The latest news and resources in education since 2007
Friday, February 22, 2019
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
CURMUDGUCATION: OH: Lorain, HB 70, And A Reformy Attack
CURMUDGUCATION: OH: Lorain, HB 70, And A Reformy Attack
OH: Lorain, HB 70, And A Reformy Attack
I began my career in Lorain, Ohio, so the ever-spinning mess there is of personal interest to me. But it is also a picture of much of the damage being inflicted on public education in the name of reform. This is going to be a really long read, the longest I've ever posted on this blog, but it's a story worth telling, because here we find most of the problems of ed reform on display.
I: Lorain Back in the Day
I arrived in Lorain in the fall of 1979, fresh out of college and desperate for a job within 40 miles of downtown Cleveland. It was a rough start-- Lorain was the 16th interview I landed that summer, and August was ticking away. I signed a contract on Thursday. New teacher orientation happened on Friday. Monday was set to be the first teacher day, with students arriving to start the new year on Tuesday. But on Sunday, the union met and voted about 750-6 to go out on strike. The strike lasted for six weeks.
What do I remember about Lorain in 1979. A population of about 83,000 people (I had to write a report for grad school). Several auto plants. Steel plants. At least one ship-building plant. Of the 83,000 people, roughly 82,500 were blue collar workers, with a few doctors and lawyers thrown in. Lorain was a labor town; supposedly there was a city ordinance that fined anyone who crossed a picket line to scab.
Most of the things you would expect in a city of that size weren't there. Tiny newspaper and radio stations, because Cleveland was less than 30 minutes away. A stretch of one street displayed the vestiges of a downtown, but there was no real center to Lorain. Instead, there were blocks after blocks of neighborhoods, with a mom and pop grocery store on every other corner.
There was a reason for that, just as there was a reason that Lorain called itself an "international" city. Virtually every possible ethnicity was represented in Lorain. Having student taught in Cleveland Heights just seven months earlier, I was exceptionally on edge about racial tensions in a CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: OH: Lorain, HB 70, And A Reformy Attack
OH: Lorain, HB 70, And A Reformy Attack
I began my career in Lorain, Ohio, so the ever-spinning mess there is of personal interest to me. But it is also a picture of much of the damage being inflicted on public education in the name of reform. This is going to be a really long read, the longest I've ever posted on this blog, but it's a story worth telling, because here we find most of the problems of ed reform on display.
I: Lorain Back in the Day
I arrived in Lorain in the fall of 1979, fresh out of college and desperate for a job within 40 miles of downtown Cleveland. It was a rough start-- Lorain was the 16th interview I landed that summer, and August was ticking away. I signed a contract on Thursday. New teacher orientation happened on Friday. Monday was set to be the first teacher day, with students arriving to start the new year on Tuesday. But on Sunday, the union met and voted about 750-6 to go out on strike. The strike lasted for six weeks.
What do I remember about Lorain in 1979. A population of about 83,000 people (I had to write a report for grad school). Several auto plants. Steel plants. At least one ship-building plant. Of the 83,000 people, roughly 82,500 were blue collar workers, with a few doctors and lawyers thrown in. Lorain was a labor town; supposedly there was a city ordinance that fined anyone who crossed a picket line to scab.
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| My first teaching job was right about here. |
There was a reason for that, just as there was a reason that Lorain called itself an "international" city. Virtually every possible ethnicity was represented in Lorain. Having student taught in Cleveland Heights just seven months earlier, I was exceptionally on edge about racial tensions in a CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: OH: Lorain, HB 70, And A Reformy Attack
Badass Teachers Association Blog: An Open Letter to Teach for America Regarding Teacher Strikes by Seth Khan
Badass Teachers Association Blog: An Open Letter to Teach for America Regarding Teacher Strikes by Seth Khan
An Open Letter to Teach for America Regarding Teacher Strikes by Seth Khan
Originally posted at: An Open Letter to Teach for America Regarding Teacher Strikes
An Open Letter to Teach for America Regarding Teacher Strikes by Seth Khan
Originally posted at: An Open Letter to Teach for America Regarding Teacher Strikes
Dear Ms. Villanueva Beard, CEO, Teach for America:
The current wave of teacher strikes across the United States leads us to request that Teach for America leadership rethink your organization’s stance towards your members’ participation in those strikes.
An Associated Press article (“Teach for America Slammed over Oakland Strike”, Feb 12) indicates that your advice to TFA members in the event of a strike is to do what they think is right, but to understand that joining the strike may come at substantial financial cost to them. To be fair, your spokesperson hints that TFA “is exploring if it could help supplement an AmeriCorps education award if a teacher loses it.”This advice is troubling for three reasons.
First, it’s textbook coercion to lay a decision and the penalty for making it alongside each other while acting like you don’t mean to connect the dots. The fact that AmeriCorps has a policy preventing participants in its programs from striking doesn’t make the threat less of a threat. That is, it’s no less coercive by virtue of being accurate.
Second, there’s a conflict between the fact that your members are fully faculty at the schools where they teach, including their right to become members of the union, and your policy that they face penalties for participating in perfectly legal activities attached to their membership. They’re allowed to pay dues; they’re allowed to file grievances; they’re allowed to vote in union elections; but they are penalized for striking. It’s difficult to see any logic in which those propositions are consistent.
Finally, TFA’s claim not to have a position on strikes rings awfully hollow in the context of your support for and collaboration with publicly anti-union forces; this piece from Gary Rubinstein names just a handful, and anyone who has followed TFA over the years is likely familiar with more.
We understand you’re trying to thread a needle: recognizing the right of your members to participate in legal activity while recognizing a policy of your partner organization. To be candid, we would be more sympathetic to the difficulty of that position if TFA hadn’t been so unfriendly to CONTINUE READING: Badass Teachers Association Blog: An Open Letter to Teach for America Regarding Teacher Strikes by Seth Khan
Appreciating Teachers: Responding to Donald Trump Jr. | janresseger
Appreciating Teachers: Responding to Donald Trump Jr. | janresseger
Appreciating Teachers: Responding to Donald Trump Jr.
Appreciating Teachers: Responding to Donald Trump Jr.
Recently at the President’s rally in El Paso for his border wall, his son, Donald Trump, Jr., warmed up the crowd with a speech in which he gratuitously attacked teachers: “Bring it to your schools… You don’t have to be indoctrinated by these loser teachers that are trying to sell you on socialism from birth.” It is hard to know what all that means, although I suppose we can infer that attacks on so-called socialists are going to be a centerpiece of the campaign if the President runs for reelection in 2020.
Valerie Strauss covered responses to this disgusting ad hominem attack on schoolteachers. Teachers themselves have been speaking up, she explains, on twitter with the hashtag #loserteachers.
Strauss also published a response to Trump Jr. from three teachers—Jelmer Evers (the Netherlands), Michael Soskil (2017-18, Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year) and Armand Doucet (Canada) who co-authored a 2018 book, Teaching in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Standing at the Precipice. Evers, Soskil, and Doucet write that for them, Trump Jr.’s speech was a chilling moment: “Throughout history, schools and teachers have always been among the first to be targeted by authoritarian regimes and extremists. Independent thinking, creativity, compassion and curiosity are threats to dogmatic beliefs and rule.” “Whether Democratic or Republican, liberal or conservative, right, left, center, blue or red—seeing and reinforcing the value of a teacher should be a national pillar that rises high above partisan politics and cheap applause… If we can be accused of anything, it is that we are on the front line of democracy. Education reformer John Dewey famously said, ‘Democracy has to be born again each generation and education is its midwife.’ As members of a global profession, we reject the narrowing of the mind and we stand by our colleagues defending academic freedom.”
President Trump and his son were both educated in private schools. I suspect that neither has even visited a public school, and I wonder if either one has ever considered what teachers do, or what shapes teachers, or what teachers consider as they work every day with children and CONTINUE READING: Appreciating Teachers: Responding to Donald Trump Jr. | janresseger
The Internet Is Sowing Mass Confusion. We Must Rethink How We Teach Kids Every Subject (Sam Wineburg) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
The Internet Is Sowing Mass Confusion. We Must Rethink How We Teach Kids Every Subject (Sam Wineburg) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
The Internet Is Sowing Mass Confusion. We Must Rethink How We Teach Kids Every Subject (Sam Wineburg)
The Internet Is Sowing Mass Confusion. We Must Rethink How We Teach Kids Every Subject (Sam Wineburg)
Sam Wineburg, a professor of education at Stanford University, is the author of “Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone).” This op-ed appeared in USA Today, February 12, 2019
In 2016, months before the presidential election, my research team surveyed nearly 8,000 students from middle school through college on their ability to judge material from the internet. We concluded that students’ ability to navigate online information could be captured in one word: bleak. We released our findings two weeks after Donald Trump’s election and were immediately swept up in the media maelstrom.
Our most reported finding was that 82 percent of middle school students couldn’t tell the difference between an ad and a news story. But putting it that way isn’t really fair to kids: While dozens of outlets reported this nugget, none mentioned an industry study that showed 59 percent of adults couldn’t tell the difference, either.
We are all in the same boat. That boat is taking on water.
In the wake of mass confusion caused by the internet and social media, there have been calls for a renewed commitment to teaching civics and instructing students in the foundations of democracy. But if we think this challenge is only about civics, we’re deluding ourselves. Bringing education into the 21st century demands that we rethink how we teach every subject in the curriculum.
We’re still teaching history using only print texts even as kids are being CONTINUE READING: The Internet Is Sowing Mass Confusion. We Must Rethink How We Teach Kids Every Subject (Sam Wineburg) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
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