan’s Department of Education. To qualify for Race to the Top, for example, states had to promise to evaluate teachers based on students’ test scores, agree to controversial turnaround plans that included school closure and privatization, and adopt “college-and-career-ready” standards, which, in practice, meant they were agreeing to adopt what became the overly constrictive, unwieldy and expensive Common Core and accompanying tests.  Underneath all of these programs was also a big change in the philosophy underneath federal education policy. Despite that races with winners always create losers, Duncan modeled his trademark education programs on the way philanthropies award funds: through competition. As the CONTINUE READING: Biden Offers Hope for Turning Around Awful DeVos Education Policy | janresseger

Is Re-Opening Schools a Political, Science-Driven or an Emotional Decision? | Ed In The Apple

Is Re-Opening Schools a Political, Science-Driven or an Emotional Decision? | Ed In The Apple

Is Re-Opening Schools a Political, Science-Driven or an Emotional Decision?



* “If we don’t re-open schools another generation of students will be doomed to a life of poverty and the poorest, must vulnerable parents will burdened with childcare expenses; if our economy doesn’t revive a depression paralleling the Great Depression is inevitable.”
* “We have to follow where science leads us, testing, contact tracing, social distancing, masks, and not allow politics or emotions to dissuade us.”
* “I’m afraid, I know too many people who died or who spent weeks recovering and months later are still suffering, until there’s a vaccine I’m not going back to work or allowing my children to go to school.”
*”I go to work every day, I have no other options, I have to pay my rent and feed my family; teachers say they love our kids; not enough to be willing to go to work, as I do.”
School opening opinion varies widely.
As tropical storm Isaisis blows by torrential rain interrupted by glaring sunlight flashes by, sort of like the school opening discussions of the moment.
For weeks the Board of Regents, the Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio CONTINUE READING: Is Re-Opening Schools a Political, Science-Driven or an Emotional Decision? | Ed In The Apple

glen brown: “I think that reopening schools would be (alas, will be) an unprecedented catastrophe… Clearly, if we are to depend on remote learning, we must address some serious issues” by Bob Shepherd

glen brown: “I think that reopening schools would be (alas, will be) an unprecedented catastrophe… Clearly, if we are to depend on remote learning, we must address some serious issues” by Bob Shepherd

“I think that reopening schools would be (alas, will be) an unprecedented catastrophe… Clearly, if we are to depend on remote learning, we must address some serious issues” by Bob Shepherd



“A new article by Dale Chu, on the Fordham Institute website, describes remote learning as being like the ‘security theatre’ that we got in response to 9/11. I found that quite interesting.
“Oddly, the question about whether we should reopen schools has some folks in Deformist/Disrupterist organizations arguing that remote learning stinks and some members of the Resistance to arguing that it’s what we have to do given the circumstances. These positions are exactly the opposite of those for which they usually advocate.
“I’m definitely of the second camp, though I have long defined remote learning as a purported educational system in which there is a remote chance that learning is taking place.
“Alas, we now know, from recent studies, that while children under ten are less likely than adults to show overt symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 infection, they have 10 to 100 times as much viral load in their upper respiratory CONTINUE READING: glen brown: “I think that reopening schools would be (alas, will be) an unprecedented catastrophe… Clearly, if we are to depend on remote learning, we must address some serious issues” by Bob Shepherd

Tennessee: Plaintiffs File Amicus Brief in Voucher Case | Diane Ravitch's blog

Tennessee: Plaintiffs File Amicus Brief in Voucher Case | Diane Ravitch's blog

Tennessee: Plaintiffs File Amicus Brief in Voucher Case



This news just in from the Education Law Center about resistance to vouchers in Tennessee. Vouchers are a huge waste of public money. Studies in recent years have converged on the conclusion that students who use vouchers fall behind their peers who remain in public school. Meanwhile, the public schools lose money that is diverted to subpar voucher schools. Why do politicians like Governor Lee of Tennessee want to spend public dollars on low-quality religious schools?
Here is a press release from the Education Law Center:
The plaintiffs in McEwen v. Lee, a case challenging Tennessee’s unconstitutional Education Savings Account voucher law passed in 2019, have filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief in an appeal of a companion challenge to the law.
In Metropolitan Government of Nashville & Davidson County v. Tennessee Department of Education, Shelby and Davidson Counties – the two counties targeted by the voucher law – obtained an injunction blocking the voucher program while the case is on appeal. Because the law applies only to students in those counties, the CONTINUE READING: Tennessee: Plaintiffs File Amicus Brief in Voucher Case | Diane Ravitch's blog

Academic Freedom, Pedagogy, White Privilege, and Racism in Higher Education – radical eyes for equity

Academic Freedom, Pedagogy, White Privilege, and Racism in Higher Education – radical eyes for equity

Academic Freedom, Pedagogy, White Privilege, and Racism in Higher Education



“Reckoning” is an imposing word for those with power and privilege; for white people in the U.S. the threat or possibility of a reckoning is often terrifying, triggering what has now been identified as white fragility.
For those abused, assaulted, or marginalized by racism, sexism/misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, etc., the possibility of a reckoning is exhilarating—although tinted with at least skepticism if not cynicism about any reckoning coming to fruition.
Amidst a pandemic, however, the murder of George Floyd at the knee of a police officer seems to have reignited with a renewed stamina the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
Professional sports, including even the ultra-conservative NFL, have blinked finally against the call for police reform and racial reform across all aspect of the U.S.
Like the symbolism now being allowed and celebrated in the NBA and WNBA, the diversity and inclusion initiatives in U.S. higher education remain mostly CONTINUE READING: Academic Freedom, Pedagogy, White Privilege, and Racism in Higher Education – radical eyes for equity

CURMUDGUCATION: Viral Overconfidence

CURMUDGUCATION: Viral Overconfidence

Viral Overconfidence



Well, this is an interesting piece of research.

A new paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that overconfidence can be transmitted socially, that being around overconfident people rubs off on other folks.

As with most psycho-social research, the experimental designs leave room for considerable debate, and there are plenty of needles to thread. I find it interesting that the transmission only appears to occur within people in your own tribe.


The research reminds me of a not-uncommon phenomenon in the world of student performance-- the group founded and led by somebody who's not very qualified, but who is absolutely confident in their awesomeness, and the group itself is filled with students who are vocal in their belief that Beloved Leader is awesome and the group itself is also awesome. These kinds of groups are aided and abetted by an entire industry of "competitions" that let them earn medals and awards.

The power of overconfidence is under-discussed in education, probably because the problems of confidence gaps loom so much larger in classrooms. But the effects are similar. A student who lacks confidence will not try, because not trying is the only tactic they believe they have for avoiding CONTINUE READING: 
CURMUDGUCATION: Viral Overconfidence


Contact tracing is hard – harder if you don’t know how high school works | JD2718

Contact tracing is hard – harder if you don’t know how high school works | JD2718

Contact tracing is hard – harder if you don’t know how high school works



The NYC DoE wrote this about contact tracing:
Tracing: In the event of a confirmed COVID-19 case in a school, NYC Test + Trace and NYC Health will investigate to determine close contacts within the school. All students and teachers in the classroom with the confirmed case are assumed close contacts and will be instructed to self-quarantine for 14 days since their last exposure to that case. In older grades where students may travel between classes, this applies to all classes that the confirmed case was in.
In older grades where students may travel between classes, this applies to all classes that the confirmed case was in.
Help me out here. “all classes that the confirmed case was in” – what do they mean? The rooms? Did they mean to say “all students who shared a class with the person with a confirmed case?” + “all teachers who taught that person?”
Why am I convinced that no one working on the NYCDoE plans has ever been to a high school?
Contact tracing is hard – harder if you don’t know how high school works | JD2718

Mr. G for District 3: Chris Guerrieri's Education Matters: The District's unacceptable plan to keep us all in the dark

Mr. G for District 3: Chris Guerrieri's Education Matters: The District's unacceptable plan to keep us all in the dark

The District's unacceptable plan to keep us all in the dark



Last week the district announced it would not disclose cases until an outbreak causes a class or school to close. Well, friends, do you know how you get an outbreak that will cause a school or class to close? By keeping cases secret. The District willingly keeping people in the dark is dangerous, reckless, and unacceptable.

So I heard about a case at a school, and I asked, mind you I didn't need to know any names. People should be allowed to keep their privacy, I just wanted to see if it happened and then what the school did to keep people going forward safe, and then this is what the district said.


Hey Chris,

Appreciate you reaching out, but I’ll have to refer you to what we shared on our website regarding medical/health information.  See it below:

Students and staff have a right to privacy with respect to any medical condition they might be encountering, including COVID-19. 

General announcements about infected individuals will not be made. However, if instances of COVID-19 impact campus operations in any way, we will make appropriate announcements through the school.

Medical professionals from the Department of Health determine who needs to know about specific COVID-19 CONTINUE READING: Mr. G for District 3: Chris Guerrieri's Education Matters: The District's unacceptable plan to keep us all in the dark