Community Program Bridges Differences

Walking the Walk, an interfaith group in Philadelphia, brings students of various faiths together to take part in community service programs, reflect on their work, and also discuss their faiths, commonalities, and differences. 

they can meet with other teenagers wearing hijabs or yarmulkes, who are Muslim, Jewish or Christian, and talk — or text — about pizza, goofing off, television and the Jonas Brothers. Asked what was the most important lesson he had learned from getting to know young people of other faiths, Ibrahim, son of the imam, said without hesitation, “I learned they’re just like me.”

Find more info about the project here.

Teaching about Privilege

Education for Liberation hosts its online forum, 'talkin bout on teaching privilege: Tuesday, November 18 to Wednesday, November 19.

talkin `bout….teaching truth to power, will focus on how educators can teach about injustice and inequality to a group with an identity of privilege (for example, teaching about racism to white people, teaching about sexism to men, teaching about heterosexism to straight people etc.). Most Americans have at least one identity of power—male, middle-class, straight, American citizen, white, Christian etc. How do we confront the issue of privilege with students? What are the challenges and benefits of this work? Is it possible to teach someone out of their power?

Obama and the Arts

Obama supports the arts. 

Obama began forming his culture plank in the spring of 2007, long before winning the Democratic nomination. He brought together a committee of artists and arts professionals, headed by Hollywood writer, director and producer George Stevens Jr. and Broadway producer Margo Lion.

The committee's members include novelist Michael Chabon, Broadway director Hal Prince, musicians Eugenia and Pinchas Zukerman, Museum of Modern Art president emerita Agnes Gund, as well as Lynch, of Americans for the Arts.

Here's the part I especially love:

The committee developed a program that advocates: the creation of an "Artists Corp'' of young artists trained to work in low-income schools and communities; the expansion of public- private partnerships to increase cultural-education programs; increased funding for the NEA; a commitment to ``cultural diplomacy''; attracting foreign talent in the arts; and providing health care to artists.

I'd been thinking about the need for an artist corp to address the lack of arts opportunities for particularly low-income students, but I guess my idea is a little too late...

Beyond Gap-Closing: Some Thoughts

Does the overwhelming focus on closing the "achievement gap" channel our energy in the wrong places?

Say we are able to eventually "close" the gap, eliminate it. What would the purpose of education be then? How would our schools, testing, and/or curricula change? Would education look or feel different?

When we focus on "gap-zapping," as EdTrust refers to it, do we change the way in which we practice education? Should we seek to close the test-score gap at all costs? Does the end justify the means? 

Are we short-changing our students?

Paying Students for Performance

NPR airs a discussion of D.C.'s initiative to pay students for their performance and test scores. (a.k.a. bribing students, rather than changing teaching methods and curriculum so that they will actually find learning exciting...)

College Board to Offer Pre-Pre-Pre SAT

The College Board will offer another standardized test for students, reports The NY Times. The test will "help prepare eighth grade graders for rigorous high school courses and college." I'm not sure how a test helps students prepare for high school.

“This is not at all a pre-pre-pre SAT,” Lee Jones, a College Board vice president, said at a news conference. “It’s a diagnostic tool to provide information about students’ strengths and weaknesses.”

The College Board, which owns the SAT and PSAT, made its announcement when an increasing percentage of high school students are taking the rival ACT and amid mounting concern over what critics call the misuses of the SAT and ACT and other standardized tests in college admissions.

Those critics dismissed the new test for eighth graders as just what Dr. Jones said it was not: “a pre-pre-pre SAT.”

“Who needs yet another pre-college standardized exam when there is already a pre-SAT and the SAT test itself?” said Robert Schaeffer, the public education director of FairTest, a nonpartisan group that has called for colleges and universities to make standardized tests optional for admissions. “The new test will only accelerate the college admissions arms race and push it down onto ever younger children.”

Do we really need yet another test? Especially when the SAT is not even a reliable tool?

A Teacher Training Model That Makes Sense

Education Week reports on the Boston Teacher Residency program trains urban teachers by placing them with a master teacher in an urban classroom for a year. This way, there are less surprises when they take on their own classrooms a year later. 

The program makes sense in comparison to other models. In traditional teacher certification routes, students spend less time in the classroom, have little control over placement, and the cooperating teachers' teaching skills can be questionable. With Teach for America, to-be teachers spend less than a month in a classroom, teaching only about one lesson per day. 

Boston Teacher Residency's program sets future teachers up for success and attracts those who are serious about education and teaching in the long-term. However, does it lose candidates to TFA, whose teachers will receive a full salary during the first year of the program, unlike BTR participants who will only receive a stipend?

Billionaires for Bloomberg

What would another term mean for NYC public schools?

Oh, The Things Money Can Buy: Admission to the Ivy League

This NPR report is hard to stomach. Sad and disturbing.

For $40k, Michele Hernandez will start working with your kid in 9th grade to ensure they'll get into the Ivy League. If Hernandez's schedule is too full to accommodate you, your child can take part in her 4-day admission boot-camp for only $14,000.

It's so sad.

Desperate Testing Shams

Schools in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana are transferring magnet school students' tests to the local schools that they would have attended. 

Jefferson school officials began rerouting scores last year at the urging of School Board member Judy Colgan, who feared the system's fledgling advanced studies schools were draining neighborhood schools of their brightest students and consequently lowering those schools' test scores.

School Sucks: but we'll bribe you with cell phone minutes!

Roland G. Fryer, Jr., former "Chief Equality Officer" for NYC schools and Harvard economist will head up the Education Innovation Lab, funded with $44 million from Eli Broad. The first year, researchers, who include "economists," "marketers," and "others" who are interested in reforming education will focus on studying "incentives" for students. This would include Fryer's plan to give middle school students cell phone minutes based on their performance. His plan won't be implemented in NYC (thank God), because the money couldn't be raised by private donors. Currently, NYC pays students in ninth and tenth grade up to $500 for test scores. It hasn't worked so far, but they're going to keep doing it.

Couldn't the money do much more if it was spent on teaching & learning--providing incentives for students to come to school because the subject matter is relevant and interesting, the buildings are welcoming, and teachers care about them?

Diversity is Shrinking in the NYC Teaching Force

The NYSun reports that the percentage of black teachers in New York City is dropping. In 2001-02, 27% of the teaching force was made up of teachers who were black, but that number has shrunk to 13%. The drop could be attributed for an initiative that required all teachers to be fully certified by 2003. In light of this, the city is beginning to focus on recruiting more black and latino educators.

The changing demographics come in a school system that is increasingly made up of non-white students.

Educators and advocates said they have been troubled by the data for several years — and they said they are especially troubled this year, the 40th anniversary of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis, in which black community leaders challenged the city to make school staff more representative of the city.

"We want a school system that values educators who are invested in their students and who reflect the communities of which they are part," a member of the Center for Immigrant Families in uptown Manhattan, Donna Nevel, said.

The Department of Education's executive director for teacher recruitment and quality, Vicki Bernstein, said responsibility for the declining diversity lies with a state requirement that all public school teachers be certified by 2003.

The requirement was introduced in 1998, forcing the New York City public schools to scramble; before 2003, 60% of new teacher hires were uncertified, and 15% of the overall teaching corps in the city was not certified.

School officials said the mandate had a chilling effect on diversity, because the state certifies very few black teachers. According to a state report, in the 2006-07 school year, black people made up just 4% of new certified teachers who identified their race.

The article references the Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict that occured 40 years ago. Taking Note's Richard Kahlenberg shares a summary of the events that is very much worth reading. Here's the intro:

New York City public schools opened peaceably again this year, making it all the more remarkable to recall the chaos that rocked the system 40 years ago. On what was to be the opening day, September 9, 1968, the vast majority of city schools were shut down as more than 50,000 New York City public school teachers went out on strike. The day marked the beginning of the first of three walkouts that kept 1.1 million students out of school for a total of 36 days through mid-November, constituting what was at the time the longest and largest series of teacher strikes in American history. The strikes persisted for so long because they were not about teacher salaries and benefits, issues of dollars and cents which can be easily compromised. Rather, they were about different visions of racial justice and the meaning of liberalism.

The Smoke and Mirrors of Standardized Testing

eduwonkette interviews Daniel Koretz, author of Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us.

She asks an important question:

EW: What are the implications of score inflation for both measuring and attenuating achievement gaps? Because schools serving disadvantaged students face more pressure to increase test scores via the mechanisms you describe, I worry that true achievement gaps may be unchanged - or even growing - while they appear to be closing based on high-stakes measures.

DK: I share your worry. I have long suspected that on average, inflation will be more severe in low-achieving schools, including those serving disadvantaged students. In most systems, including NCLB, these schools have to make the most rapid gains, but they also face unusually serious barriers to doing so. And in some cases, the size of the gains they are required to make exceed by quite a margin what we know how to produce by legitimate means. This will increase the incentive to take short cuts, including those that will inflate scores. This would be ironic, given that one of the primary rationales for NCLB is to improve equity. Unfortunately, while we have a lot of anecdotal evidence suggesting that this is the case, we have very few serious empirical studies of this. We do have some, such as the RAND study that showed convincingly that the "Texas miracle" in the early 1990s, supposedly including a rapid narrowing of the achievement gap, was largely an illusion. Two of my students are currently working with me on a study of this in one large district, but we are months away from releasing a reviewed paper, and it is only one district.

I have argued for years that one of the most glaring faults of our current educational accountability systems is that we do not sufficiently evaluate their effects, instead trusting - evidence to the contrary - that any increase in scores is enough to let us declare success. We should be doing more evaluation not only because it is needed for the improvement of policy, but also because we have an ethical obligation to the children upon whom we are experimenting. Nowhere is this failure more important than in the case of disadvantaged students, who most need the help of education reform.

The willingness for policymakers to think critically about this question reflects their stake in the ed reform movement. 

Do we really want to improve and provide equitable and meaningful education for all students? Or do we just want to make it look like we've closed the achievement gap?  

Let's not accept shortcuts.

Optional SAT: Watch Out Test Prep Industry

A commission led by Harvard's dean of admissions calls for less emphasis on the use of SAT and ACT scores.

“Society likes to think that the SAT measures people’s ability or merit,” Mr. Fitzsimmons said. “But no one in college admissions who visits the range of secondary schools we visit, and goes to the communities we visit — where you see the contrast between opportunities and fancy suburbs and some of the high schools that aren’t so fancy — can come away thinking that standardized tests can be a measure of someone’s true worth or ability.”

Teaching Is a Popular Choice During "Hard Times"

England's Teacher Training Institute approaches nervous bankers, offering a "stable" job.

The Training and Development Agency for Schools is planning to visit London's financial districts in a bid to find people who might re-train as teachers.

The agency (TDA) says the credit crunch has already boosted inquiries about teaching as a career.

Its recruitment website has had a 34% annual increase in traffic.

It also says there has been a 13% increase since last year in the number of people registering an interest in becoming teachers.

Book to Read: Lives on the Boundary

Deborah Meier of Bridging Differences recommends Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary, an alternative to what she phrases as "another way" to educate, in opposition to "boot camp" methods of education. Rather than attempting to change the symptoms of a poor educational system--high drop-out rates, low test scores, etc., she reminds us of the importance of engaging students in the process of education.

Engaging students in pursuit of their own education is possible, and it’s the real “cure”—not just for the crisis of school dropouts, but the larger one of societal dropouts. It requires knowing each other well and having the power to act on that knowledge in respectful ways.

Here's the summary of Lives on the Boundary:

Remedial, illiterate, intellectually deficient—these are the stigmas that define America’s educationally underprepared. Having grown up poor and been labeled this way, nationally acclaimed educator and author Mike Rose takes us into classrooms and communities to reveal what really lies behind the labels and test scores. With rich detail, Rose demonstrates innovative methods to initiate “problem” students into the world of language, literature, and written expression. This book challenges educators, policymakers, and parents to re-examine their assumptions about the capacities of a wide range of students. Already a classic, Lives on the Boundary offers a truly democratic vision, one that should be heeded by anyone concerned with America’s future.

Life-long learning: University Without Walls

The Boston Globe highlights DOROT's University Without Walls, a program that offers educational opportunities to homebound seniors. Classes are held over the phone.

The curriculum includes more than 250 courses and runs the gamut from understanding feng shui and poetry writing to discussions on moral, ethical and philosophical issues and a discourse on women of the progressive era. Informational classes on money management, Internet surfing and medicine also are available.

"It gets me out emotionally. It releases me from the four walls around me," said Leeds, who has participated in the program for 12 years. Her fall selections include a course on the life and work of author Doris Lessing and a class on recording personal histories.

While the majority of the students are from the New York area, seniors in Alaska, Iowa and Texas also participate. The oldest was 105, but died last year.

For more information on University Without Walls visit: http://www.dorotusa.org/.

Whatever It Takes - At what cost?

Bridging Differences is back, and Diane Ravitch has some important commentary on Paul Tough's Whatever It Takes, chronicling Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone.

Tough’s book is very hopeful. He cites a large body of evidence to argue that children will never fall behind cognitively if their parents and their environment provide them with enough stimulation and support from the beginning of their lives. This is the case, he says, no matter how poor their parents are, no matter how disadvantaged their circumstances. If we as a society do “whatever it takes,” we can close the achievement gaps and get every student ready for college or a good career.

However, and there is always a however, there is a depressing aspect to Tough’s book. As the author describes the situation, Canada is in complete sympathy with his powerful, wealthy board of directors, which includes hedge-fund billionaires. Not surprising. These directors care only for the numbers, and they don’t care how the schools get them. “The overall goal of the Zone might be liberal and idealistic—to educate and otherwise improve the lives of poor black children—but Canada believed the best way to achieve that goal was to act not like a bighearted altruist but like a ruthless capitalist, devoted to the bottom line.” (p.135).

The first principal of the middle school sounds like you, Deborah; she must have been reading your books. She is a progressive educator who worries about the whole child, about their social and emotional problems, and who wants the children to have a rounded education. But her school doesn’t get the test scores gains that the hedge-fund managers and the New York City Department of Education demand. She is removed and replaced by a KIPP-style principal. The wealthy men who run the board of the Zone are impressed by the KIPP model, which is described by one of them as “more of a military-style, real rote-learning, rote-behavior discipline thing,” because this model “delivered results.”

The new principal begins a regimen of test-prep, test-prep, test-prep, no-nonsense discipline. Drill, drill, drill. I won’t spoil the book for you by giving away the outcome, but I can only say that the school part of the book’s message was startling. Do poor black and Hispanic kids really need to be in “no excuses” schools that insist on rote learning and rote behavior? That take control of their lives and change their culture? Should this be the model for education for children of color in big cities? This was the message of Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom’s book "No Excuses," and it was echoed by a recent book by David Whitman, "Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism."

Catholic Charter Schools?

Should Catholic schools be allowed to become public charter schools? To avoid closing, several Catholic schools in D.C. have worked out a deal with the school system in which they will become public charters. 

New Issues of The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy

The Freire Project has published the second (free!) issue of The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy. Articles that caught my eye:

• "But What Can I Do?" Fifteen Things Education Students Can Do to Transform Themselves In/Through/With Education"
• "Liberating Grades/Liberatory Assessment"