Monday, March 15, 2010

ESEA Reauthorization to Congress

It would appear that Diane Ravitch has taken up the mantle as the "unlikely national spokeswoman" for those concerned with the direction of the Obama/Duncan reauthorization plan for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). With the President announcing Saturday on his weekly radio broadcast that he was sending his reauthorization plan for ESEA, known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in its latest version, to Congress today, Ravitch responded yesterday with and excellent opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, The Big Idea -- it's bad education policy. If you've already read Ravitch's book that was released earlier this month, there's not a lot new in the column. But she does clearly state what is going on with the Obama/Duncan plan:

Having embraced the Republican agenda of choice, competition and accountability, the Obama administration is promoting the privatization of large segments of American education and undermining the profession of teaching. This toxic combination is the latest Big Idea in education reform. Like so many of its predecessors, it is not likely to improve education.

While there are many other educators expressing the same views as Ravitch, she seems to have the national prestige to make folks listen.

Veteran Washington Post education writer Valerie Strauss appears to be emerging as a strong critic of the Obama/Duncan reform plan. Many of her postings on her The Answer Sheet blog cut through the administration's high-sounding rhetoric and zero in on the good and the bad of their efforts. Her analysis of the President's reauthorization plan, Obama and NCLB: The good--and very bad--news, notes that the impossible NCLB "deadline of 2014 for all students in all public schools to achieve 'proficiency' in basic subjects" will die, but "the current standardized testing schedule put in place by NCLB will remain." She relates that "the lowest achieving 5 percent of schools in every state will be punished even harder than under NCLB." And she concludes with a statement that rings true for many of us:

So many people had so many high hopes for Obama’s impact on education. How disappointed they are that he sounds like another George Bush.

Also see Administration Unveils ESEA Renewal Blueprint by Alyson Klein on Education Week.

They're Not Listening (Part 1)

I had an interesting and disappointing experience recently that may say a lot about the crafting of the Obama administration's current proposals for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). As a citizen and a retired teacher, I wrote both the President and Secretary of Education in January about my concerns with their market oriented approach to education reform.

Over a month passed without a response, and my concern over the lack of a response began to deepen. While the President and Secretary have conducted their "Listening and Learning Tour" about education reform with great fanfare, it appeared to me that they think we are the ones who are supposed to be listening and learning, not the other way around. They couldn't be listening to real teachers and come up with some of the education proposals they are making.

I really believe that elected officials, even the office of the President of the United States, have a responsibility to participate in two-way communication with their constituents. So I decided to try to elicit a response to my conceerns by removing myself from the info@barackobama.com mailing list with the following tart comment:

As a retired career teacher, I've written to both President Obama and Arne Duncan in strong protest of the business oriented changes they're pushing for education. Those measures won't work. And both (offices) have neglected to respond. I now move from being an Obama supporter into that middle ground of independents.

Since my wife and I had been very minor contributors to the 2008 Obama for America campaign, I thought surely the prospect of losing a previous contributor to their never ending campaign for further contributions might attract something other than a canned email acknowledgement. To their credit, the stream of constant emails from Barack, Rahm, David, Michelle, and many others stopped immediately. But there was also no response to my concerns about the Obama/Duncan steamroller that is now threatening public education.

It was at that point I concluded, "They're not listening." Or at the very least, "They're not responding."

To be sure it wasn't just me, I sent out inquiries to some other writers about any feedback they might be receiving from the administration. Widely respected educator and now blogger for Education Week, Walt Gardner, wrote back:

No, I haven't received any feedback whatsoever from the Obama administration about "Reality Check." And I don't expect to because input from classroom teachers is given short shrift from politicians. Nevertheless, I intend to continue to write frankly about the issues confronting education at this crossroads in history.

Neither Ron Maggiano's eloquent A Teacher's Letter to President Obama nor his more biting Let's Fire All the Teachers elicited any response. Ron wrote:

I did not receive a response from the Obama administration regarding my posting. I honestly do not think they are listening to the concerns of teachers. The administration seems to have decided upon its educational policy and is going to stick with it regardless of facts and opinions to the contrary.

If you perceive a theme emerging, I think you're right. I really didn't expect either President Obama or Arne Duncan to pick up the phone and call me to get the straight stuff on education. They obviously have settled on a plan and not unexpectedly, are going to stick with it. Candidate Obama extolled bottom up change, but as President seems to employ only top down "reform" efforts in education. This approach, coupled with Secretary Duncan's reliance on business oriented initiatives, leads me to believe that the Obama administration is no longer, if it was ever, listening to those with the most experience with the problems of education, classroom teachers.

Jump to Part 2 of They're Not Listening!

Odds 'n' Ends

Both Walt Gardner and Valerie Strauss have shared some interesting views recently on teacher evaluation. Walt's Evaluating Teacher Evaluators and The Quest for Qualified Principals look at those doing the evaluations. Valerie's On Obama (and Jay Mathews) and teacher accountability explores the need for "a complete measure of a teacher’s performance" that simply doesn't exist as yet.

Why Montgomery teachers won't stop advocating for schools is Montgomery County Education Association President Doug Prouty's response to some fairly harsh Washington Post editorials about the organization.

Eduwonk has received a bit of a facelift and a new association. Andy Rotherham tells about it in For Whom The Bellwether Tolls.

I watched the HBO movie, Temple Grandin, last night. For those of us who work with students with autism, it's a must watch film.

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Tuesday, March 16, 2010

A Blueprint for Reform

The Department of Education has released its Blueprint for Reform: Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (2.2 MB PDF document). The document is a broad outline of the the administration's plan to "ask states to ensure that their academic standards prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace, and to create accountability systems that recognize student growth and school progress toward meeting that goal."

Sam Dillon has a nice analysis of the proposal in Array of Hurdles Awaits New Education Agenda.

Other than noting the Blueprint uses the phrase "competitive grants" an awful lot of times (22), I'll leave it at that. I got my licks in yesterday in They're Not Listening!

All Contests: All the Time

Okay, I lied. But even eSchool News notes in Nation’s ed-tech chief reacts to budget concerns that tech folks are worried about a draft of the new National Educational Technology Plan that "would fold the largest single source of federal funding for school technology equipment, software, training, and support" into a larger competitive grant program.

Odds 'n' Ends

Winnie Hu has a good article about a school that is using a recess coach to curb bullying and behavior problems. Forget Goofing Around: Recess Has a New Boss tells of the pros and cons for structured recesses.

Pink slips sent to thousands of California teachers relates that "school districts had issued 21,905 pink slips to teachers and other school employees by Monday, the legal deadline for districts to send preliminary layoff notices."

Tree Kits

I wrote last month about happening upon some tree kits that looked like they might make a nice classroom project. The kits I purchased were offered by GenericSeeds.com, but I also found that the original source, The Jonsteen Company, offered far cheaper sets of tree kits for schools. Their Life Cycle of a Tree 24-pack runs around $70 and could prove to be a nice alternative to the traditional clasroom bean seed in milk carton activity.

I ordered a Red Maple Arbor Day Tree Kit and a Colorado Blue Spruce Tree Kit from GenericSeeds.com to see what I'd get. The kits come as pictured left, right, and below, and do include everything one needs.

I was a little dubious about the blue spruce, as many coniferous tree seeds require stratification and even scarification to germinate. But after four weeks of stratification in our refrigerator and a couple of weeks sitting on a windowsill, our blue spruce seeds germinated this week. I apparently had washed all the seed to one side of the planting tube provided, as I found a tangle of what proved to be 8 blue spruce seedlings against the side of the tube.

Surprisingly (to me, anyway), the red maple seeds haven't yet shown any sign of germination!

It will be interesting to see how the blue spruce grow, and how quickly they may be ready to set in the ground outside. But from what I've seen so far, these kits could prove to be a good classroom project.

Full disclosure: GenericSeeds.com is an Educators' News affiliated advertiser. The Jonsteen Company is not.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

March Madness

With St. Patrick's Day, the start of the NCAA tourney, and spring break upon us, Valerie Strauss has a timely story today, March Madness: What's the academic effect? Strauss begins her second paragraph, "A nationwide independent poll funded and conducted by me..."

Tough Sell

Sam Dillon writes in Administration Seeks Converts to Education Plan that "the Obama administration has begun trying to persuade union leaders, teachers and the public that its proposals for overhauling federal education policies are good for teachers and for public schools." But the administration is finding its Blueprint for Reform a tough sell to the NEA and AFT. Responding to a prepared statement Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will deliver today when he testifies before Congress on reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, AFT President Randi Weingarten stated:

Teachers alone cannot turn around struggling schools, and the administration’s plans put 100 percent of the responsibility on teachers.

NEA President Dennis Van Roekel was equally unimpressed:

They say they are offering flexibility and an end to micromanaging our schools, but the administration’s blueprint mandates to 15,000 school districts how they should evaluate and compensate teachers.

The administration's Blueprint for Reform was created with minimal input from real teachers by Arne Duncan's inner circle of business type non-educators. Their message seems to be that teachers should be thrilled they're doing away with the impossible NCLB goal of total student proficiency in reading and math by 2014 and should drink the Kool-Aid on their proposed mass firings of teachers in the lowest performing 5% of the nation's schools, continuation of high-stakes testing that destroys a well rounded curriculum, and basing teacher evaluations on student test scores.

And yes, I think Van Roekel needs to hire away some of Randi Weingarten's writers for his sound bites!

On Science@NASA

I was wondering if Dr. Tony Phillips, author of the excellent Science@NASA site, had gone on vacation or put the site on hiatus. I hadn't received any updates about the site on my RSS reader this month. When I visited the site, I found that Dr. Phillips is indeed continuing to put out some very useable postings for teachers and students. His Did the Chilean Quake Shift Earth's Axis answered some of my questions about the news reports of a possible axis shift.

Postings on Science@NASA are written in vocabulary appropriate for middle through high school students. They also have audio files and other language versions available as well as being available as podcasts on iTunes.

Other Science@NASA postings since the RSS blackout:

• Solar 'Current of Fire' Speeds Up
• Spirit's Journey to the Center of Mars

No Magic Bullet

LAUSD teacher Joseph Staub references California's new "parent trigger" option in Education magic bullets are often blanks in the Los Angeles Times. He goes on to suggest what most teachers wish would be enabled, a "parent trigger" or "family trigger" by which "a school's teachers could vote to restaff a kid's family when they don't support him or her in getting the free education offered by the state or, worse, abuse and neglect the child. Maybe we could transfer that kid to a family that does care."

New Rule

To go along with Bill Maher's New Rule: Let's Not Fire the Teachers When Students Don't Learn -- Let's Fire the Parents, I'd like to add another New Rule: Don't say you were a teacher when you really weren't one.

I'd read Ruben Navarrette Jr.'s ridiculous piece, Firing all the teachers was justified, when it appeared on CNN.com. I'd forgotten all about it until my wife brought it to my attention this morning when she read it in The Week. Navarrette writes (with my emphasis in the second paragraph):

Whenever I write in support of education reform -- whether proposed by Democrats or Republicans -- or, for that matter, whenever I challenge teachers in any way, I get an earful from angry and defensive educators who demand to know if I have ever been in the classroom. I interpret their comments to mean that if have never been a teacher, I ought to just pipe down and keep paying my taxes so they can grow their salaries at a respectful rate.

I will keep paying my taxes, but I will not pipe down. Not that I think it matters, but, in fact, I have been in the classroom. I taught for nearly five years at the K-12 level in Central California. I've taught the kids of poor farm workers, but I've also taught the kids of doctors and lawyers.

When one digs a little deeper, one finds in his American Program Bureau bio that he substituted "in classes from kindergarten to high school." He began an article in the The Victoria Advocate in 2001, "One lesson I learned in four years as a substitute teacher..."

You don't have to "pipe down," Mr. Navarrette, but you really need to be more candid about your qualifications to speak out on education reform. While we need great substitutes (I'm now one.), it definitely is a totally different animal than being a real classroom teacher.

And while I'm flaunting my pet peeves, let me add one about the nutty, conservative Indianapolis Star columnist, Andrea Neal. Her Star bio says "Andrea Neal, former editor of The Star editorial pages, is a teacher at St. Richard's School in Indianapolis and an adjunct scholar for the Indiana Policy Review Foundation." I'm sure she is, but when one does an IDOE search for her name amongst licensed teachers, her name doesn't come up!

And speaking about the Star, Kids can't learn if they're hungry is an excellent editorial.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

"Blueprint" News

Despite the headlines below, the Washington Post's Nick Anderson writes that "for the most part, Education Secretary Arne Duncan drew a positive reception from key lawmakers as he began pitching the administration's blueprint to rewrite the No Child Left Behind law." Duncan did receive pointed questioning about the administration's proposal favoring "big-city districts at the expense of poor students in small towns," and shifting from set formulas to competitive grants to fund a number of items. He also was advised by several lawmakers that their school turnaround strategies, three of four would involve firing educators, were probably unworkable in remote rural districts.

• The New York Times: Lawmakers Say Needs of Rural Schools Are Overlooked by Sam Dillon
• The Washington Post: Plan to rework 'No Child' prompts concerns for rural areas by Nick Anderson

Time Magazine inexplicably turned over a page to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein for Does Obama's Education Plan Make the Grade? I'd recommend reading Diane Ravitch's book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, for a more balanced look at school reform and what the New York City schools have done in that regard.

Friday, March 19, 2010

A Double Treat

I got a double treat last night when I visited John Spencer's always excellent Musings from a Not-So-Master Teacher blog. He first shares a great metaphor about education in Measuring the Twigs While the Tree Dies. And then in a one-liner at the very bottom of the posting was, "Hey, check out my book Teaching Unmasked (link to John's site). I'm selling it at-cost or you can download it for free as a PDF."

Teaching Unmasked: Why I Am More of a Teacher When I Am Less of a Teacher (Amazon link) is John Spencer's very readable collection of heartwarming and heartbreaking experiences in the classroom. His candor and humility about how one grows as a teacher is refreshing and inspiring.

Here's an excerpt from Chapter 3:

I'm sitting in the dingy cafeteria, trying to avoid the smell of bleach and sweat and spoiled milk. I notice a student in my Summer School class gathering travel-sized boxes of sugar cereal (can't we just call it what it is, which is candy?) and stuffing them discreetly into her backpack.

When I see her in class, I'm not sure where to go with this. I've walked in on an incomplete scene. I know nothing of the context or character and only a fragment of the plot.

"You're doing really well in here. I'm surprised that you ended up in summer school."

She responds on with "thanks."

The next day, she gathers toast. She takes the dry pieces of burnt white bread and stacks them neatly, wraps them with industrial paper towels and stuffs them into the backpack again.

I'm scared to ask, feeling that I might compound the shame. So I ask her more carefully, "Why are you here?"

She misinterprets it as an existential quandary and responds, "I guess we're all trying to figure that out. Why are we here? Some say religion has the answer. I'm not so sure."

"I'm not talking about that. See, I know that you're smart. Your answer tells me that. I'm trying to figure out why you are in summer school right now instead of having fun with your friends."

"I didn't do my work," she says.

"Can you tell me what's going on? You and I both know that you shouldn't be in summer school."

She pulls out her backpack and says, "It was my turn. My mom cleans houses, but they raised the rent and she has to decide if she wants air conditioning or food for us. So, we have to take turns going to summer school so that we can have lunch. The food banks start getting empty this time of year."

"Why didn't you talk to a teacher?" I ask.

"They just thought I was being lazy. They called me in for a meeting and told my mom how to make me do my work. They handed me printout sheets of what I was missing. They were being good teachers."

It's easy to judge a teacher for missing her story and creating a Shame-and-Blame meeting without ever asking the questions. However, I can empathize. It's easy to believe that since I know a child's writing style, I know her voice. I'm sure I've missed backpacks full of toast because I saw myself as an expert on children and I never took the time to ask.

Yeah, Teaching Unmasked is just that good. John offers his book as a free PDF download, a $1.00 "at cost" Kindle book, or the standard print version for just $4.99 from Amazon.

On the Blogs

I originally had the posting about John Spencer under my irregular feature heading of "On the Blogs," but it really deserved its own section. I generally use this section when:

1. I need a lift from the often depressing news in education,
2. I run across some really neat stuff from real classroom teachers, or
3. I have absolutely nothing of value of my own to post on Educators' News.

Today's listings are a combination of all three.

Michael Doyle's The Apprentice on his Science Teacher blog shares the unsettling news:

I will probably be fine, but I am the boy on the bubble in our department. This is my fourth year; everyone else here has been teaching longer.

Our district has been hit hard by budget cuts. Seniority trumps. I get all that.

Why does it have to be like that? Doyle's writing is always inspiring. I hope he makes the cut.

Do not miss Thirteen Things You'll Never Hear Your Students Say from This Week's Education Humor. It will make your day. For example, number thirteen reads, "This worksheet is repetitive and tedious, but we love it."

Jenny Orr shares a a couple of gems of her usual and considerable wisdom in Failure on her Elementary, My Dear, or Far From It blog.

I do believe our schools can do better. I do not believe they are failing.

Most people are happy with their local public school. It's "public schools" they don't like.

Hanging On to Moments by a Thread on Organized Chaos shares some interesting, overheard student conversations.

The I'm a Dreamer blog turned one year old this week. Happy Birthday, or is it Anniversary?

Paul L. Martin's Paolo's Quest on The Teacher's View is another of those heartwarming and heartwrenching stories about the kids we teach.

Schools Matter brings us back to the reality of the political situation swirling around our profession in NJ's Bully Governor Will Not Be "Bullied:" Declares War on Teachers.

Candi Peterson's Spring Cleaning At Hardy Middle School on The Washington Teacher has a great parody of the Michelle Rhee "clean sweep" cover on Time Magazine.

And Walt Gardner’s Reality Check on Education Week continues its excellent analysis of education reform with The Other Educational Outcome. This time Walt looks at "the attitudes, values and interests that teachers want to instill in their students...affective outcomes. Yet as vital as they are, they are totally ignored by today's reformers."

School Closings

Reports of school closings in Detroit and New York have filled the news recently. A couple of stories that may get missed in the swirl of news of mass big city school closings are Trip Gabriel's Despite Gains, Charter School Is Told to Close about the New Covenant school, and Louis Sahagun's Tiny school's fate roils rural California district about the Eastern Sierra Academy, a college-prep academy designed for high achievers, that may be shuttered as a cost cutting measure.

Odds 'n' Ends

Education Week's Stephen Sawchuk weighs in on the Obama/Duncan school reform blueprint in Teachers' Unions Slam Obama K-12 Budget Proposals. Sawchuk covers a lot of ground, but his first paragraph echoes my concern noted earlier this week about putting "all new education funding into competitive grants rather than into aid formulas." That's scary.

Ralph E. Shaffer's Time to regulate what charters are teaching from the San Francisco Chronicle is illuminating. I'm not sure I totally agree with Shaffer, but I share his concern.

I was reading through the comments on Nick Anderson's Plan to rework 'No Child' prompts concerns for rural areas from the Washington Post yesterday. Towards the end of the comments, one that was posted early on, I thought the content sounded familiar. As I read on, I said to myself, "That's exactly what I wrote on Educators' News yesterday."

And it was. It was posted with a link to this page by Ed Harris, who keeps me on my toes with frequent links and comments. I seem to be adding, "Thanks, Ed!" about once a week now.

Have a great weekend!

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