Big Education Ape: Sep 28, 2020

Monday, September 28, 2020

1619 | Teacher in a strange land

1619

When I was a junior in HS, my American History teacher was in a serious car accident in the fall, and did not return to teaching. This was 1967, and Social Studies teachers weren’t thick on the ground. The situation was personally worrisome: I had somehow persuaded this history teacher to let me take his required class as an ‘Independent Study’ so I could take both band and choir (which were infinitely more important to me than American History).

As rounds of fill-in teachers appeared, I was basically living in fear that my arrangement with Mr. Gilbert would be uncovered. He apparently left no record that I was even part of his class load. I might have to drop out of the choir—and I loved the choir—being coerced to return to conventional, one-chapter-a-week-test-on-Friday American History. It could go on my permanent record, or something.

Then fate smiled. My school district hired a young, spanking-new graduate of Western Michigan University, in December. She was cool with my studying American History on my own, added my name to the official grade book, and offered me her college history texts. Assignments would be short papers—and conversations with her. She recommended paperbacks I might enjoy.

In one of those conversations, I mentioned that her college Am-Hist textbooks presented things differently from our HS text. Things like the smallpox-infested blankets and how Andrew Jackson might not be a totally upright guy.

She smiled her praise. Good work, she said. You now understand that the people who CONTINUE READING: 1619 | Teacher in a strange land

Are teachers ready to help students navigate chaos?

How can teachers help students grapple with the chaos surrounding us?

Too many aspiring teachers lack sufficient knowledge and preparation to guide students through these tough times

No matter whether elementary teachers return to physical or virtual classrooms, this will be a year for the history books. Even kindergartners have plenty of questions about the presidential election, the pandemic and the movement to end systemic racism.

What’s less clear is how prepared elementary school teachers are to put these seismic events into context.

More aspiring elementary teachers failtheir professional entry exams on the first attempt than pass them, a rate unheard of in other professions. The rate of failure for aspiring Black and Latinx teachers is even higher than for aspiring white teachers, making lack of content knowledge preparation yet another obstacle to the diversification the teaching profession so dearly needs.

This problem has been created in large part by institutions’ failing to acknowledge that elementary teachers need to acquire specialized content knowledge — not just professional coursework — to be effective.

Many working on an elementary education degree are given free rein to take whatever general education course interests them, and one called The Sexual Revolution of the 1960sno doubt proves more compelling to the average college student than a course entitled From the American Revolution to the Civil War.

A look at the courses required by teacher preparation programs reveals scant attention to the broad social studies knowledge aspiring elementary teachers need to provide essential context to world events. At most of these institutions, the deficiency is not about a lack of sufficient credit hours. Instead, it’s a failure, first, to diagnose knowledge gaps at the point of admission to a teacher preparation program, and second, to narrow choices available to aspiring teachers with demonstrable gaps in their knowledge.

Not until the end of their preparation, with most of their coursework under their belts, do most aspiring teachers find out what they don’t know — a rude awakening when they get back the results of their state’s licensing tests.

Some teacher educators have pushed back at me on this point, asserting CONTINUE READING: Are teachers ready to help students navigate chaos?

Sound Advice for Parents of Young Children | Diane Ravitch's blog

Sound Advice for Parents of Young Children

Denisha Jones, an expert in early childhood education and a lawyer (and a member of the board of the Betwork for Public Education) has prepared an excellent report for Defending the Early Years.

DEY advocates for sound educational practices for young children, and their advice in this report is balanced and humane.

Be sure to read the recommendations at the end of the report.

It begins:

Though the push to online learning/remote schooling was necessary to deal with a global pandemic, it ushered in fundamental changes to the lives of young children, their families, and their teachers. The speed at which schools were closed and how quickly we expected children and families to learn online or at home made it difficult for CONTINUE READING: Sound Advice for Parents of Young Children | Diane Ravitch's blog

The Students Left Behind by Remote Learning — ProPublica

The Students Left Behind by Remote Learning

Has a desire to keep the coronavirus out of schools put children’s long-term well-being at stake?

This story was co-published with The New Yorker and is not subject to our Creative Commons license.

Shemar, a 12-year-old from East Baltimore, is good at math, and Karen Ngosso, his fourth grade math teacher at Abbottston Elementary School, is one reason why. “I would try to pump him up and tell him, ‘You’re a good student,’” she said. But she knew that he didn’t get enough sleep, and he was often absent. His home situation, like those of many of her students, was unstable: his mother suffered from drug addiction, and they moved frequently.

Ngosso kept an eye on Shemar even after he started ﬁfth grade, which is when I met him, in late 2018, at First & Franklin Presbyterian Church, a few blocks from the transitional housing where he and his mother were living. I volunteered to tutor Shemar, and once a week I picked him up from school and we’d do homework at a coffee shop.

Shemar has a remarkably good sense of direction, which came in handy when he had to catch multiple buses and the light rail to get to school from wherever home happened to be. He has a knack for impish one-liners, often prefaced by “Can I just say something?” He is the only kid I’ve tutored who will, without fail, stop mid-text to ask about a word he doesn’t recognize. “Personiﬁcation?” he’ll ask. “What’s that?” His own vocabulary is charmingly esoteric — once, he said that an older sister had “bamboozled” him into going to the store; another time, he asked me to tighten his swim goggles “just a smidgen.”

His mother takes Suboxone every day at a clinic, but stability is elusive. She and Shemar often stay up late watching TV, and when Shemar made it to school he was often drowsy in class. But being around teachers and other kids revived him. I continued to see him when he entered sixth grade, and on days when I picked him up he was typically tearing around the jungle gym with friends, with an unself- CONTINUE READING: The Students Left Behind by Remote Learning — ProPublica

Teacher Tom: "If I Could Take on All of Their Pain, I Would"

"If I Could Take on All of Their Pain, I Would"

Parents, if they love their children at all, at least sometimes worry about what their offspring might say about them in some future therapy session. We strive to love them in a way that guides them to grow up to be strong, confident, thoughtful, and caring, even as we know that the degree to which they fall short of the ideal will inevitably be blamed, at least in part, on us. It doesn't seem fair, especially since we don't get graded on a curve. Sometimes even the most ghastly parents produce saints, while the most conscientious of us are doomed to watch our children struggle and even suffer. That's because there is more at play than parenting, as important as it is. There are so many other factors involved in how any of us "turn out," from genetic to environmental, that only the most abusive and neglectful of parents will ever really know exactly what role they've played in who their child grows up to be, and what an awful knowledge that would be.

The best of us try so hard to help them, to be with them, and to absorb as much of their pain as we can. Parents often say things like, "If could take on all of their pain, I would." It's part of what human love is. In turn, we hope to shelter them from as much pain as possible, and by no means do we want or expect them to absorb any of our pain. But they love us too, and they are human too, which means that they must take on some of our pain. We're wise to avoid laying the whole awful truth on them, of course, the time for that knowledge will come soon enough, but some of our pain will always get through and they will suck it up like sponges because this is part of what it means to love. Likewise, they CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: "If I Could Take on All of Their Pain, I Would"

Capital & Main: Which Plutocrats Are Funding Fight Against Tax Reform | Diane Ravitch's blog

Capital & Main: Which Plutocrats Are Funding Fight Against Tax Reform

California has been underfunding its public schools for years. The state has vast wealth but low taxes for commercial real estate, due to Prop 13, which was enacted in 1978 as part of a taxpayer revolt. It froze taxes on commercial real estate at 1975 levels.

Who are the plutocrats funding the fight against Prop 15? Investigative journalism Capital & Main followed the money.

As reporter Bobbi Murray shows, the tax system is badly skewed and vastly profitable properties are under taxes.

Prop. 15, the second of 12 initiatives to appear on California’s ballot, would establish a “split-roll” system to tax corporate and commercial property at presently assessed values instead of at rates based on purchase prices set by Proposition 13 in 1978. Chevron, for example, has saved over $100 million a year on taxes, as CONTINUE READING: Capital & Main: Which Plutocrats Are Funding Fight Against Tax Reform | Diane Ravitch's blog

Derek Black’s Fine New Book Explores the History of America’s Idea of Public Education — Part I | janresseger

Derek Black’s Fine New Book Explores the History of America’s Idea of Public Education — Part I

Derek Black’s stunning new book, School House Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy, threads together a history that has rarely been collected in one volume. Black, a professor of constitutional law at the University of South Carolina, presents the history of an idea first articulated in the Northwest Ordinances of 1785 and 1787, threatened again and again throughout our nation’s history but persistently revived and reanimated: that a system of public education is the one institution most essential for our democratic society. And, while the specific language defining a public education as each child’s fundamental right is absent from the U.S. Constitution, the guarantee of that right is embedded in the nation’s other founding documents, in the history of Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, in the second Reconstruction during the Civil Rights Movement, and in every one of the state constitutions.

Today’s post will skim the history as Derek Black presents it; on Wednesday, this blog will explore how Black believes both public education and democracy are threatened today.

While the U.S. Constitution never formally names public education as the nation’s fundamental and necessary institution, the provision for public education is the centerpiece of the Northwest Ordinances of 1785 and 1787: “The Ordinances, and education’s role in them, however, cannot be so easily dismissed. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 is one of the most significant legal documents in our nation’s history and the current United States Code teats it as such… In many important ways, the history and effect of the Constitution and the Ordinances are inseparable. First, the documents were passed by many of the same people… Second, the Northwest Ordinance’s substance is a constitutional charter of sorts. Practically speaking, it established the foundational structure for the nation to grow and organize itself CONTINUE READING: Derek Black’s Fine New Book Explores the History of America’s Idea of Public Education — Part I | janresseger

Whatever Happened to Authentic assessment? | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Whatever Happened to Authentic assessment?

No Child Left Behind drove a stake into its heart. OK, that is a bit dramatic but the standards, tests, and accountability movement that began in the early 1980s, picking up speed in the 1990s, then accelerating to warp drive with the passage of NCLB brushed aside this Progressive instructional reform called “authentic assessment.”* Pick your metaphor but, save for scattered teachers across America who began teaching during the height of “authentic assessment,” few new superintendents, novice principals, and rookie teachers, much less reform-minded parents have ever heard of this Progressive way of assessing student learning.

Where and When Did Authentic Assessment Originate?

In the 1980s following A Nation at Risk report state policymakers rushed to raise curriculum standards and increase school and district accountability. One outcome of these cascading reforms across the country was a sharp increase in students taking required standardized tests. By the late-1980s and early 1990s, Progressives of the day such as Deborah Meier, Grant Wiggins, Fred Newmann, Linda Darling Hammond, and Ted Sizer sought to make schooling more CONTINUE READING: Whatever Happened to Authentic assessment? | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Stupid Zoom Trick 1 | JD2718

Stupid Zoom Trick 1

Teaching this way is not like real teaching. Maybe a pale facsimile. And that’s not a real classroom. But I still need to find ways to have fun.

This story needs some context. You may know that I stopped giving tests. But I live in a world, and teach in a world, with tests. One of my ‘classes’ this term is one term advanced – scheduled to take a Regents Exam in January – a Regents Exam that will never happen.

How do I avoid spending a horrible zoom-term prepping for an exam that won’t happen? I need to convince the kiddos that it is not necessary. And how do I do that? I’m lucky. My students are good at taking tests (that’s the nature of the school). Their instructor in the Spring was good. He taught, pretty well, over half the material on the Regents. And the scoring scale is bizarre – associating passing with earning one-third of the points. (Really. Look.)

So I gave a Regents, in three parts, so that we don’t have to do any more testing or test prep this term. They did a Part I during an asynchronous class CONTINUE READING: Stupid Zoom Trick 1 | JD2718

The Awful Inhumanity of Life at NY’s Success Academy | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

The Awful Inhumanity of Life at NY’s Success Academy

Eva Moskowitz is a former NYC council woman who was chosen by hedge funders to operate a charter school chain in New York, Success Academy (SA).

Her authoritatian leadership produces high test scores (from “little test-taking machines”)– and high student and teacher attrition.

SA’s ever-percolating dysfunction has found expression on the Instagram site, @survivors_of_successacademy, described as “a place to anonymously share your experience of racism and/or mismanagement at Success Academy.”

Below are some entries detailing a twisted inhumanity at SA:

“On my last day at SA as an assistant, I fainted in the blocks room with my K kids. This was after a nonstop day, in the hot sun with them outside, and no lunch break besides trying to snack when I could sneak away to my bag really quick during the day. … My head teacher was annoyed I missed dismissal because I fainted. She realized it was bad when I needed my dad to pick me bc I wasn’t comfortable driving. I called the dean on the way home and quit.”

“In the 2018-19 school year, my leadership team made us keep scholars who had low grade fevers in school. I would call their parents and tell them we would ‘monitor’ the situation, even though SA guidelines are to have scholars with a fever sent home. Only if the fever kept rising is when we would ask for them to [be] picked up. My direct manager, a business operations manager, made the main office switch from an in-ear thermometer to an orl thermometer because she thought the ear thermometer was giving inaccurate results. She then told us we couldn’t order the oral thermometer covers because it would make the readings higher. When we expressed to her how unhygienic that was, she told us to ‘wipe the thermometer with an alcohol pad after each use.'”

“[One of our teachers this year] wasn’t feeling well on a Wednesday and found out she had the flu. She was still asked to come in for the full day Thursday CONTINUE READING: The Awful Inhumanity of Life at NY’s Success Academy | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

Reflections on Teaching » Week 3 in Distance Learning 2020

Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » Week 3 in Distance Learning 2020

Week 3 in Distance Learning 2020

I’m still tired. This week, it’s mostly due to poor planning on my part, and things in my family life. Class, that’s settling into a routine. I’m making adjustments as I get feedback from my parents. Mostly it’s about giving kids “breaks” but also transition signals and check-ins to get them or keep them on track. I’m running classes about 30 minutes of direct instruction, then 30+ minutes for them to work independently finishing up work based on what I taught. The direct instruction includes Nearpods or discussions (small group or whole class).

A notable recent moment in the classroom was during the novel I’ve been reading to students, Rick Riordan’s The Red Pyramid which is part of his Kane Chronicles series based on Egyptian Mythology. I picked the book out because I wanted to find a fun book to start out the school year, and I wanted to have a non-white character, since most of those types of books used in elementary, and most of the novels that have traditionally been used for fourth grade have white characters. I had read the novel to my son when he was younger (but older than 9). The story starts with an explosion at the British Museum, where the Kane family was visiting after hours. Dad is African American Egyptologist. The kids are mixed, their mom was a white CONTINUE READING: Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » Week 3 in Distance Learning 2020

NYC Public School Parents: Principals vote "no confidence" in Mayor; ability of DOE to provide an adequate education to NYC kids more in doubt than ever

Principals vote "no confidence" in Mayor; ability of DOE to provide an adequate education to NYC kids more in doubt than ever

Mark Cannizzaro, President of the CSA, the administrator's union, just announced that they had unanimously approved a resolution this morning, saying they had lost trust in the Mayor, and calling him to cede control over NYC schools and let the NY State Education Department take over.

It is clear from the CSA resolution, press release and subsequent press conference that the frustration of principals has reached a boiling point, given all the repeated last minute changes in DOE's reopening plans and how they were not included in any of the discussions that has made their attempt to staff their schools even more difficult that it was already, with three different teachers required for in-person learning, remote blended learning, and 100% remote learning.

The lengthy resolution says, among other things, that DOE had "entered into grossly irresponsible staffing agreements that fail to prioritize needs of school children and families" & district superintendents have pressured principals "to falsely report their staffing needs already met."

The straw that broke the camel's back, according to President Mark Cannizzaro at a press conference this afternoon, was the latest DOE MOU with the UFT, released on Friday, that will allow teachers to stay home if they are teaching remotely, which he said makes the orderly staffing of schools even more difficult. He also cited a DOE email that went out to administrators, saying that they would have teach classes, even though the Chancellor had earlier agreed that this would be a voluntary decision on their part.

FACE (DoE's office of Family and Community Empowerment) also emailed parents late on Friday, linking to the new UFT agreement and highlighting the new role of CONTINUE READING: NYC Public School Parents: Principals vote "no confidence" in Mayor; ability of DOE to provide an adequate education to NYC kids more in doubt than ever

Stumbling Towards School Re-Opening: Can NYC Successfully Bring a Million Kids Back to Hybrid Schools? | Ed In The Apple

Stumbling Towards School Re-Opening: Can NYC Successfully Bring a Million Kids Back to Hybrid Schools?

UPDATE: Council of Supervisors and Administrators (CSA) union executive board unanimously passed a “no confidence” resolution condemning the mayor and the chancellor – see here

At the core of the revival of New York City is slowly and safely returning to normalcy, stores and restaurants reopening, workers returning to offices, and, student returning to schools safely.

Spain, Italy, France and Great Britain all thought they had turned the corner only to see COVID numbers spike. As we move further and further into colder weather and more and more indoor activities will we see a spike in New York City?

The COVID data in New York State is widely available online.

COVID School Report Cards: https://schoolcovidreportcard.health.ny.gov/#/home

COVID by zip code: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/nyregion/new-york-city-coronavirus-cases.html

NYC COVID Positive Testing Rate: https://forward.ny.gov/percentage-positive-results-region-dashboard

The most complicated issue: whether to reopen schools, and, if so, how do you CONTINUE READING: Stumbling Towards School Re-Opening: Can NYC Successfully Bring a Million Kids Back to Hybrid Schools? | Ed In The Apple

A VERY BUSY DAY Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... The latest news and resources in education since 2007

Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007

A VERY BUSY DAY

Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

The latest news and resources in education since 2007

This Week’s “Round-Up” Of Useful Posts & Articles On Ed Policy Issues

by Larry Ferlazzo / 13h

Here are some recent useful posts and articles on educational policy issues (You might also be interested in THE BEST ARTICLES, VIDEOS & POSTS ON EDUCATION POLICY IN 2019 – PART TWO ): A Pivotal Moment for U.S. and Public Schools? (Part 2) is by Larry Cuban. Beyond Spending Levels: Revenue Uncertainty and the Performance of Local Governments∗ is a new study that finds even questions about future

The “Write. Right. Rite.” Series With Jason Reynolds Is A Gold Mine For Teachers & Students

by Larry Ferlazzo / 13h

To help build a sense of community in my distance learning classes, one of the activities I did with them was Jason Reynolds’ Frame A Special item lesson I found at Facing History. It went very well. However, it wasn’t until this week that I found out that it was just one of many videos and activities that he made for The Library of Congress this year, and they look great! You can find them all a

Monday’s Must-Read Articles About School Reopening

by Larry Ferlazzo / 13h

geralt / Pixabay Here are new additions to THE BEST POSTS PREDICTING WHAT SCHOOLS WILL LOOK LIKE IN THE FALL : Florida education commissioner orders Miami to open schools earlier than planned is from The Washington Post. As Covid-19 Closes Schools, the World’s Children Go to Work is from The NY Times. As I said last week, I wasn’t sure it was possible to find a school district that was more dysfu

Everything You Wanted To Know About Teaching Current Events But Were Afraid To Ask

by Larry Ferlazzo / 13h

stux / Pixabay I have over 2,100 frequently revised and updated “Best” lists on just about every subject imaginable, and you can find them listed three different ways in three different places (see Three Accessible Ways To Search For & Find My “Best” Lists ). I’m starting to publish a series where each day I will highlight the “Best” lists in a separate category. Today, it’s on Current Events: Th