Be a Better Teacher by Doing Less - Teacher Habits

Be a Better Teacher by Doing Less - Teacher Habits:

Be a Better Teacher by Doing Less

About this time every year I open a file on my Chromebook called “Goals.” It’s a living document that changes every May.  I decide which of the current year’s goals I want to keep, what to scrap, which ones to tweak, and I add new goals for the upcoming year. The last few years, many of my goals have centered around me doing less work. That’s not normally something people admit, but in the case of teachers, doing less can make you more effective.

Like most new teachers, I read Harry Wong’s The First Days of Schoolwhen I was starting out (I’ve also read it every August since). My favorite quote from the book is:

“The reason teachers are so tired at the end of the school day is that they have been working.  If I worked as hard as many teachers do, I’d be as tired too.  But have you ever noticed what happens at 3 0‘clock when the students leave? “Yea, yea, yea!”  Why are they so full of energy?  Because they have been sitting in school all day doing nothing while the teacher does all the work.  The person who does all the work is the only one doing any learning!”

 

It took me years to internalize the truth of this. For most of my career, I have been the dominant presence in my classroom. My need to feel in control, my mistaken belief that my doing more would lead to greater Be a Better Teacher by Doing Less - Teacher Habits:

The Seattle school board is asking the question: Where should technology fit into the education of K-12 students? | Seattle Education

The Seattle school board is asking the question: Where should technology fit into the education of K-12 students? | Seattle Education:

The Seattle school board is asking the question: Where should technology fit into the education of K-12 students?

On May 3, 2017, Richard Best, Director of Capital Projects and Planning, and John Krull, Chief Information Officer, stood in front of the Seattle School Board with a proposal for $1.6M to purchase laptops to be distributed to seven schools. Krull estimated the budget would allow one laptop for every two students.

According to the proposal, All classrooms will receive the appropriate Teacher Work Station (matching the mobile device rollout that the Department of Technology Services (DoTS) along with Curriculum and Instruction (C&I) is currently implementing)… Curriculum for Seattle Public Schools is due for revisions and updates and so far no curriculum proposals have been presented to the school board for review by Seattle Public School staff. Also, the software to be installed, as School Board Director Leslie Harris pointed out, has not been vetted as would happen with any textbook used in a classroom. Harris also noted that the students at Middle College have alleged that the software program Edgenuity that is installed on all of the computers at a school where the majority of students represent minority communities, has racist undertones. Apparently no one took a critical eye to the software before it was installed.

There is also the concern by parents of how much of the curriculum to be installed on the laptop is based on the Common Core Standards with its concomitant testing. With so much emphasis on the Common Core Standards, there is concern that learning has become imbalanced leaving out history, civics and the arts, and the testing too obtrusive.

The proposal goes on to state, DoTS as well as Teaching and Learning have developed a vision of incorporating more mobile devices into the classroom, which not only The Seattle school board is asking the question: Where should technology fit into the education of K-12 students? | Seattle Education:

Ralph Nader: Schooling for Myths and Powerlessness | Dissident Voice

Schooling for Myths and Powerlessness | Dissident Voice:

Schooling for Myths and Powerlessness

All over America, school children are completing another academic year before their summer vacation. This invites the questions, what did they learn and what did they do with what they learned?

I’m not talking about their test scores, nor the latest fads in rebranding education, like the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) curriculum that de-emphasizes the first two thirds of the old mantra – reading, writing and arithmetic. Rather, I am questioning what they learned about their real-world surroundings, about preparing themselves for life as citizens, workers, consumers, taxpayers, voters and members of various communities.

Not very much, sad to say. The same is true of my generation. Instead of receiving an enriching and well-rounded education, we were fed myths. All societies perpetuate lavish myths that enable the few to rule over the many, repress critical thinking and camouflage the grim realities. Our country was, and remains, no exception.

In school we learned that our country was number one, the greatest in the world. We sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” in music class. Being the “greatest” was neither defined nor questioned. We simply had a vague sense that “great” meant militarily and economically “big.”

In practice, however, “great” was associated with kneejerk patriotism and served as a barrier to thinking critically about what we were told to take for granted. For were we to parse the deeper meaning of the word “great,” we might have had to make specific comparisons of the United States in concrete ways with other countries such as Canada and those in Europe. And we might have discovered that we weren’t first in many areas of human and environmental well-being.

Early in elementary school we were told that Christopher Columbus “discovered” America and what followed was the arrival of the pioneers of “civilization.” This myth served to justify the white man’s domination over “inferior races,” whether native or brought in as slaves from Africa. In truth, as my father taught me, Columbus invaded America in search of gold and, with his soldiers, slaughtered Caribbean tribes that long preceded Columbus’s arrival in their lands.

Along the way in school we were told that, unlike other “evil” countries, American soldiers did not intentionally kill civilians, as did our cruel enemies. Somehow General Sherman’s march to the sea during the Civil War escaped our attention; as did later mass slaughter of human beings in the Philippines and the deliberate targeting and incineration of entire residential, civilian areas in World War I and World War II –  to, in the language of the official strategies, “terrorize the populations.”

The myth of an America without imperial intentions camouflaged the purposes of several wars and many imperial assaults and overthrows. Who were we to question? Other countries were Empires; America was guided by “manifest destiny.”

Then there was the fictional character, Paul Bunyan, the giant lumberjack from American folklore who was hijacked and commercialized by the timber industry to propagandize the minds of millions of children. With his huge blue ox, Babe, Bunyan conquered and cut down forests. One of the Paul Bunyan Schooling for Myths and Powerlessness | Dissident Voice:

This is the new Betsy DeVos speech everyone should read - The Washington Post

This is the new Betsy DeVos speech everyone should read - The Washington Post:

This is the new Betsy DeVos speech everyone should read

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos made news (again) recently when she was booed by students at Bethune-Cookman University, a historically black college in Florida, while she delivered a commencement speech. Students were upset that she had earlier this year called historically black colleges and universities “pioneers” in school choice rather than necessities because blacks weren’t allowed at white schools.

But in terms of education policy substance, the substance of a speech she gave a day earlier deserves at least as much attention. (See full text below.)

The Michigan billionaire appeared at the 2017 annual technology and innovation conference in Salt Lake City sponsored by Arizona State University and the Global Silicon Valley, delivering a speech and answering questions from Jeanne Allen of the nonprofit Center for Education Reform, who, as Liz Willen, editor of the Hechinger Report, said in this column, “threw one softball after another, such as: “What would you say to people about technology?”

As Willen noted, the audience, a friendly one of entrepreneurs, probably expected her to talk exclusively about educational technology.

What she talked mostly about, though, is what she always talks about — school choice — and she renewed previous attacks she has made on the value of government and public schools. If anybody thought that having the responsibility of running the entire Education Department would broaden her scope, this speech should disabuse them of that.

DeVos has been as controversial as any Cabinet member in the Trump administration, confirmed by the Senate only after Mike Pence became the first vice president in history to break a tie for a Cabinet nominee. In 2015, she gave a speech declaring the U.S. public education system “a dead end” and saying that “government sucks.”

Here are some of the highlights of the speech, and some of the questions they raise about her views.

[Booing students at Betsy DeVos’s commencement speech told to shut up or get diplomas sent in mail]

DeVos said:

Since I do have this opportunity to speak with you, I want to begin by saying it’s time for us to break out of the confines of the federal government’s arcane approach to education. Why now? Because Washington has been in the driver’s seat for over 50 years with very little to show for its efforts.

What exactly does this mean? The Education Department did not respond to a query about the meaning of “over 50 years.”

Is that a reference to the 1965 Elementary and Secondary School Act, the most important federal education legislation ever passed by Congress that was aimed at funding primary and secondary education to help close This is the new Betsy DeVos speech everyone should read - The Washington Post:

 

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Rahm's great ideas

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Rahm's great ideas:

Rahm's great ideas

Rahm considering taxing "high net-worth individuals". What a concept! 

Just to prove that I'm not a Rahm hater, I'll give a SmallTalk salute to two things the mayor said this week.

The first was meant as a warning to fellow Democrat bigwigs. Stop focusing so much on Trump and start fighting for middle-class and working families.

Emanuel is worried. He thinks everyone in Washington is too focused on the crazy around Trump to see what’s actually going on — and what’s not... “Talking to ourselves and persuading ourselves,” Emanuel said, “is not going to be the way you get to a majority.” (Politico)

Of course, he then went on and spent the rest of the interview talking about Trump.

But then this:

“I think there are certain things we as a party wandered off from as it relates to being a party that fought for hard working families." (The Hill) 

Okay, so that's one thing. Here's the other:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel may seek new taxes on downtown businesses, “high net-worth individuals” or both to dig the Chicago Public Schools out of a $596 million hole without state help, City Hall sources said Monday. Sources said the new taxesMike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Rahm's great ideas: 

 

California must save its successful after-school programs | EdSource

California must save its successful after-school programs | EdSource:

California must save its successful after-school programs

van Cardona, a 1st-grader at Mountain View Elementary in Los Angeles, arrived at the Regional Spelling Bee excited to take on a new challenge. Despite placing first in his school spelling bee, Evan’s success had not come easily. In kindergarten, Evan fell behind and finished the year without knowing many of his first-level words. Doctors had told his mother that, because of complications at birth, Evan would likely experience many developmental delays throughout his life.

State Senator Connie Leyva, D-Chino

However, at the start of 1st grade, Evan began participating in the Woodcraft Rangers after-school program, run on his school campus each afternoon. Suddenly, he began to flourish. His mother noticed a change immediately. He had developed a passion for reading and learning. Every day, he came home committed to finishing his homework. Evan’s passion and confidence helped him excel during the spelling competition. His mother told Chris Johnson, the CEO of Evan’s after-school program: “All he wants to do is practice, practice, practice his spelling bee words because he wants to be number one!”

Evan has a great story, and he is not alone. He is one of more than 14,000 children from 71 schools in the Woodcraft Rangers NVISION program, 100 percent of whom are from low-income families. Across California, more than 400,000 students participate in After-School Education and Safety (ASES)-funded programs such as Evan’s at over 4,000 elementary and middle schools.

State Senator Anthony Portantino, D- La Cañada Flintridge

In 2002, Californians made a strong commitment to students attending after-school programs by passing Proposition 49, which was promoted by Arnold Schwarzenegger before he came governor and allocated funds for these transformative programs. Since then, ASES programs, and the students they serve, have thrived. Students who regularly participate in these after-school programs have higher GPAs and do better in language arts and math.

The after-school programs operate in predominantly high-poverty areas, where an average of 80 percent of students who attend the programs qualify for and 

DeVos Meets with Home School Lobby | Diane Ravitch's blog

DeVos Meets with Home School Lobby | Diane Ravitch's blog:

DeVos Meets with Home School Lobby

From Politico Education:

EDUCATION SECRETARY BETSY DEVOS MEETS WITH HOMESCHOOL ADVOCATES: DeVos spent roughly 45 minutes late Monday afternoon listening to the needs of homeschooling families during a meeting with officials from the Home School Legal Defense Association. William Estrada, director of federal relations with the group, tells Morning Education they sought to convey to DeVos that homeschooling shouldn’t be included in any efforts to use public funds for vouchers because homeschoolers don’t want the government regulation that could come with it. They also conveyed to DeVos that homeschoolers should continue to have their diplomas treated “fairly” so they have access to federal aid once they enter higher education – something that’s previously been spelled out in department guidance. Estrada said the meeting was a “true meeting of the minds” and DeVos was “very supportive.”

– The group’s meeting with DeVos included Mike Smith, a founder of the group, and Tricia Powell, a local parent who homeschools her children, Estrada said. DeVos has previously expressed support for homeschooling, and the group backed her during her Senate confirmation process. “It was very clear that she’s an advocate for all students, all children, whether they are in public schools, private schools or home schools, and we appreciated having the opportunity to chat with her,” Estrada said.”

Politico also reports that Minnesota legislators have passed a tax credit bill that will enable wealthy individuals and corporations to give their taxes to a private corporation that turns them into vouchers. Governor Mark Dayton has said he will veto any voucher bills but this one is embedded in the state budget.

Let’s hope that Governor Dayton vetoes this program and forced the legislature to strip out the vouchers.

http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-education/2017/05/how-safe-are-schools-and-college-campuses-220338

DeVos Meets with Home School Lobby | Diane Ravitch's blog:

CURMUDGUCATION: The Takeover Lie

CURMUDGUCATION: The Takeover Lie:

The Takeover Lie

One of the techniques in the reformster arsenal has been the school takeover, in which some august body declares a public school a failure, and that school is marked for Takeover. That failure can be certified by specious Big Standardized Test results (yay, PAARC and SBA) or by the more cynical method of refusing to fuly fund a district and then certifying them, as financially distressed. This particular "solution" was built into Race To The Trough Top and RTTT Lite (more waivers, less paperwork), but it has been embraced in a variety of forms, such as the Achievement School District of Tennessee and other attempts to create via bureaucracy what had previously been accomplished by natural disaster (aka Hurricane Katrina).

You can see it happening yet again in Gary, Indiana, where the schools have been taken over by the state. That state takeover, which strips the elected school board of power and replaces them with a state-appointed manager, was enacted a month ago and explained to the public more fully just a week ago. Gary was a two-fer, a district slammed for both low test scores and for failing to get enough money to keep itself solvent. Within roughly five minutes, a charter company was putting in its bid to run the formerly-public school system.

The proposed management group is the Phalen Leadership Academies, a group with strong ties to Indianapolis's big charter boosters with giant apsirations loaded into its name-- the Mind Trust. The group was founded by a former Indianapolis mayor and his head of charter schoolery, and it has done a fine job of finding ways to funnel public tax dollars into private pockets. So there are plenty of specific and historical reasons to oppose Phalen's glomming up one more set of de-public schools.

But the whole takeover process is itself a scam of tremendous proportions, a house of cards resting on a foundation of falsehoods.

Remember, the basic idea here is, "You public school people couldn't make this school work, so we're going to bring in someone who can." Let's consider that premise for a moment.

What's your secret?

The takeover premise requires someone who knows the secret of making a school "work." Someone who knows more about how to educate children than the trained professionals who previously ran CURMUDGUCATION: The Takeover Lie:

Different Conversations | Blue Cereal Education

Different Conversations | Blue Cereal Education:

Different Conversations

“So… why do you think they hate Mexicans so much? Do they really think we’re all bad people, or are they just racists, or…?

It was a sincere question from one of my most brilliant girls. She doesn’t yet know all she will, but she sees more than most and asks the most sincere, probing questions. They always grab my interest, and are rarely easy to answer.

And yeah – her family is from Mexico.

I acknowledged her concerns, and did my best to suggest maybe most Republicans (the “they” in the context of our larger conversation) didn’t see themselves as hating Mexicans and might not be overtly racist. In my best developmentally-appropriate, big picture way, we talked about fear and frustration and how the U.S. has changed in the past few generations and how difficult that is for some people – especially when they think they recall a simpler, stronger past.

We recalled discussions in class about the general narratives of the political left and the political right, and while I don’t think she walked away feeling like she owed any hugs to the Trump campaign, I hope she saw complexity where before she saw naked hostility.

Then again, people don’t yell and post “complexity” at you for being Hispanic, so it’s a tough sell, even when I’m at my most fair and balanced.

You can’t teach American Government or Oklahoma History – or any Social Studies, I would think – without social and political disputes coming up. I have a disconcerting number of freshmen boys (and one girl?) this year with the strangest Nazi obsession… they’re not proper fascists, near as I can tell – it’s hardly that developed or ideological. I’m not sure they’re even truly racists – although you wouldn’t know that from their whispered comments.

Mostly they seem to just find the whole movement strange and funny and abrasive, in the same way one watches reality TV transfixed by the shouting matches or Maury Povich announcing “you ARE the father!” They love Trump, but know little of his policies or even his daily scandals – they just like the way he’s able to be such an a-hole and stir Different Conversations | Blue Cereal Education:

Protecting the Public Commons - The Atlantic

Protecting the Public Commons - The Atlantic:

Protecting the Public Commons

At a moment when institutional distrust is surging, there’s an urgent need to support civics education.

The debate about the role technology plays in society is as old as humankind’s ability to use tools and techniques to change our world. The technologies we have in our hands today would be magic to our forefathers, from gene editing to spacecraft to the smartphone you’re likely using to read this article.

The impact of information technology on democracies is a comparatively younger concern, driven by the quicksilver pace of innovation and invention in the minds, labs, and garages of people around the globe, as well as the disruption of the institutions that held monopolies on the production and distribution of information.

For the billions of humans who are now connected to the broader world by mobile devices, our experience is increasingly mediated by screens animated by endless rivers of news, livestreams, and entertainment. Our feeds are personalized not only by our individual choices about media outlets but the algorithmic determinations of technology companies that may placed commercial interests before public goals. Our public squares are hosted on private platforms that weren't designed with civic good in mind.

Disintermediation, dystopia, and dismay are the words of the day, eroding the last of the romantic dreams of a better world, built anew in virtual spaces and places. “Digital dualism” is finally on life support, replaced by a dawning recognition that the distinction between offline and online has collapsed. Instead, we face pervasive surveillance enabled by the growth of cameras, sensors, connected devices, and data collection in our communities.

Despite systemic issues in education, criminal justice, and elections, the United States remains an inherently open society, where freedom of speech, information, association, and assembly are baked into Americans’ understanding of their culture and enshrined in statute.

As we move into the next century, however, we are faced with renewed challenges around our politics, as partisan polarization expresses itself not only in party affiliation but through media consumption and the accountability Protecting the Public Commons - The Atlantic:

The Privatization Prophets

The Privatization Prophets:

The Privatization Prophets

JENNIFER BERKSHIRE

For years, millionaires and religious zealots have teamed up to preach "school choice" in an effort to dismantle public education.

During a recent talk to tech investors and “edupreneurs,” Secretary of Education Betsy Devos, the least regarded of all of the rogues and billionaires who compose the Trump cabinet, returned to a favorite theme of hers.

Apple, Uber, and Airbnb have worked their disruptive magic on one industry after another. Why aren’t our public schools being similarly disrupted? “Who here can pull out their Blockbuster card?” she asked the crowd.

But if the nation’s schools are the equivalent of a kitchen-wall rotary phone or the cab that never comes, DeVos was eager to let the audience know that a quick fix is at hand: school choice. The way to disrupt our educational malaise once and for all is to shift the way we think about education to focus “on students, not buildings. If a child is learning, it shouldn’t matter where they learn.” Even the best schools won’t be the right “fit” for all kids, DeVos noted. “The simple fact is that if a school is not meeting a child’s unique needs, then that school is failing that child.”

Beneath the folksy tech talk, though, lurks a radical vision, one that is taking root in state after state. The ultimate aim of the project of which DeVos is now the most visible face is to remove education from the public system. Those “buildings” of which she speaks so disdainfully, the disparaging “status quo” never far behind, represent the entire architecture of public education, and more importantly, its democratic control.

Diminishing this is key to reaching the promised land of privatization. Stodgy school boards are standing in the way of getting there; so are superintendents and parent teacher associations and teachers unions — above all, the teachers unions.

Unfettering the markets is only part of the vision. Control over the process of socializing children, the near-monopoly domain of a system that is both secular and, as the libertarian right deridingly characterizes it, collectivist, is another prize. And if there is some money to be made along the way, well, there’s nothing wrong with that.

DeVos’s efforts to take public education private are uniting seekers of profits and prophets. Let’s take a look at some of the key battles overThe Privatization Prophets:

Drive to increase charter enrollments triggers massive spending in LA school board race | EdSource

Drive to increase charter enrollments triggers massive spending in LA school board race | EdSource:

Drive to increase charter enrollments triggers massive spending in LA school board race

School board races tend to be sleepy affairs, drawing little attention and even less campaign spending compared to other higher profile races on most local ballots.

Not in Los Angeles, which has become the site of the most heated – and by far the most expensive – battle over charter schools in the nation.

An extraordinary $15.9 million has been contributed to decide who will fill two seats on the seven-person Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education.

The battle, which a Los Angeles Times headline over the weekend described as “brutal, expensive and important,” is coming to a head Tuesday in a runoff election pitting incumbent school board President Steve Zimmer against Nick Melvoin in District 4, and Imelda Padilla against Kelly Gonez in District 6 for an open seat vacated by former teacher Monica Ratliff, who ran unsuccessfully for Los Angeles City Council in March.

The contest has been generally framed as a contest between pro- and anti-charter forces, with Zimmer and Padilla in the anti-charter camp, and Melvoin and Gonez in the pro-charter one. But that vastly oversimplifies the issues at stake in the election.

From a historical perspective, the district can hardly be characterized as hostile to charter schools.

With 279 charter schools, L.A. Unified has more charter schools than any other district in the nation.  Of those, 224 are “independent” charters and 54 are “affiliated” ones. The 156,000 students enrolled in them exceeds that of any school district in the nation. New York City is next with 201 charter schools and an enrollment of close to 107,000 Drive to increase charter enrollments triggers massive spending in LA school board race | EdSource:

 

Eve Ewing. | Fred Klonsky

Eve Ewing. | Fred Klonsky:

Eve Ewing.

Eve Ewing with my brother, Michael Klonsky on our Hitting Left with the Klonsky Brothers radio whow and (right) with Chicago playwright Ike Holter (Chicago Magazine photo).

I am so glad to see our friend Eve Ewing included in Chicago Magazine’s Who’s Got Next?

Of course, we had her first on our weekly radio show, Hitting Left with the Klonsky Brothers, which you can hear each Friday at 11AM, FM in Chicago or streaming live on http://www.lumpenradio.com all across the universe. Our show is also downloadable from iTunes or from Liberated Syndication.

You can listen to our one hour conversation with the brilliant Logan Square native here.

And here is the Chicago Magazine feature:

Ignore Eve Ewing at your own intellectual, political, and cultural peril. The 31-year-old education scholar, scribe, and artist has got a lot to say, and people—including her 50,000 Twitter followers—are listening. In the past two years alone, the Logan Square native has coedited a fiction anthology, contributed to a collection of breakbeat poetry, served on the board of a major youth organization, and written features and opinion pieces for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, and The New York Times. 

By the end of next year, the Harvard alum and former schoolteacher will have released a collection of her own poetry and prose, seen the production of a play she wrote with poet Nate Marshall, assumed an assistant professorship at the University of Chicago, and released her much-anticipated book When the Bell Stops Ringing: Race, History and Discourse amid Chicago’s School Closures (University of Chicago Press), which promises to propel her directly to the center of the heated debate over the fate of public education in America.

“I want teachers and policymakers and students to have something to hold in their hand when they’re fighting this fight,” she says of the book. “I think my role is to be an amplifier, to be a bullhorn, to be a storyteller.” Ewing is all those things and more. —Hannah NyhartEve Ewing. | Fred Klonsky: