Educators from across the country will be meeting this week with Education Secretary Arne Duncan in Denver to discuss Advancing Student Achievement Through Labor-Management Collaboration at a conference cosponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and the mounting nation's top education unions.
Ironically, our meeting to discuss paths to renewed cooperation will be taking place at a time when governors and municipal leaders throughout the nation are rolling back the rights and benefits of public employees. These politically charged campaigns have a lot in common with the assault on educators already underway by so-called business-model school reformers who impede the much-needed improvements in public service -- in our case, public schools.
In both the assault on public employee pensions and the blame-the-educators movement, the failures of elected officials and their corporate benefactors are projected onto the victims of these failures -- and public schools have certainly been among those victimized.
When federal experiments with school curricula fall short, the thrust of the attack on educators and students is to label them "failures" when the experiments themselves have failed largely as a result of excluding front-line educators from the design of reforms.
And when poorly designed data-driven tests are adopted by Democrats as well as Republicans as a panacea, it's difficult not to conclude that the same corporate interests that now dominate both parties are dominating the debate about the best way to educate our children.
Any question about how the corporate sector is dominating Washington policymakers was laid to rest recently when it was revealed the administration is enlisting the help of 30 major corporations in pushing the Education Department's reforms on Congress.
The data-driven business model "reformers" champion vouchers and charter schools, with the professed goal of restoring world-class performance among U.S. school children. In fact, there is growing evidence that their motivation is to ensure that 10 percent of school children perform to globally competitive standards, while the rest are dismissed as "failures" without much, if any, regard for the social consequences.
America is scouring the urban centers for what W.E.B. DuBois would refer to as its "yeast." In his essay, The Talented Tenth, he writes, "All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of training where men are not mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary toll of earning a living, as to have no aims higher than their bellies."
The corporate reformers' singular focus on college readiness and obsession with STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), often to the exclusion of arts and humanities, raises serious questions about whose needs they seek to serve since these preoccupations are at odds with the jobs the federal government projects will grow most in the coming years.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the greatest number of new jobs in the U.S. labor market between now and 2018 will be food preparers and servicers (3.1 million), customer service representatives (2.7 million), long haul truck drivers (1.8 million), nursing aides and orderlies (1.7 million), receptionists (1.3 million), security guards (1.2 million), construction workers (1.18 million), landscapers and groundskeepers (1.12 million), and home health aides (1.05 million).
"Few of these jobs," writes political scientist Jacob Hacker, "will call for college credits, and their pay is unlikely to vary much from current medians." Political leaders and their corporate backers who insist on making STEM courses the centerpiece for curriculum appear to be advocating an untenable system of "natural selection" in which the survival of the academically fittest is advanced, while the rest of students are labeled "failures."
The last thing we want to do is to set up children for failure. We need to guide students in the disciplines of discovery and creativity that are the pathways to independent thinking, seldom an attitude cherished by corporate views of education. For children's sake -- and the nation's -- we can't afford to demand teaching to tests as if something has actually been "learned." And in the words of DuBois, "We cannot mistake the means of living for the object of life."
To be successful in reforming public education, we must teach with an expectation of learning, not with the presumption of achievement by some and remediation among the rest.
We need to be guided by the examples of our own experience as children and students. I don't know what my test scores were when I was in school or what my IQ was, but I know that my parents told me I could achieve whatever I wanted if I worked at it. Now you're told, "If you don't get these test scores, you're not going to be anything." You're labeled a failure. So, students accept what their leaders tell them. They sit back and say, "I guess we have failed."
For schools whose performance falls short, we must turn them around. And we need curricula that challenge students -- all students -- with rigor. But we need to do so by creating an expectation of achievement that addresses the disparate skills of students and the differing paces at which they learn
Only when programs are designed to equip all children with the skills to exercise sound, independent judgment as workers and citizens will they be successfully educated, whether they're prepared to drive a long haul truck across country or drive a smart bargain with an investor halfway across the globe.
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Marian Wright Edelman: Law of Unintended Consequences
Center for Education Reform - Home
The Progress of Education Reform
It seems reasonable that people would want a method for measuring what they are getting.
Perhaps the current testing regime is poorly designed. Perhaps the educational process doesn't use test data properly...
But that doesn't mean that there ought not be Standardized Testing by which we can evaluate educational programs.
http://supportpubliceducation.blogspot.com/
The other thing that is absent from much educational discussion is the absolute need to spend hours and hours studying. As if the government spending more money will suddenly impart the Calculus into the brains of high school students. To learn Calculus, the majority of students only need a classroom, a teacher of acceptable qualifications and ability, a book, and about 2 hours a night in studying. The educational pundits appear to believe that if you have the first two, you don't need to even talk about the third component.
Another crucial difference is the impact the test has on the student. Currently there is no benefit to the student for scoring well, and no consequences for failing. The honors students are going to do well because they have the drive to succeed and will try their hardest (which is why they are honors students to begin with) but the student we need to reach, the at risk students, often see the tests as a meaningless activity that, like their view of all their education, has no impact on them so they put in minimal effort.
I would still generally oppose this practice, but were they more like the A/O levels seen in the British model at least I'd feel a little more comfortable that we were trying to isolate the 'student motivation' variable before using them as evaluation tools.
I actually think that's the wrong message. We shouldn't change the expectations for achievement, we should change the support systems that allow kids from disadvantaged backgrounds to close the gap as best they can. Lowering the bar isn't the answer. Educating parents on how to set higher expectations for their kids and learning the skills they need to support their kids' homework efforts should be the goal. Right now, we expect the schools and teachers to do all the hard work. But the reality is, a good work ethic and a respect for education starts at home. If families don't have the role models and wherewithal to make this happen, then we need to come up with creative ways to make sure those kids buck the odds.
What the market model does not do is distribute opportunity equally, since access and thus opportunity goes to those who can pay. The market doesn’t serve all customers only paying customers—the ones who can pay more will get more.
“If we critically think about ‘the why’ of an educational system we will unavoidably be brought to the grounding truth that human beings—and that’s what children are not merely potential workers—must continually learn in order to remain viable. That is to say people must be unceasing learners and therefore they must learn how to learn at the higher levels of learning. If we are all capable of doing this, then no future challenge will be unmet! Thus we might all be better served if those in authority—and this could be the united commoners—envision and enact a system for learning wherein all have the opportunity to unfold their uniquely human potential.
http://www.forprogressnotgrowth.com/2011/02/10/better-thinking-leads-to-better-solutions/
http://www.forprogressnotgrowth.com/2010/11/04/enfold-and-unfold/
http://www.forprogressnotgrowth.com/2010/09/01/20th-century-management-lives-on/
What often amazes me is why no one goes to the schools that are succeeding, the states that always finish at the top of the nation and find out what they do.
Of course, a lot of the answer to that is money. And government officials do not want to do that. Anything but that!!!
This fall the MUM Education Department launches a new degree program, the Master’s in Educational Innovation. The program will train a new generation of educational entrepreneurs, prepared to work in a wide range of settings, including charter schools, magnet schools, career academies, and Consciousness-BasedSM schools.
“This is a time of great experimentation and change in the field of education,†said Chris Jones, director of the new program. “Everyone is looking to solve the apparently unsolvable problems of education.â€
One of the solutions adopted in many schools is the addition of the Quiet TimeSM program where students practice the Transcendental Meditation® technique, resulting in increased academic performance, improved behavior, and reduced levels of stress, anxiety, and hyperactivity among children.
“The need for effective stress reduction strategies and programs that support holistic human development is extremely high,†said Laurent Valosek, Executive Director of the Quiet Time programs in the San Francisco area. “In turn, there is a need for teachers who are trained to introduce, implement, and grow these programs."
Students in the education program will learn how to use Maharishi’s teaching techniques for building interdisciplinary frameworks of knowledge and strategies for connecting all knowledge to the deepest level of the student.
Another component includes the ecology of learning and new strategies for community building.
the program will also train school change agents, ....
Technology will play a major role in teaching students how to apply the latest electronic technology
I teach in the inner city (Phoenix) and my high school son attends with me.
He's getting a great education from the best educators.