Live Long and Prosper...

MEN IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

Calling Nurturing Men to the Teaching Profession

Most of my 35 years as a teacher was spent with students in grades K through 3. The quote below from Nancy Bailey suggests that it was difficult because of the strong-willed women I worked with. I can think of only one or two cases where I was made to feel unwelcome at the primary level from my colleagues.

It was much more difficult to deal with parents who were skeptical that a man could give their child the nurturing education necessary in the primary grades. Even worse, were those (few times) when parents actually requested another teacher because they didn't want their daughters in my class. I understand the fear that makes a parent do that. The news stories of teachers who betray the trust parents have put in them and abuse children are frequent enough that there are some parents who would be scared to take a chance. I understood the parent request...but it saddened me.

From Nancy Bailey

Men who teach early childhood education have a lot of moxie. It can’t be easy to walk into an elementary school of strong-willed women who know the craft of teaching.

Some of my third grade students during recess on the last day of school, 1976-1977.

PRIVATIZATION: VOUCHERS

Why Churches Should Hate School Vouchers

Normally, I like to keep quotes short...one or two sentences, or a paragraph at the most. With this quote from Peter Greene, however, I felt like I needed to include two paragraphs.

Vouchers entangle Church and State, despite the ruling of the Indiana Supreme Court, and as such, are a danger to both the public schools and the church schools accepting vouchers.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State listed ten reasons for rejecting vouchers. At the top of the list...Vouchers Undermine Religious Liberty. They wrote,

...vouchers force Americans to pay taxes to support religion. This runs counter to the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty. In America, all religious activities should be supported with voluntary contributions.

James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and other Founders strongly supported the separation of church and state and opposed taxation to support religion. As Ben Franklin succinctly put it: “When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not care to support it, so that its professors are obliged to call for the help of the civil power, ‘tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”

From Peter Greene (Curmudgucation)

Somebody is going to try to cash in on voucher money or make a point or indulge in performance art, and taxpayers will be horrified to learn that their tax dollars are going to support a school that promotes satanism or pushes sharia law or teaches that all white folks are evil (I am confining myself to outrageous things that will outrage people-- the list of outrageous things that people will happily put up with is a longer list).

So in the storm of outrage, taxpayers will demand that government make sure not to send voucher dollars to That School That Teaches Those Awful Things. Politicians will ride that wave, and before you know it, we will have a government agency whose mandate is to decide which churches are "legitimate" and voila-- the Government Bureau of Church Regulation.

Op-ed: Myth busting Indiana’s voucher system

From Rocky Killion (See Rise Above the Mark)

Instead of throwing more money at this unproven two-system approach, Indiana legislators should use Indiana’s resources on proven strategies that will improve public education, including early childhood education, reducing class size, investing in professional development for educators, and assisting students who live in poverty. These are the strategies the best education systems in the world have implemented to become the best.

PRIVATIZATION: CHARTERS: FLORIDA

FL: Death To Public Education

Indiana, North Carolina, Arizona, Ohio...all the states in which wealthy privateers are doing damage to public education...don't reach the heights of damage done to the public schools and public school children of Florida, according to Peter Greene at Curmudgucation. And Florida is, frankly, a terrible place to be a public school student right now. In this post, Greene lists many of the things that Florida has done to support privatization while neglecting or punishing public schools. The third paragraph in the article contains a list of actions so despicable that only the most ardent "reformer" would fail to see the damage done to children.

The most recent legislation diverts millions of dollars from public schools to charter schools.

From Florida State Senator Linda Stewart quoted by Peter Greene (Curmudgucation)

The legislation you signed today gives to the charter school industry a free hand and promises them a bountiful reward. It allows corporations with no track record of success, no obligation to struggling students, and no mandated standards of accountability to flourish, with the sole obligation to their shareholders. Not the public. Not to well-intentioned parents desperate to see their children succeed – but to a group of investors who have made a business decision to add these companies to their portfolios because they are interested in making money.

HYPOCRISY

More Truth in Teacher-Written Education Blogs Than Corporate Media

The entire "reform" movement – the obsession with standardized tests, the growth of charters and vouchers – has grown up and taken over as the status quo of American education with virtually no input from professional educators.

• Have teachers been left out because teaching is a traditionally female dominated profession so the good-old-boys in state legislatures and board rooms across the country disrespect teachers as easily as they disrespect women in general?

• Have teachers been ignored because "reformers" assume that going to school is enough "experience" to dictate how education ought to be?

• Have teachers been silenced because millionaires and billionaires must be smart or they wouldn't be rich, so we must listen to their "new" ideas for education?

• Teachers comprise the last and largest labor unions left in the U.S. Are teachers shunned because destroying America's unions in order to raise up the oligarchy won't be complete until the NEA and AFT are relegated to the ineffectual level of other unions?

The hypocritical conflicts of interest within the political system are rampant, in which legislators and policy makers with economic and political ties to textbook and testing companies, charter management companies, and parochial schools, make policy for public education. Yet teachers aren't consulted about public education policy because they might be "biased."

From Steven Singer (Gadflyonthewall)

For some people, my position as an educator discredits my knowledge of schools. Yet getting paid by huge testing corporations doesn’t discredit journalists!?

POVERTY

School Choice Opponents and the Status Quo

• The status quo in American education is testing and punishing children, teachers, and schools. 

• The status quo in American education is diverting public tax dollars from public schools to religious, private, and privately owned schools.

• The status quo in American education is requiring "accountability" from public schools, while charters and voucher schools need not be transparent.

• The status quo in American education is closing public schools and replacing them with charters instead of fixing them.

• The status quo in American education is blaming teachers for student low achievement without society accepting a share of the responsibility for communities struggling with gun violence, drug and alcohol abuse, toxic environments, lack of health care facilities, and other effects of poverty.

From Russ Walsh

Those of us who continue to point out that poverty is the real issue in education are accused of using poverty as an excuse to do nothing. Right up front let me say I am against the status quo and I have spent a lifetime in education trying to improve teacher instruction and educational opportunities for the struggling readers and writers I have worked with. To point out the obvious, that poverty is the number one cause of educational inequity, does not make me a champion for the status quo. It simply means that I will not fall prey to the false promise of super-teachers, standardized test driven accountability, merit pay, charter schools, and vouchers, all of which are futile efforts to put a thumb in the overflowing dyke that is systematic discrimination, segregation, income inequity, and, yes, poverty.

POLITICS

About That Partisan Divide

From Sheila Kennedy

Today’s Republicans and Democrats do not share a belief in the nature of the common good. Democrats believe that government has a responsibility to ensure access to healthcare. Republicans don’t.

INDIANA'S ISTEP DEBACLE, 2015

Two weeks ago, Rocky Killion, Superintendent of West Lafayette Community School District suggested that parents withdraw their students, homeschool them during the ISTEP test "season" and then re-enroll them when the test was over. His actual words, quoted by WTHR.com

I would prefer all of my students' parents withdraw and become home-schooled during ISTEP, and then we can re-enroll them.

Dave Bangert of the Lafayette Journal and Courier, came out against that suggestions saying it would be a "logistical nightmare."

But Heather Harvey, a board member of the New Community School public charter school, agreed with Killion, saying it was time for action.

This is the time to take action. It's one thing to complain about too much testing. It's another, much more powerful statement to refuse to let our children take the test.

I agree with Ms. Harvey. Logistical nightmare or not, our children shouldn't have to put up with the results of childish arguments of adults by taking what has become an exam so politically charged as to become meaningless...or more meaningless than it already was.



MISGUIDED ASSUMPTIONS

The entire mess surrounding this year's ISTEP test, the State of Indiana's "accountability" test for schools, teachers, and lest we forget them, students, is an indication of the misguided importance we, as a society, place on the standardized tests we give our children.

The assumptions by test-makers, politicians, the media, and much of the general public, are that

• standardized tests are valid and complete measures of student learning and can therefore be used for high stakes decisions about students' futures
• standardized tests are valid measures of a school's effectiveness and can therefore be used to reward or punish schools
• standardized tests are valid measures of a teacher's (or teachers') competence and effectiveness and can therefore be used to judge and retain or fire teachers

These assumptions are incorrect.


TESTS DON'T MEASURE WHAT YOU THINK THEY MEASURE

We rank students, fire teachers, and damage communities with school letter grades using standardized tests, but what is it that the tests actually measure?

There is substantial evidence that standardized test scores measure the family income of students. In study after study there is a direct correlation between the level of achievement of students and their family income. This is no secret...we've known it for years. At the end of this post are 10 links to articles and studies discussing the direct link between poverty and school achievement...there are dozens...likely hundreds more.

One could argue that the appropriate use of standardized tests, if there is one, is that of measuring student learning. But standardized tests only measure a small subset of what children learn in school and an even smaller subset of what teachers teach in school.

In The Case Against Standardized Testing, Alfie Kohn wrote that standardized tests measure what matters least in school.

...as a rule, good standardized test results are more likely to go hand in hand with a shallow approach to learning than with deep understanding..."most tests punish the thinking test-taker"...

In their explanation of What's Wrong With Standardized Tests? Fairtest.org wrote

These kinds of tests are very poor yardsticks of student learning. They are weak measures of the ability to comprehend complex material, write, apply math, understand scientific methods or reasoning, or grasp social science concepts. Nor do they adequately measure thinking skills or assess what people can do on real-world tasks.

And Professor Dan Koretz, of Harvard's Graduate School of Education, discussed testing and his book, Measuring Up. An interview of Professor Koretz, Measuring Up: A Q and A with Professor Dan Koretz reveals his position on the use of tests.

Don't take test scores to mean more than they do. Tests measure only some of the important goals of schooling, and even in measuring those, they are only approximate indicators. They are subject to measurement error; different tests of the same subject often provide a somewhat different picture; and indicators other than tests often tell quite a different story. Therefore, a single score, taken alone, cannot provide a comprehensive measure of the achievement of a student, and it certainly is not sufficient to judge the quality of a school or an educational system.

The high stakes consequences of these tests are inappropriate. If we use them at all, we should use them for reflecting on how the curriculum is taught, and how teachers might more effectively present material, not to determine which teachers are fired, which students are promoted, or which schools are closed.



OUGHTS

The roll out of this year's ISTEP has been a fiasco...a "casualty" in the war among politicians in Indiana's government. Rocky Killion is right...we ought to just cancel ISTEP and use the time set aside for instruction.

Instead of wasting money on ISTEP we ought to spend it on professional development to improve instruction for all students.

The legislature, instead of arguing and passing laws about achievement tests ought to be working on legislation geared towards higher employment, higher wages and the reduction of poverty.

In fact, we ought to cancel ISTEP every year...from now on.



The Link Between Poverty and Academic Achievement.

• Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success
• Income level has strong effect on school test scores, analysis shows
• Parental Income Linked to Students’ Standardized Test Results
• The Impact of Family Income on Child Achievement: Evidence from the Earned Income Tax Credit
• How Poverty Affects Behavior and Academic Performance
• The effects of poverty on academic achievement
• The Relationships Between School Poverty and Student Achievement in Maine
• The impact of poverty on educational outcomes for children
• For the millionth time: the conditions poverty creates affect academic achievement
• Statistics on How Poverty Affects Children in Schools

The narrow pursuit of test results has sidelined education issues of enduring importance such as poverty, equity in school funding, school segregation, health and physical education, science, the arts, access to early childhood education, class size, and curriculum development. We have witnessed the erosion of teachers’ professional autonomy, a narrowing of curriculum, and classrooms saturated with “test score-raising” instructional practices that betray our understandings of child development and our commitment to educating for artistry and critical thinking. And so now we are faced with “a crisis of pedagogy”–teaching in a system that no longer resembles the democratic ideals or tolerates the critical thinking and critical decision-making that we hope to impart on the students we teach.