4-16-14 The Whole Child Blog — Imagine Today's Children at 25 — Whole Child Education

Imagine Today's Children at 25 — Whole Child Education:

THE WHOLE CHILD BLOG

Imagine Today’s Children at 25

April 16, 2014 by Whole Child Symposium

"What do we want our children to be like? Think of that child, that teenager, that young adult and describe them. What words do we use? ... What do our children want to be like when they are 25? How would they describe themselves? Are they content with an education system which at times seems more designed to sort, test, and label students than develop, educate, or prepare them?"

—"In Support of the Whole Child," The Huffington Post, 2012

We live in a global economy that requires our students to be prepared to think both critically and creatively, evaluate massive amounts of information, solve complex problems, and communicate well. A strong foundation in reading, writing, math, and other core subjects is still as important as ever, yet by itself is insufficient for lifelong success. For too long, we have committed to time structures, coursework, instructional methods, and assessments designed more than a century ago. Our current definition of student success is too narrow. It is time to put students first, align resources to students’ multiple needs, and advocate for a more balanced approach.

If the child were truly at the center of each educational decision, what would that look like? Would we

• Create learning conditions that enable all children to develop their fullest potential?
• Enable children to reconnect to their communities and their own diverse learning resources?
• Deeply engage each child in learning?
• Integrate all the ways children come to know the natural world, themselves, and one another, so that they 

4-15-14 The Whole Child Blog — Glowing, Growing, and Getting Back to the Real Basics

The Whole Child Blog — Whole Child Education: THE WHOLE CHILD BLOGGlowing, Growing, and Getting Back to the Real BasicsApril 15, 2014 by Whole Child PodcastDownload Podcast Now [Right-Click to Save]In this era of school reform, turn around, and educational change, it is easy to overlook the basics of why we educate and what we want for our children. These aren't the typical basics—reading, 'riting

by mike simpson / 13h 

The Daily Censored » After we’ve won: 3 education policy proposals: Truth/facts, Love/community, Lifelong virtue

The Daily Censored » After we’ve won: 3 education policy proposals: Truth/facts, Love/community, Lifelong virtue:

After we’ve won: 3 education policy proposals: Truth/facts, Love/community, Lifelong virtue

Education builds the future, and as you who read alternative media know so well, is a lifelong upgrade in virtue.

Alternative media is engaged in an education contest. We educate the public that US “leadership” is an oligarchy immersed in “Big Lie” crimes centering in war, money, and media (also in ~100 other crucial areas). The oligarchy “educates” through “leaders” that their actions are legal, wise, and in the public’s best interest. The oligarchy’s media controls textbooks, and are a major source of their propaganda.

To be clear: the above links (among work of hundreds in alternative media) easily explain, document, and prove a “1%” criminal oligarchy engage in psychopathic crimes that annually kill millions, harm billions, and loot trillions. The education contest is not about what the objective facts are, but the art and science of communication for public recognition of those facts.

The irony is that this battle has been fought and won before: “Enlightenment” ideals of objective and independently verifiable data is where all educated people claim to stand, and apply in all areas of competence. When these academic and professional standards are applied in this contest, “official” stories are easily and quickly exposed as propaganda surviving with normalcy bias, “Big Lies,” and appeal to authority (to stop at just three factors).

When we win, the field of education for our children will become quite different from how it looks today. Among the changes, these three seem essential:

1. Truth/facts.
2. Love/community.
3. Lifelong virtue.

1. Truth/facts: This “top 3 list” is a context; the upgrade of what’s necessary in detail is lengthy and goes beyond the limited work I’ve done in history, government, and economics (full archive here) to explain, document, and prove official lies centering in wars and what we use for money.

The good news is that this shift will be relatively easy after media control is ended. The bad news is that the struggle to discern fact from spin today is the best education I can imagine.

2. Love/community: The unspoken context of education today is education of one’s self as an individual. This is important, and just one of several essential The Daily Censored » After we’ve won: 3 education policy proposals: Truth/facts, Love/community, Lifelong virtue:

John Thompson: Gallup Poll Finds Majority of Teachers "Not Engaged" - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher

John Thompson: Gallup Poll Finds Majority of Teachers "Not Engaged" - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher:

John Thompson: Gallup Poll Finds Majority of Teachers "Not Engaged"

By Anthony Cody on April 16, 2014 12:43 PM

Guest post by John Thompson.

Gallup has produced decades of research on the characteristics of high-performing educators, students and schools. Gallup explains that its studies have produced "unparalleled expertise on the 'human' elements" of school improvement, but "these elements are often overlooked in the effort to 'fix' America's education system." 

 

Gallup's latest study found that 56% of teachers polled are "not engaged." They may be satisfied with their jobs, but they are not emotionally connected to their schools. Another 13% are "actively disengaged." While those numbers are consistent with the engagement and disengagement levels of most American workers, they are very disturbing for a profession that seeks to nurture engagement in young people with learning and developing the skills necessary for well-rounded fulfilling lives. 

 

Moreover, 46% of teachers report high daily stress. That is nearly identical as the stress reported by physicians and nurses.   

The survey found that teachers are dead last among occupational groups in terms of their opinions being heard at work. That fosters teachers' feelings of isolation and disempowerment. Gallup concludes that the "increased use of high-stakes testing at the state and district levels may be exacerbating this problem by limiting teachers' control over their own work." 

 

These findings also suggest the approach school reformers should have adopted. The first step in improving schools, Gallup finds, is asking teachers about curriculum, pedagogy, and other issues, John Thompson: Gallup Poll Finds Majority of Teachers "Not Engaged" - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher:

Elizabeth Warren and I | Diane Ravitch's blog

Elizabeth Warren and I | Diane Ravitch's blog:

I have recently read that Senator Elizabeth Warren is a supporter of school vouchers. This made people who despise public schools, like certain hedge fund managers, tingle with joy. At last, a progressive who is as contemptuous of public education as they are! At last, someone who will support their efforts to dismantle our nation’s precious democratic institution whose doors are open to all.

About a month ago, I visited Senator Warren in her office in Washington, and she said without reservation that this was untrue.

She told me that she was, like me, a graduate of public schools. Without public education, she said, she would not be where she is today.

I gave her a copy of “Reign of Error,” which she promised to read.

Since I am writing this on an iPad from Louisville, I can’t figure out how to add the photo of me and Warren, holding the book. But I will tweet it.

I hope to hear from her again. More on this when I do.

Hedge fund managers, don’t be so sure of yourselves. You can’t buy everyone.

Common Core Taking a Beating in Oklahoma Statehouse and Campaign Trail | Truth in American Education

Common Core Taking a Beating in Oklahoma Statehouse and Campaign Trail | Truth in American Education:

Common Core Taking a Beating in Oklahoma Statehouse and Campaign Trail

Filed in Common Core State Standards, Education at State Level by Shane Vander Hart on April 16, 2014 • 0 Comments

It is not a done deal yet.  Earlier this month the Oklahoma Senate passed HB3399 on a 37 to 10 vote.  The Oklahoma House will need to consider the Senate amendments, and then it needs to go onto Governor Mary Fallin.  They will need to also consider the testing that they do.  Oklahoma pulled out of PARCC, but have worked with a company that was a subcontractor for PARCC with the new assessment.  So Common Core opponents in Oklahoma want to see a clear break from the Common Core and players associated with the Common Core and its aligned assessments.  They don’t want the assessment to be PARCC-light just like opponents to the Common Core want to see a rebranding of the Common Core instead of a legitimate repeal.

In the light of the bill, you also have the State Superintendent of Public Instruction race in Oklahoma and the Common Core is front and center.  The Tulsa World reports:

A candidate for state superintendent challenged incumbent Janet Barresi on Monday to clarify her stance on the controversial Common Core standards and whether she sought federal intervention to put down an effort to repeal those standards in Oklahoma.

Joy Hofmeister, a Tulsa Republican, said Barresi, who has long supported Common Core standards, gave differing statements on the hot-button issue at campaign appearances in Tulsa and Oklahoma City last week.

She also contended that Barresi requested assistance from the Obama administration “to bully the (state) Legislature into protecting Common Core” and then twisted the facts to 

Listen: In Louisville, Education Instigator Diane Ravitch Shares Concerns About School Reforms | WFPL

Listen: In Louisville, Education Instigator Diane Ravitch Shares Concerns About School Reforms | WFPL:

Listen: In Louisville, Education Instigator Diane Ravitch Shares Concerns About School Reforms

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By DEVIN KATAYAMA

She's against high-stakes testing, big business in schools, and doubts charters are the answer to improving public education. But Diane Ravitch, a New York University research professor who has become an influence voice in U.S. education, didn't always feel this way.

Education historian Diane Ravitch is the recipient of the 2014 Grawemeyer Award for Education.

“It’s very difficult once you become embedded in a point of view to step back from it," Ravitch said Wednesday. "And I found that to be true because all your social networks tend to agree with you."

Ravitch spoke at WFPL studios Wednesday morning to an audience that included people who agreed and disagreed with her beliefs on how to improve public education. Ravitch won the 2014 Grawemeyer Award for Education from the University of Louisville for her book, "The Life and Death of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education."

She explains how she worked on reforms for the U.S. Department of Education under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, but changed her mind on the policies she supported then.

She now says those policies now hurting students, teachers, and schools.

(Please add comments at the bottom of this post.)

Does she thinks our understanding of the way children learn has changed?

"I think what we understand is that there is no single understanding, that children are very different, and what we're trying to do today is to create standardization and it doesn't work," Ravitch told the audience in WFPL's studio.

"That children are so different and I hear this from teachers all the time and I know this from my own experience, that the sophistication about learning is to recognize that you have to be, as a teacher, flexible enough to respond to the children in front of you, which is why when you get non educators making policy, they don't understand that."

Ravtich also said the Common Core Standards, which Kentucky and a majority of states have adopted, will not answer public education's single biggest problem, the "vast inequality in our society."

"The standards will not change that. Where they could be helpful to teachers is, if Listen: In Louisville, Education Instigator Diane Ravitch Shares Concerns About School Reforms | WFPL:

“Revival from the Roots”: A listening tour of Philly Schools with Parents United and PFT’s Jerry Jordan | Parents United for Public Education

“Revival from the Roots”: A listening tour of Philly Schools with Parents United and PFT’s Jerry Jordan | Parents United for Public Education:

“Revival from the Roots”: A listening tour of Philly Schools with Parents United and PFT’s Jerry Jordan

Posted on April 16, 2014 by HELENGYM

I was deeply moved in watching the final cut of “Revival from the Roots,” a listening tour Parents United did with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. We wanted to hear from Philadelphia’s parents, staff and students who live the consequences of the policies we enact on our public schools. Here we toured West Philadelphia and talked with families from Barry, Lea and Penn Alexander Elementary schools and with students and staff at West Philadelphia High School. We have to be humble and thoughtful that too many of our young people face or deal with circumstances most of us could not even imagine. Our schools shouldn’t be part of their problems. They can and must uplift and invest in young people. Rather than seeing them as broken institutions to be discarded or shut down, they can be places of hope and potential. With the right investment, they are the most stalwart buffer against poverty and the best proof of our collective values. I could not be prouder to be part of this effort and to share it with outstanding parent voices like our own Maurice Jones and so many others. It’s eight minutes you won’t regret! Many thanks to Media Mobilizing Project and to the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers for this incredibly moving collaboration.

Competing Views of Teacher Tenure Are on Display in California Case - NYTimes.com

Competing Views of Teacher Tenure Are on Display in California Case - NYTimes.com:

Competing Views of Teacher Tenure Are on Display in California Case

One of the student plaintiffs spoke outside the Superior Court of Los Angeles County on the opening day of Vergara v. The State of California in May 2012.CreditMonica Almeida/The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — These are two vastly different portraits of California’s education system. In one, poor and minority students are frequently placed in front of incompetent teachers whose blackboards are filled with basic misspellings and who play irrelevant movies instead of devising lesson plans for class time. In the other, the vast majority of teachers are providing students with all they need to learn, and well-run school districts are able to ferret out and dismiss the ones who are not.

For more than two months, lawyers have been arguing in state court over whether California’s laws governing teacher tenure, firing and layoffs violate students’ constitutional right to an education. And by the beginning of July, Rolf Treu, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge, will deliver the first legal ruling on the case, which has attracted national attention. In states around the country, opponents of tenure rules, who have tried and largely failed to bring about changes through state legislatures, are looking to this case as a test of whether taking their arguments to court could prove more successful.

Photo

Dr. John E. Deasy, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, testified in May 2012.CreditMonica Almeida/The New York Times

Lawyers for the students named in the case, Vergara v. California, have argued that California students are subject to an unfair system that deprives them of a fair education, which translates into the loss of millions of dollars in potential earnings over their lifetimes. But lawyers for the state and the teachers’ unions counter that the problems in the system have little or nothing to do with the rules that govern how teachers are hired and fired.

In many ways, the case echoes the political debate over tenure that has gone on for years. Some school superintendents and education Competing Views of Teacher Tenure Are on Display in California Case - NYTimes.com:

4-16-14 Engaging Parents In School… | Going Beyond Parent "Involvement"

Engaging Parents In School… | Going Beyond Parent "Involvement":

Useful New “Family Engagement Brief”

The National Center For Families Learning has just published a useful “Family Engagement Brief.” I don’t think people familiar with parent engagement research will find anything new in it, but it provides a well-written and concise review of research on the topic, along with providing some case studies. I’m adding it to “The Best Research Available On Parent Engagement.”

by Larry Ferlazzo / 4min hide  //  save

Interesting Discussion: “Should parents have a say in curriculum?”

Chalkbeat, an education new site, has published Chalkbeat Roundtable: Should parents have a say in curriculum? Interesting question, and good guests there respond to it.

by Larry Ferlazzo / 4min 

“Why ‘parental involvement’ is not a ‘broken compass.’”

I’ve written a couple of posts skeptical of claims made by authors of a new book on parent involvement called The Broken Compass, with the most recent one about their op-ed piece in The New York Times on Sunday. Inflated Research Claims Can Harm Children: Why “parental involvement” is not a “broken compass.” is a post by Marilyn Price-Mitchell that is similarly skeptical. And respected parent eng

by Larry Ferlazzo / 4min  

4-15-14 Engaging Parents In School… | Going Beyond Parent "Involvement"

Engaging Parents In School… | Going Beyond Parent "Involvement": “More than 20% of [British] parents say they have been fined for unauthorised holidays”More than 20% of parents say they have been fined for unauthorised holidays is the headline of an article in the British newspaper The Guardian. Here’s how it starts: More than 20% of parents say they have been fined for taking their chil

by mike simpson / 18min 

John White’s is doing a fantastic job! | Crazy Crawfish's Blog

John White’s is doing a fantastic job! | Crazy Crawfish's Blog:

Crazy Crawfish's Blog

Zesty Louisiana Education Politics

John White’s is doing a fantastic job!

Posted on April 16, 2014

1

John White is doing a fantastic job at destroying public education. BESE recently reviewed White and gave him 3 out of 4 on his annual review and commended him for his great success. Let’s recap some of his success stories:

John White’s Course Choice program was abused by fraudulent vendors who went door to door asking mentally disabled children and adults to sign up for advanced Math Classes. Many of the enrollees failed to show up for classes and teachers working for Course Choice were assigned in excess of 400 students, and they got paid by the state. John White made an executive decision that Course Choice providers do not need to have any certifications nor do they actually have to ensure students attend or complete coursework, and he decided test scores for students taking tested subjects would route back to the home school for SPS reporting purposes, even though those schools never taught the student the tested subject. John White fail.

John White’s voucher program encourages non-public schools to ignore the law for reporting financial transactions. Most of the schools participating in the program did not comply with keeping accurate records of how they spent their state funding allocations, and White touted their compliance as exemplary and sanctioned none of them. One of the only schools to actual comply with the proper accounting of the funds, New Living Word in Ruston, was ejected from the program for too large of a discrepancy between what they were charging for tuition to some students and what they were charging the state for others. They were not ejected for being the largest recipient of vouchers while not having a school building, nor for teaching all their kids all their subjects with biblical DVDs. That equates to a good choice for parents in John White’s department of education.To most “thinking” humans this would be a John White fail.

John White catastrophically bungled the Common Core rollout singlehandedly. No one helped him foul this up, and he was very thorough. John White’s complete incompetence resulted in mass protests statewide, a continuous presence of pissed off parents at the capital, numerous anti-  John White’s is doing a fantastic job! | Crazy Crawfish's Blog:

Are Teacher Evaluations Education ‘Reform’s’ Biggest Bust?

Are Teacher Evaluations Education ‘Reform’s’ Biggest Bust?:

 Are Teacher Evaluations Education ‘Reform’s’ Biggest Bust?

Would you like your job performance judged by a five-year-old? That’s a relevant question for public school teachers in Hawaii, where the state’s new teacher evaluation system attributes ten percent of their job performance rating on what children as young as 5 years old think. Although ten percent may not seem like a whole lot, in a metric based evaluation system where harsh judgments of “effecti

by Jeff Bryant / 22min 

APR 10

4/10/2014 – America’s Biggest Failures

April 10, 2014 Subscribe THIS WEEK: Poverty Saps Instructional Time … Why Let Kids Make Rules … Chicago Charter Schools Are No Better … Do E-Books Harm Reading Comprehension … For-Profit College Capture Washington, DC TOP STORY Testing Season Reveals America’s Biggest Failures By Jeff Bryant “It’s testing season in America, and regardless of how the students do, it’s clear who is already flunki

4 by Jeff Bryant / 6d 

Test Season Reveals America’s Biggest Failures

It’s testing season in America, and regardless of how the students do, it’s clear who is already flunking the exams. Last week in New York, new standardized tests began rolling out across the state, and tens of thousands of families said “no dice.” According to local news sources, over 33,000 students skipped the tests – a figure “that will probably rise.” At one Brooklyn school, so many parents o

200+ by Jeff Bryant / 6d 

APR 02

4/2/2014 – A ‘Fair Shot’ Agenda For Education

April 2, 2014 Subscribe THIS WEEK: The Public School Brand … Common Core Lost Opportunity … Charter Schools And Inequity … Obama’s Boldest Civil Rights Reform … Who Is ‘College Material’? TOP STORY Time For A ‘Fair Shot’ Agenda For Education By Jeff Bryant “There’s an issue rife with populist discontent that Democrats have left out of the Fair Shot agenda: K-12 education … If Democrats want to

5 by Jeff Bryant / 14d hide  //  save

Time For A ‘Fair Shot’ Agenda For Education

“Democrats Scramble to Stave Off Midterm Disaster” was the headline in The New York Times article this week reporting on “the problem” the party has with turning out its base in the upcoming midterm election. As the reporter explained, “Young voters have abandoned the midterm electorate at more than twice the rate of seniors. Hispanics, who favored Mr. Obama by a margin of 44 percentage points, ha

44 by Jeff Bryant / 14d 

MAR 26

3/26/2014 – When ‘Reform’ Perpetuates Racial Inequity

March 26, 2014 Subscribe THIS WEEK: Demographics Affect Teacher Retention … Education Inequality Is Racial … Taxpayers Fund Creationism … Charter Pay Stays Secret … Community Colleges In Crisis TOP STORY How ‘Education Reform’ Perpetuates Racial Disparity By Jeff Bryant “America was shocked, shocked, by new data from the U.S. Department of Education last week showing that a child’s education de

12 by Jeff Bryant / 20d