Guest Post from Denny Taylor, Friend of Public Education, Families and Children

Denny Taylor is author of the influential books Family Literacy and Learning Denied, two books that had a huge influence on my thinking about literacy instruction. When she speaks, we all should listen. After years away from publishing, but not from researching, Denny is back with a vengeance. She deserves our support. Please read her letter below.

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I am writing to urgently request your help. If you find the political circumstance and the research base for the four propositions that I have outlined in this letter are compelling, and you support the course of action suggested here please send this letter to friends and colleagues. Use your websites, Facebook, and any other means to get the message out. Given that I rarely enter the public sphere my friends will know that the situation of which I write is pressing. Time is of the essence, I fear.

Some of you will have read books I have written based on forty years of longitudinal research in family, community, and schools settings with children, families, and teachers who live and work in challenging social and physical environments. Except for my doctoral dissertation, all my research has taken place in sites of urban and rural poverty.

About fifteen years ago I became more focused on catastrophic events, including extreme weather events, industrial disasters, war and armed conflict, and acts of mass violence that occur with little warning and in a matter of a few seconds change the lives of children, teachers, and their families forever.

I haven’t published during this fifteen year time period, but I have been working as a researcher and writing on a daily basis. Much of the time I have spent studying the research on trauma and mass trauma with a mentor in the field. Still more time has been spent studying Earth system science, and eventually writing qualitative research papers that were peer reviewed by researchers in the physical sciences. Based on the reviews, I have participated in research conferences and meetings with Earth system scientists whose research focuses on quantitative studies on the anthropogenic changes that are taking place to the planet.

My own research has evolved, and I have found my place between scientists, policy makers, and the public. The mix of social and physical sciences is making it possible for me to share the findings of these fifteen years of daily study, which are firmly grounded in scientific evidence, and in the lived knowledge that has come from living and working in places where catastrophic events have taken place.

There are eight book length manuscripts on my bookshelf and the first three books based on them are being published this summer. These books are very different from each other, but they all focus on the interconnections between two of the greatest threats to our children’s future:

1. The dismantling of the US public education system; and
2. The acceleration of anthropogenic change to the planet.

The Earth system scientists from the global scientific community who participated in the IPCC 5^th Assessment Report categorized climate change as “unequivocal”, and 195 countries signed documents in agreement with these scientists. In addition, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has produced 40 reports, the first in 2005, raising concerns about climate change and in the 2014 report the GAO has elevated the impacts of climate change to “high risk” status. The Department of Defense (DOD) has issued similar reports and warnings and is preparing for catastrophic events that might occur because of climate change.

But the US Congress still refuses to act. Many members of Congress are still denying that climate change is unequivocal, and they refuse to acknowledge that both the people of the United States and the entire global community are at “high risk”.

Even more inexplicable is the fact that there is now one political party in the US Congress that is not only denying climate change, but has powerful members on Congressional sub-committees convened to focus on climate change who are also outspoken in denying basic science.

The three books connect the dots between the dismantling of the US public education system and the denial of climate change, and they present four propositions:

First Proposition: By defunding public education the federal government is selling the future of children in the US to private corporations, creating huge revenues for companies and a bonanza for shareholders, while at the same time undermining and destabilizing the neighborhoods and communities in which schools are privatized.

Second Proposition: By profligating denial of climate change, defunding and limiting expenditures on mitigating climate and environmental problems, the US Congress is actively engaged in protecting the corporate interests that have supported their political campaigns, while willfully ignoring the very real and very grave threat that exists to the American people, especially children, and to all human life on the planet.

Third proposition: By defunding public education and selling the children in the US to private corporations that are in large part responsible for climate change and the destruction of the environment, the federal government is ensuring the indoctrination of America’s children into the State-Corporate Complex that is threatening their future, while at the same time actively interfering with their capacity to develop the problem-solving capabilities they will need to tackle the potentially life-threatening anthropogenic changes to the planet that they will experience in their lifetime.

Fourth proposition:If we are serious about preparing our children for an uncertain future, in which they will be confronted by many perils, then we must stop the corporate education revolution immediately and recreate the public school system based on democratic principles, ensuring equality and opportunity for all children to participate in projects and activities that will ensure their active engagement in re-visioning and re-imagining human life on Earth.

For our children and the planet, the third and fourth propositions are far reaching in their implications. The three books unpackage the political propaganda, and focus on the scientific research that is being obfuscated for political power, and corporate revenues and profits. Each book explores the relationships that exist between what Noam Chomsky calls “the State-Corporate Complex” and the acceleration of climate change, and the defunding andcorporatization of public education. Together they provide compelling evidence why the Common Core should be abandoned and Pearson’s “global education revolution” immediately ended.

Here are the titles of the three books:

Nineteen Clues: Great Transformation Can Be Achieved Through Collective (just published in paper and also available in electronic formats for Amazon, B&N, Kobo, and iBooks).

Save Our Children, Save Our School, Pearson Broke the Golden Rule (proof copies of this political satire have arrived and the actual book should be available in two weeks with eBooks to follow).

Keys to the Future: A Parent-Teacher Guide to Saving the Planet (is in the final edit stage and will be available in paper by September, again with eBooks to follow).

Together, based on the evidence, these books make the case that there are three things we know for sure:

1. What happens to the future lives of our children and grandchildren depends on us;
2. We should not expect the powerbrokers of the State-Corporate Complex to come to our aid or rescue our children;
3. Extreme inequality is not only bad for people it is bad for the planet – the poor are at greater peril than the rich.

Many teachers and parents are already leading the way in the struggle for equality and more humane learning environments for children. Their courageous activism is the struggle not only for the re-establishment of the publiceducation system, but also for the future of humanity.

The dangers to our children are real, and at Garn we volunteering our time to work for the Press, because we regard ourselves as first responders in an emergency situation. Our mission is to publish books with actionable knowledge that can be of use to educators and the public. We are hopeful for the future and we put our trust in the people, especially parents and teachers, who are working to make the planet a child safe zone.

Please consider supporting Garn Press by sharing this letter with everyone in your social networks and encouraging your friends and colleagues to read the books. Reviews are welcome!

Our hope at Garn is that when our children and grandchildren ask us what we did to respond to climate change we will be able to tell them that:

1. We saved their schools and made them sites of equity and justice;
2. We made their schools places where every child developed the capacity to be resourceful and resilient;
3. We insisted that they had the opportunity to participate in great projects about the Earth and about the Universe;
4. We made sure their education included both the scientific and the literary so they could see the deep connections between these ways of thinking and ways of being;
5. We were adamant that they learned together in classrooms that valued the ways in which they could support one another;
6. We insisted that their classes included the arts, dance, music, drama, painting and drawing in seamless lessons that encouraged joyfulness and a sense of belonging to a community.

We will be able to tell them that because of the ways in which we insisted they were educated the ethos of the nation changed. Because of their children the public began to regard the Earth differently. People began to reassess what was important to them. They acted on what they already knew, that liberty cannot exist without justice, and that the price of great wealth for a few was too high for the public to pay and would no longer be tolerated.

We will tell them we stood strong, and we used these newfound beliefs in our re-Imagining of the ways we live on the planet. We will tell them because we love our children so much the world changed.

We must do whatever we can to make this happen, so we can tell our children, “We worked together and we made the Earth a child-safe zone.”

Denny Taylor

New York

July 15, 2014

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie Blinks on Teacher Evaluation

Champion of corporate education reform, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey has blinked on one of the signature tenets of that reform movement: AchieveNJ – which provides for teacher evaluation tied to student performance on standardized tests. Faced with an assembly bill that sought to delay the use of the new tests to measure schools and teachers until a task force could be established to review and report on the impact of the tests, Christie capitulated. He had threatened to veto any such bill, but faced with a 72-4 bi-partisan vote in the assembly, Christie had little choice but to compromise.

His executive order does nothing to relieve parents and children from taking the suspect tests, but it does delay the implementation of the value-added measurement of teacher performance. The executive order means that the 20 per cent of New Jersey teachers who teach language arts and math in grades 3-8 will have student performance on those tests count for 10 per cent of their evaluation in 2014-15 and 20 per cent the following year. While the executive order really just kicks the can down the road for two years, it must be seen as a clear victory for the two teacher unions, NJEA and AFT, if not for parents and students.

It is interesting to note that test scores were originally intended to account for 35 per cent of a teacher’s evaluation. Out-going New Jersey Commissioner of Education, Chris Cerf, lowered that to 30 per cent earlier this year. Now Christie has lowered it to 10 percent and 20 per cent for the next two years. As Jersey Jazzman has pointed out in a comment on Bob Brauns’ blog, “It is an indication of how arbitrary the process of tying test scores to teacher evaluations is when the governor — on the basis of absolutely nothing — can change the weight of test scores in those evaluations merely by executive order.”

So now we wait for the findings of this new task force. Chritie's task forces have a tendency to report what Christie wants to hear, so I am not very optimistic about what we will hear from this new panel.

Several years ago, another of the Governor's executive orders initiated the Task Force on Educator Evaluation, a group that ultimately recommended the 35 per cent number for the amount that student standardized tests should count in a teacher evaluation. That recommendation flew directly in the face of testimony provided that task force by a group of New Jersey educators and researchers calling themeselves EQuATE.  The EQuATE report called on the task force to recommend the following to the Governor.

Based on a thorough analysis of existing literature, evaluation programs, and its members’ own experiences, EQuATE is recommending the following:

1. Appoint a ―guiding coalition to develop an aligned ―Department of Education – Local Education Authority‖ (DOE-LEA) system for continuous improvement of teaching and school leadership through an inclusive process by December 2011.
2. Develop a balanced teacher evaluation framework and process. The DOE-LEA evaluation system should:

• Empower teachers and school leaders to customize, adopt and implement a process and framework that is LEA-specific;
•  Reduce the weight given to standardized test-based measures of student achievement; 
• Select pupil progress indicators with wisdom; Incorporate all domains of professional practice into the evaluation framework; 
• Develop guidelines, standards, processes and training around the proper use of data; 
• Design for transformative change rather than simply technical change;
• Conduct a cost-benefit analysis.

3. Complete a pilot of the DOE-LEA process and framework by July 2015.
4. Provide LEAs with a set of criteria by which they might opt-out of the proposed statewide system based on performance and locally developed educator improvement systems. One alternative should be a locally negotiated Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) process designed to identify and assist under-performing teachers before making a professional judgment regarding their fitness for continued service.

EQuATE further warned of the dangers of attributing more to test scores than they could reveal about teacher effectiveness.

Research studies show that the teacher’s effect on value-added scores, based on these kinds of tests, accounts for only 3-4 percent of the variation.1 Fully 90 percent of the variation in VAMs is attributable to student characteristics and the interaction of learning/test-taking styles with the instruments used to measure achievement; it’s not the teacher. To ascribe a weight to this measure that exceeds its explanatory power would be malpractice at best.

If the Task Force on Educator Evaluation had aligned their recommendations with this reasoned and well-researched approach, yesterday's Christie capitulation would not have been necessary and real progress on teacher evaluation could have been made. Instead the task force report and the policy which followed it were driven by ideology rather than sound practice. 

Christie paid a bit of a price for that yesterday. It will be interesting to see if this new task force listens to educators, sound research and good sense and makes non-ideological recommendations. I, for one, am not holding my breath.

For a full explanation of why AchieveNJ is "faith-based policy" please see Jersey Jazzman here.

Arne Duncan Gives Lip Service to Equity

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says he wants all students to have access to a quality teacher. Well, who could argue with that? On Monday, the U.S. Department of Education launched an initiative aimed at addressing what Duncan calls the “systemic inequities that short-change students in high-poverty, high-minority schools across our country.” He has called for every state to get cracking at developing their teacher equity plans.

The Secretary wants equity so badly that, according to Education Week, he has dedicated 4.2 million dollars to develop a “technical assistance” network to help states develop their plans.

Golly gosh gee willikers, Mr. Secretary, 4.2 million dollars. To put that figure into perspective, that 4.2 million is less money than one modest sized urban school district in the country will spend in one year on the new Common Core testing regime that the Secretary has bribed states to participate in.

I would say that backing this equity initiative with a pittance in cash indicates just how committed to equity this administration is. If we wish to read where their real commitments lie, perhaps we should look at other places where they spend money.

In 2010, the Department of Education, under Secretary Duncan, granted 50 million dollars to Teach for America. You read that correctly. Ten times more cash was committed by this champion of equity for a program that literally defines inequity.

A quick refresher. Teach for America (TFA) provides recent college graduates looking to pad their resumes and who have shown no prior interest in education as a career, with five weeks of training in teaching and throws them into the classrooms of some of our neediest children. A large majority of these recruits are gone from the classroom in 2-5 years. Originally designed to fill a need in underserved areas, they now replace furloughed certified teachers in many areas and form the bulk of the staffs in many charter operations.

To recap, Duncan has committed 4.2 million to teacher equity and 50 million to insuring that inner-city children get teachers who are clearly not qualified to teach and will leave the profession in a couple of years. Whether it be under the No Child Left Behind definition of “highly-qualified” or any other designation of a well-trained, committed and certified teacher, TFA is no friend of teacher equity.

If the Secretary wanted to strike one clear blow for equity, he would immediately disavow TFA and insist that every teacher in urban schools be fully trained and certified. Don’t hold your breath.

It will be interesting to see what the states come up with in these equity plans. I would think that the plans would call for making teaching in urban areas more attractive to teachers. This would include things like insuring school buildings are clean, safe and under good repair. It would include insuring a professional staff that included counselors and other support staff that could help to meet the needs of students in crisis as so many urban children are. The plan might include good pay, but even more importantly, job security and the kind of autonomy that high performing teachers desire.  It might also include an evaluation system that includes multiple measures of performance and that does not rely on spurious value-added formulas, famously skewed against teachers of struggling students, to assess teacher performance.

But wait. Secretary Duncan recently praised the Vergara decision that stripped teachers of their job security protections. Duncan pushes for value-added measures so we can (erroneously) identify who the best teachers are. Duncan pushes for charter schools (he gave 50 million to KIPP charters in 2010 also) that drain the funds urban districts might use to fully staff schools and repair and maintain buildings. Good luck getting your equity plans past the Secretary if you include job protections and autonomy and disavow value-added.

.

Secretary Duncan is the enemy of the very equity to which he gives lip service.

For a full and witty discussion of the false promises of the teacher equity concept, I highly recommend you read what my colleague, Peter Greene, has to say about the issue in this Huffington Post article.

Thinking about Critical Thinking, Common Core and Vergara

Recent headlines have me thinking about critical thinking.

House Speaker John Boehner Wants to Sue the President

Sarah Palin Says, “Impeach the President.”

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan Praises the Vergara Decision

Reading some of these pronouncements makes me think that the Common Core’s call for instruction in critical thinking has come not a moment too soon. It is probably too late for Boehner, Palin and Duncan, but maybe the future political leaders sitting in Common Cored classrooms today can be saved. Or maybe not.

Here is what the Common Core says about critical thinking:

·         Students are engaged and open-minded—but discerning—readers and listeners. They work diligently to understand precisely what an author or speaker is saying, but they also question an author’s or speaker’s assumptions and premises and assess the veracity of claims and the soundness of reasoning.

·         Students cite specific evidence when offering an oral or written interpretation of a text. They use relevant evidence when supporting their own points in writing and speaking, making their reasoning clear to the reader or listener, and they constructively evaluate others’ use of evidence.

Is it just me, or does this sound not very revolutionary to you, too? I started teaching in 1969. From day one I was asking my students to challenge the veracity of what they were reading, to cite information from the text to support their arguments, and to write and speak clearly about their opinions. I don’t buy the premise that schooling before the Common Core was all about rote learning and yet that is what I hear over and over from Common Core defenders.

I do know this; rote learning was discredited in my undergraduate education (1965-69) and was consistently discredited as a practice through my years as a teacher of social studies, through my graduate work, as a reading specialist and as an instructional supervisor. When I was supervising instruction, I observed hundreds of lessons. Very few of these lessons focused on rote learning for its own sake. When they did, teachers were informed about it and provided guidance on moving the lesson to a higher level of thinking for the children.

As I think critically about the Common Core and its “chief architects”, the Gates Foundation and Student Achievement Partners (David Coleman, Jason Zimba, Susan Pimentel, et.al), I have to wonder how good they are as critical thinkers, too. I wonder what level of critical thinking led them to believe that a group of people who had never taught could get together with a group of representatives of testing companies and write standards that would be embraced by the teaching community. Not to nit-pick, but if I were writing standards for teachers to implement, my own critical analysis would have led me to believe that I should integrate actual classroom teachers in the process from the beginning.

Secondly, what critical thinking process allowed these “architects” to believe that the standards would absolutely work to improve education without any field testing? If David Coleman, as he avows, values evidence so much, why would he and his colleagues rush the Common Core into schools with absolutely no evidence that they will work? What, by the way, is the evidence that top-down standards have ever worked to improve teaching and learning?

And finally there is the coup de grace of failed critical thinking. How are we to measure student critical thinking ability? Why, of course, on a standardized test. Nothing says commitment to the high minded concept of teaching children to be open-minded, engaged readers and listeners capable of clear reasoning than asking them to fill in the bubbles on a multiple choice answer sheet. I wonder if the “architects” critical thinking may have been clouded by having so many representatives of test companies at the table.

But let us not be too harsh on David Coleman and his group of clueless standardnistas; they don’t have many great role models. Secretary Duncan’s immediate and full-throated support of the Vergara decision striking down teacher job protections defies all common sense, let alone critical thinking. Let me see if I can get into Arne’s head on this one. Might this have been his thought process? 

“Let me see, I am the national spokesperson for educational policy. School children are my most critical constituency. The most important in school factor influencing children’s learning is the classroom teacher. What I need to do is come out lauding an arbitrary decision made on a purely ideological basis by a biased judge that undermines teachers' ability to do their jobs. Yes, that is the right route to take! That will lead to improved learning for those children. Nothing makes a person a better custodian of children’s learning than fear of losing their jobs.”

So here is a discussion starter question for those of you who teach Civics or Problems of Democracy or Critical Reading: Boehner, Palin, Coleman, Duncan: Just what the hell were they thinking?

Putting Students First: Reformers Don’t Know What that Means

 If you want to put children first, you must also put the adults who are working closest with them, their parents and their teachers, first.

The corporate education reformers love to talk about putting students first. Uber-reformer, Michelle Rhee, loves to say it so much she named her multi-million dollar non-profit StudentsFirst. When reformers attack teachers and teacher unions, they say it is because they are putting students first. When they support lawsuits attacking teacher job protections, it is because they are putting students first. The reformy state appointed superintendent in Newark, NJ, Cami Anderson, says that too many adults are getting in the way of her plans to close neighborhood schools and hand them over to charter operators “for the kids.” Even Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, who has systematically decimated public schools in Philadelphia through budget cuts, claimed he was putting students first with an agreement to raise a cigarette tax to aid Philly schools.

To paraphrase the immortal words of Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, “You reformers keep saying students first, but I don’t think you know what that means.”

Allow me to explain what it means.

I suppose most of us have flown so often by now that we don’t really pay attention to the flight attendants’ safety patter as the flight is about to take off. On a recent flight though, I listened enough to hear this: “If in the unlikely event an emergency causes a loss of cabin pressure, an oxygen bag will fall down from above you. If you are travelling with a small child, please put your mask on first and then assist the child in putting on a mask.”

The airlines get it. Children need adult assistance to succeed and if those adults are under extreme stress, say from lack of oxygen, or from poverty, or from stupid tests and evaluation schemes, the children will not thrive. If you want to put children first, you must also put the adults who are working closest with them, their parents and their teachers, first.

Parents living in extreme poverty are living lives under stress. The stress may come from being unable to provide food for their children, or from debt, or from violence in or outside of the home, or from abuse of drugs and alcohol. Whatever the causes, these stressors make for poor conditions for raising children who are able to learn. As Jeff Madrick, writing in an article titled Inequality Begins at Birth in the New York Review of Books, recently noted:

“[T]here is new biological evidence that a high-stress environment for very young children does not simply affect cultural and psychological conditions that predispose the poor to failure; it can also affect the architecture of the brain, changing the actual neurological functioning and quantity of brain matter.”

These studies generally [agree] that persistent neglect and inadequate nurturing are primary causes of brain deterioration.

If corporate education reformers are truly interested in putting children first, they will need to confront poverty. We already know how to do it. Our social programs like food stamps, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits have all worked to reduce poverty, but they have not gone far enough and they are under constant political threat of being reduced. Professor Madrick recommends giving poor adults with children cash allowances as is done in many countries in the world right now. A frontal attack on poverty will reduce adult stress and increase children’s ability to learn.

Teaching is a stressful job under the best of circumstances. Everyday a teacher faces hundreds of decisions, large and small, that impact student learning. Whether it is classroom management, lesson planning, assessing learning on the fly, dealing with a student who is ill or traumatized or being bullied or being the bully or struggling with a new concept, stress is all around.

Media reports blaming teachers for the issues, real and imagined, of public education, hare-brained evaluation schemes using student standardized test scores to measure learning, and attacks on teacher job protections only increase the stress. When teachers are put under the kinds of stress that threatens their job status for arbitrary reasons, they will make bad decisions. On one end of the scale of bad decisions is altering test booklets, such as happened under Michelle Rhee’s stressful tenure as Chancellor of the Washington, DC schools. At the other end of the spectrum of bad decisions is narrowing curriculum to focus on what is tested and subjecting students to endless rounds of test prep.

If education reformers really wanted to put kids first, they would try to make the job of teaching as attractive and rewarding as possible. Teachers would receive the respect that they have earned for spending years of good service in the profession. Teachers would be made an integral part of whatever evaluation system is put in place so they could focus on growth rather than job loss. Finally, the emphasis would be taken off standardized testing and placed on the valuable, daily formative assessment that teachers must use to insure each student is learning.

So there is a formula for the corporate education reformers:

1.    Combat poverty so that parents can focus on parenting and students can come to school ready to learn.

2.    Elevate the teaching profession so that teachers can focus their efforts on the child in front of them and not on some specious external test and flawed evaluation system.

How do the corporate reformers want to put students first?

1.    By calling for “no excuses” and claiming poverty doesn’t matter.

2.    By calling for “school choice” that drains needed funds from public schools and worsens conditions for most poor children, while providing no appreciable learning gains for those who do attend charter schools or use vouchers.

3.    By turning our public institutions into testing factories, so that public school children and teachers can be held to a false accountability.

4.    By placing thousands of students in front of Teach for America recruits who are neither trained for teaching, trained for working with children with learning disabilities nor interested in teaching as a career.

5.    Insuring that children in urban environments are exposed to scant resources, high teacher turnover and disruptive school closings.

6.    By turning schools over to for profit corporations who by definition put making money ahead of educating children.
7.  By destroying teacher job protections in the name of weeding out "bad teachers" identified by discredited statistical measures.

Education reformers, if you want to have the audacity to tell life-long educators that you are putting children first, than please be ready to tell us what you are doing for the parents of children living in poverty. A poverty that robs children of the opportunity to learn. Please tell us what you are doing for those other adults in children’s lives, the teachers.  Tell us what you are doing to insure that the thousands of highly qualified, appropriately certified, hard-working teachers out there are working in an environment that does all it can to insure their success.

Students first? Bah. Reformers don’t know the meaning of the term. I dare say that any single teacher out there has put more students first in one day than any of these reformers have in a decade of reformy, anti-public education, teacher bashing babble.

Walter Dean Myers: An Appreciation

I was saddened to learn of the passing of the great young adult author, Walter Dean Myers. Myers was an important presence on my classroom bookshelves. His books spoke to a segment of my students who found very few voices they could relate to in literature. He wrote of poor African American kids on the streets of Harlem. Myers was acutely aware of the need for these children to see themselves in the pages of books.

I had the pleasure of meeting Myers on one memorable occasion. I was struck by his large physical presence and gentle manner. He embraced the great responsibility any author of young adult literature carried and he was determined to meet that responsibility with books that were of high quality and which transmitted values for young people to emulate.

Myers was intensely proud of maintaining his residence in Jersey City, New Jersey. He said he could see the children he was writing about walk past his window as he worked in his home.

As a young man Myers was an avid reader, but as he grew through his teenage years he realized that the books he was reading had little to say about young people of color like him. He grew resentful. He stopped reading and dropped out of school. Reading James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” turned things around. Myers found that “by humanizing the people who were like me, Baldwin’s story also humanized me.”

Myers says that after reading Baldwin he discovered his mission in life. As he said in a March 2014 essay he wrote for the New York Times:

I realized that this was exactly what I wanted to do when I wrote about poor inner-city children — to make them human in the eyes of readers and, especially, in their own eyes. I need to make them feel as if they are part of America’s dream, that all the rhetoric is meant for them, and that they are wanted in this country.

For many of the students in my classrooms in the 1980s and for surely thousands of students in the decades following, Walter Dean Myers achieved his mission. In my room his books, like Fast Sam, Cool Clyde and Stuff, Fallen Angels, Monster and Scorpions were read. They didn’t just stand there forlornly, spines sticking out, never to be pulled from the shelf. They were yanked off that shelf. They showed the wear of pages being turned briskly. Of being tossed into lockers and book bags. They showed the food stains from being read in the cafeteria. I used to call these signs of wear “love marks.”

Myers books were read, I believe, because they spoke to the students who picked them up. Many of these students would be described as “reluctant readers.” Their “reluctance” was mostly rooted in failure to find a book that spoke to them. Myers books spoke to them because they could find themselves in these books. For the young adult trying to battle towards a bit of independence and a sense of self, it is crucial that they find books where they find believable role models.

As Myers himself said in the Times essay:

Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books?  Where are black children going to get a sense of who they are and what they can be?

And just as importantly, Myers went on, where are white children going to get their knowledge and their ideas of people of color without books that represent these people?

Myers essay was written in response to a report from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin that showed of the 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, only 93 were about black people. Apparently, the world of children’s literature has not come far enough in publishing books in which our minority children can find a home.

Walter Dean Myers did his part; it is now for others to remediate this inequity.

The Reading Wars Continue: Scientific Literacy vs. Balanced Literacy

The reading wars are back with us again. Carmen Farina, the new schools chancellor in New York City, said recently that she wants to see more aspects of "balanced literacy" put back into instruction in the city's schools. You can see the New York Times report here. The city moved away from balanced literacy under former Mayor Bloomberg a few years ago citing concerns that the approach was too loosely organized. Balanced literacy did not fit into Bloomberg's or his schools chancellor Joel Klein's corporate model of schooling. Farina, who has actually taught and been the principal of a school believes that balance is best.

Chester Finn, President of the Thomas Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank and huge booster of the Common Core, is horrified. In The Balanced Literacy Hoax he says that balanced literacy is neither "balanced" nor "literacy." In fact he becomes a bit unbalanced in his critique. It is truly amusing to see Finn cite what he calls "semantic infiltration" in his criticism of the term balanced literacy. Semantic infiltration can be defined as using a term to mask its real intent (like the "Clear Skies Bill" from the Bush administration that actually would have allowed companies to increase polluting the air).

After condemning "balanced literacy as "semantic infiltration", Finn says that what we need in literacy instruction is "scientific reading instruction." Apparently Finn misses the irony of his replacing one example of semantic infiltration with another. "Scientific reading instruction" is at best quasi-scientific and at worst a proven failure as a method of reading instruction. See here.

So we return to the reading instruction wars for the umpteenth time since the 1960s. As a literacy teacher for most of those 45 years in question, I have seen it all argued over and over. What sometimes gets lost in all the noise is that teachers teach kids not programs. One thing that Carmen Farina has over Chester Finn is that she actually taught literacy to kids. When in doubt, go with those who have actually taught.

The term "scientific reading instruction" comes to us courtesy of the Bush administration and No Child Left Behind. A group called the National Reading Panel came up with literacy instructional recommendations based on a review of what they decided was scientific research. The panel's definition of what scientific research was was so narrow that they were bound to come up with recommendations that focused on the skill of reading (decoding) over other important and less easy to measure aspects of reading.  Not surprisingly, the panel came up with a series of recommendations focused on skill driven instruction including a heavy phonics emphasis in early reading instruction.

Guess what. After the implementation of the program, called Reading First, a comprehensive study discovered that kids did indeed get better at decoding. The only problem was that they did not get any better at actually reading. You know, reading. Actually understanding what they read. What those of us in the literacy business call reading comprehension. What Reading First proved is that kids learn what you focus on in your instruction. If you focus on one aspect of a complex process, students will get better at that one aspect of the process, but not necessarily at the process itself.

Balanced literacy attempts to understand the complexity of learning to read and to focus not just on the skill involved in reading, but also the will. Chief proponents of balanced literacy are life-long teachers and researchers like Lucy Calkins of Columbia University, Irene Fountas of Lesley University and Gay Su Pinnell of Ohio State. Balanced literacy emphasises teacher instruction in word solving and comprehension strategies along with lots of practice based on student choice in reading materials and writing topics.

Chester Finn tries to conflate balanced literacy with whole language instruction, a term that has (wrongly) become a buzz word for poor literacy instruction. He is wrong. His love affair with "scientific (sic) reading instruction" should have ended years ago, but the idea that the only road to literacy is through a heavy phonics emphasis will not die.

The reading wars are never going to go away. The mistake people who do not teach actual children make is that they think teaching a certain program is the answer, so we have this battle over "scientifically (sic) based instruction" and "balanced literacy." Real teachers don't teach programs; they teach children. When you actually teach children, observe their learning, sit beside them and shape their development, you can see clearly that learning to read and write is a combination of developing skill and fostering the will to read and write.

Skill and will are complementary aspects of literacy learning. Children begin with the will to learn, develop the skills as they receive instruction, and improve as they practice in real reading and writing situations under the guidance of the teacher. No program can achieve this for children. Only good teachers can.

SCOTUS Sticks It to the Union

We must all hang together, or assuredly we will all hang separately - Ben Franklin

The Supreme Court Ruling Monday in Harris v. Quinn played second fiddle to the ruling in the Hobby Lobby case in the media. While the Hobby Lobby contraceptive case was front page news in the New York Times, Harris v. Quinn didn't get a mention until page 12. The Harris case dealt with a few home health care workers insistence that they not be required to pay fees to their union. In 1977 the Court's ruling in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education established that public employees who benefit from the services of a union, such as collective bargaining agreements that improve their working conditions and salaries, must pay their "fair share" for such services even if they choose not to belong to the union. This "fair share" is typically known as an agency fee.

The Supreme Court struck down the 1977 law as it applies to these workers, citing their first amendment rights. According to the New York Times, "Justice Alito wrote that home health care workers who typically work for an ill or disabled person should be classified as partial public employees and should not be treated the same way as public schoolteachers..."

At first blush the ruling may appear to be a victory of sorts for teachers unions. Anti-labor groups were hoping the Court would strike down the 1977 Abood ruling in its entirety, crippling all public employee unions by greatly reducing its membership and treasuries. The Court stopped short of this and specifically said the ruling did not apply to public schoolteachers.

All of us in public education should hold off on our rejoicing, however. While this ruling did not specifically apply to schoolteachers, a close reading (pun intended) of the majority opinion crafted by Alito shows that the Court has clearly set the stage for some persons or group to bring suit against teachers unions. In his majority opinion Alito wrote, "Agency-fee provisions unquestionably impose a heavy burden on the First Amendment interests of objecting employees." As Nina Totenberg said on NPR yesterday, "The court has set up the legal goal posts and invited those opposed to public employee unions to kick the ball through."

It appears to be just a matter of time until this week's court ruling is applied to public school employees. This is an issue of concern for all public school teachers whether you belong to a union or not. We are living in an anti-labor era. An attack against teacher unions is an attack against the teaching profession. Whether you belong to the union or not and whether you agree with some union positions or not, the health and well-being of the teacher unions is critical to you being able to continue to practice your profession, to be reasonably compensated, to have reasonable job protections and reasonable working conditions.

I began my career as a teacher in Pennsylvania before teachers had collective bargaining rights. At the time,  I was earning $6300 dollars a year, plus $400 for coaching the basketball team. I taught six classes a day and had two preparation periods a week. My largest class had 39 students and my average class size was 33. In the spring, the temperature in my 100 year-old third floor classroom hovered around 98 degrees.

In 1970, one-year into my career, teachers won the right to collectively bargain. Concerned with the conditions I and my colleagues were working under, I joined the negotiations team. In one memorable exchange at the bargaining table, I was arguing for a class size limit of 30 students. A member of the Board's team had been consistently insistent that such things as class size were a "management prerogative" and not subject to bargaining. As I presented my proposal he became red in the face, leaned across the table, poked his finger within an inch of my nose and said, "I went to Catholic school and we had 67 kids in my first grade class and I turned out all right." I resisted saying to him that the fact that he was attempting to bully a teacher/negotiator might indicate that he had not turned out all right after all.

Eventually an arbitrator ruled that we could bargain working conditions like class size. Over those early years of contentious bargaining teacher salaries slowly rose, but even better, working conditions improved. We won daily preparation times, smaller class sizes and I even got an air conditioner in my room. Most importantly I was working in conditions that made for better teaching and improved student learning.

Our teacher unions are not perfect, note the support for the Common Core and the acceptance of Gates money, but a few disagreements in policy is no reason to take your chalk and lesson plans and run away. It is only through concerted, coordinated unified efforts that teachers have won the rights they currently enjoy. It is only through concerted, coordinated unified efforts that we will be able fight off the current round of attacks on our profession.

If you do not agree with some of the positions of your union, work for change from within. In the meantime, support your union and your union leadership in every way you in good conscience can. There is no question that the corporate education reformers, the big money plutocrats and the anti-union forces are coming after teachers.  They know the best way to do this is to divide and conquer. Political leaders on both sides of the aisles have shown their disdain for us. Remember when politicians attack teacher unions they are attacking teachers. 

Now is a critical time to put aside petty differences and join in solidarity with fellow professionals and repeat the words of the great Pete Seeger, "You can't stop me I'm stickin' to the union."

An Educator's Summer Reading List

It is summer, which means that teachers all over the country are working a summer job to pay the bills, attending graduate courses to improve teaching skills, revising lesson plans in anticipation of the next year and, of course, reading this blog.

It has always amused me when acquaintances at various gatherings would say, "It must be nice to have the summer off." Here is a partial list of things I did with my "summers off" over a 45 year career in education:

Gas Station Attendant
Ice Cream Truck Driver
Summer Camp Counselor
Summer School Teacher
Curriculum Writer
New Student Tester
Tutor
Professional Development Attendee/Provider
College Lecturer
Graduate School Student

One constant over my summers, however, was reading. I hope all of you have some extra time for reading this summer and I hope some of that time will be recreational reading or catching up with a classic you never got to read before.

I would like to suggest that some of that summer reading also be devoted to the three books discussed below. These are not beach books, but books that will arm you with good clear arguments as you fight against the dismantling of public education and the destruction of the teaching profession.

50 Myths & Lies That Threaten America's Public Schools: The Real Crisis in Education by David C. Berliner, Gene V. Glass and Associates.

Berliner and Glass are two highly respected researchers who use their knowledge of research to systematically dismantle every canard of the corporate education movement. Name an issue: charter school superiority to public schools, international tests showing the failure of our public schools, merit pay will improve teacher performance, class size doesn't matter, retention will improve achievement, money doesn't matter, education will lift the poor out of poverty. Berliner and Glass take on each of these issues, present the reformer argument and then cite research to show how wrong they are.

50 Myths is the perfect book to have on hand when in the company of those who carp about charters, choice and "bad" schools. Clear and easy to read, this is a book you will refer to over and over.

A Chronicle of Echoes: Who's Who in the Implosion of American Public Education by Mercedes K. Schneider.

Schneider provides us with a sort of field guide to corporate education reformers. Name a reformer and Schneider will provide a detailed account of her/his misdeeds. Those of you familiar with Schneiders writing from her blog deutch29 (and if you aren't you should be) will be familiar with Schneider's penchant for finely detailed investigative reporting, skilled analysis of data and air of indignation.

Here is Schneider on some of her reformy targets:

Joel Klein (former chancellor of NYC public schools) - "If Dante had thought of the likes of Joel Klein, he might have added more levels."

Wendy Kopp (founder of Teach for America) - "Wendy Kopp is no visionary. She is a well-financed conduit for worldwide education destabilization designed to serve the privileged few."

David Coleman ("chief architect" of the Common Core) - "Coleman is a dangerous man; he has the ability to both direct ....education policy and financially profit tremendously from doing so."

Jeb Bush - "Jeb Bush is not an educational reformer. He is no miracle. He is a career politician who is using education as his platform to 'move ahead the family business'."

Schneider backs up these statements with great detail, numerous quotes from the reformers themselves and data. If you want to know what motivations are behind the corporate reformers and just how dangerous these individuals and their organizations can be, this is the book for you.

Rethinking Value-Added Models in Education: Critical Perspectives on Tests and Assessment-Based Accountability by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley.

Here is a book that every teacher must read in the era of standardized test-based accountability. In school after school, in state after state, teachers are being judged (in small or large part) on value-added models (VAMs) based on student performance on standardized tests. Amrein-Beardsley is the foremost authority on  VAMs in the country. She created the blog Vamboozled! as a forum for information and criticism of VAM based accountability measures. In this book, Amrein-Beardsley takes a scholarly approach to the dismantling of the research and rhetoric behind VAMs.

Her conclusions: VAMs are unreliable, invalid, nontransparent, unfair, full of measurement errors, and being used inappropriately to make key decisions about teacher retention, termination and pay. Other than that they are just peachy.

Beardsley's book is not just a critique of a failed accountability measure, however. In the final chapter she offers alternatives, solutions and conclusions. Her key recommendations are listed here.

1. Credibility and trust are key to any evaluation scheme. VAMs lack this basic requirement.
2. Educators' professional judgment should not be removed from any evaluation system.
3. Any evaluation system should rely on multiple measures that are aligned with locally defined criteria for demonstrating effectiveness.
4. Any evaluation system must include a plan to evaluate and refine the system.

If you're performance is being judged, even in small part by value-added measures, this book is a must read.

As teachers our lives are devoted to the abolition of ignorance. As professionals, we must not fall victim to ignorance about what is happening to our profession and why. The three books cited  above will go a long way to providing us with the information we need to defend public education and our own professional integrity.

Tom Barclay: A Tribute to a Great Teacher

Tom Barclay with Cindy Mershon

One of the finest educators I have ever known is retiring this month. I had the pleasure of working closely with Tom Barclay for the last 12  years of my career and I have been fortunate to call him a friend for nearly 25 years. I met Tom through my wife Cindy Mershon, who was Tom's colleague and close friend for many years.

This post is for the many friends and colleagues of Tom's who were not able to attend Tom's retirement party, but it is also for all of us in education who have known a great teacher. We need to celebrate these folks in this time of teacher bashing and evaluating teachers by labeling them with numbers. (One of Tom's teacher friends at the party shared that she was a 3.65!)

Cindy and I were pleased to be asked to speak at Tom's retirement party this past week. In her talk, I believe Cindy captured the essence of Tom as teacher and person.

One of the things I value most about Tom, and what I believe makes him most appealing to people and most successful in his life and his career, is his ability to be a good listener.  Nobody does it better.  My conversations with Tom have informed and improved my thinking and my work, have soothed my concerns and supported by ideas, and have generally made me know someone cares about what I think and who I am.  I have watched Tom extend this kind of caring – being a good listener IS caring – to many people, and marvel at his ability to be generous and genuine with his time and himself.

When I think of Tom, I think of what Henry James, the novelist, once wrote: “Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”  Tom is the kindest human being I know.  I have seen his kindness in his role as a teacher, as a principal, as a supervisor, and as a central office administrator.  His kindness is a large part of what makes him so good at his job, what makes him so valuable as a colleague, and what makes him so treasured as a friend.  His persistent courtesy, the philosophy that informs his work and his life, and the respect he extends to children and adults alike are grounded in the kindness that informs all he does, all he thinks, and all he believes.  Unlike my flight home from Miami last night, no turbulence interferes with or disturbs Tom’s approach to interacting with the rest of the world.  Kindness guides him, and kindness wins out every time.

And here is what I had to say. The humor is specific perhaps to Tom and those who knew him. The sentiment, however, might apply to a great teacher you know.

Tom Barclay is the most irritating person I have ever met. I realized this when Tom first joined our Curriculum and Instruction team 14 years ago. At the time I thought I was pretty smart; Tom was smarter. I thought I was well-read. Tom was better read. Worst of all, I thought I was funny; Tom was funnier.

Infuriatingly, Tom was also wise. Whenever Erin or Christine or I would come up with our “next great idea”, Tom would pause and say, “Well, let’s think about this a bit. What is the evidence that this will work, that the teachers will want to do it, that it is good for kids.” Then Chris Manno would agree with him and say, “Yes. let’s take our time on this and see if it will work.” See what I mean. Infuriating.

As you know, Tom has his quirks. In fact the only really surprising thing about this evening is that Tom got here on time. Tom lives in a different time dimension than the rest of is. Here is an example. On the rare occasion when we would find ourselves with a half hour to go to lunch, I would go into Tom’s office and say, “Hey, Tom, want to go grab some lunch?” “Sure”, he would say, “let’s go.” At that, I would be running out the door, jumping into my car and starting the engine. I would then look around, no Tom. I would wait a few minutes, no Tom. I would pull the car around to the front, no Tom. I would go back inside to Tom’s office, to see Tom calmly arranging papers on his desk. He would look up at my quizzical expression and say, “Well, I can’t just leave my desk like this.”

For quicker lunches, Tom had several cans of Progresso Soup in his closet – arranged in alphabetical order: Chicken Noodle, Minestrone, Mushroom, Tomato.

Whenever we did go somewhere together, I would drive. Tom is a very law abiding driver. He is the only driver I know who stops to read the Yield sign. His car’s transmission has only two speeds – slow and slower.

And then, of course, Tom is, in the Seinfeld parlance a “low talker.” Tom would make many of his most important comments in a voice so low that our conversations sounded like this. “Well Russ, as you know we cannot just run willy nilly into the breach…” Punctuated by me saying, “Huh?” I cannot tell you how many times Tom would speak at a meeting and everyone would lean forward, nearly falling out of their chairs, trying to catch a few of the words he was saying. This was invariably followed by Gail Palumbo saying something that blew us back in our chairs in the other direction. Our meetings were a constant lean forward, get blown back.

Despite his quirks and my jealousy, Tom became, after Cindy, my closest friend in education. The absolute best part of my final tumultuous years here at Montgomery, were my 5 PM meetings with Tom. After many a difficult day, I would walk into Tom’s office where we would laugh a lot, cry a little and solve the problems (at least theoretically) of the educational world. Sometimes Earl would join us, sometimes Erin or Gail or Adam, but often it was just Tom and me. With Tom’s total lack of sense of time, these meetings often lasted well past seven, at which time I would leave and Tom would start to straighten his desk. I would call Cindy to apologize for being late and she would say, “I know you walked into Tom’s office at 5…”

Tom’s first job in Montgomery was Director of Social Studies, World Languages and Visual and Performing Arts, K-12. Talk about “Waiting for Superman.” When Chris Manno, Erin, Christine, Gail and I wrote the job description for that new position in our office, I knew there was only one person in the country who could fill that job well. The job demanded a true Renaissance man. It demanded Tom Barclay. Tom had taught social studies and World Language at the high school level, he had been a masterful fifth grade teacher, he had been an organizer of professional development, he was fluent in Spanish, but most of all he was the finest educator I knew. Our team became infinitely better the moment he joined it.

More than any other educator I have worked with, Tom truly cared about people. Tom could spot the weaknesses in some teachers, but he could also recognize, and celebrate their strengths. Tom loved to talk about his students, past and present, to celebrate their achievements and smile at their sometimes truly unusual behavior. Tom’s stories of his students are among my most treasured memories.

Because Tom is indeed a renaissance man and because poetry is a central part of both our lives, I would like to read a poem by Tom’s favorite poet, Pablo Neruda. And I should caution, it loses something in the English translation, but Tom, of course, can read it to you in the original Spanish.

Don't go far off, not even for a day, because -- 
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long 
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station 
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep. 

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because 
then the little drops of anguish will all run together, 
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift 
into me, choking my lost heart. 

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach; 
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance. 
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest, 

because in that moment you'll have gone so far 
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking, 
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

Tom Barclay. Great friend, great educator, great man. Wonderful education in Montgomery will continue in Tom’s absence. Tom’s office will be filled, but Tom will never be replaced. While living and learning will go on, that living and learning will be a little less rich without Tom’s gently insightful guiding hand. I am sure many of us wish to say to Tom, “Don’t go far off.”

And so, with so many great teachers going "far off" in this tumultuous time, don't forget to take time to celebrate their contributions to children and the profession. Tom would like that.

Teacher Tenure Under Attack: Time to Rise to Our Own Defense

In case you missed it, earlier today a California judge ruled in what is known as the Vergara case, that teacher tenure and other job protections are unconstitutional. While this ruling only relates to California and is sure to be appealed, rest assured that this ruling will lead to similar, well-financed suits in other states very soon.

What is a teacher to do? The first thing is to make sure your teacher association leaders are up to speed and ready to fight. Teachers cannot be fragmented on this issue or else they will lose. The opponents are very well-financed. While the name on the Vergara case is a parent who wants the best possible education for his child, the entire suit was financed by a wealthy, Silicon Valley entrepreneur named David Welch.

The big money plutocrats are after your job protections. Make no mistake about it. This move is part and parcel with the entire "blame the teacher" narrative of the corporate education reformers. By keeping the focus on teachers, the 1% can deflect attention from the real issue in education - income inequality.

You may find it difficult to argue for job protections with your friends and neighbors, when many of them do not have those protections. Here is a quick and dirty list of seven reasons teachers need tenure. You can also read more at this earlier blog post of mine. I also recommend reading Peter Greene on talking to parents about tenure here and another piece here. And here is a list of articles on tenure from Diane Ravitch's blog.

1. Tenure Prevents Teachers from Being Fired for Non-Performance Reasons - Without tenure you could be fired because you weree hired by a Democratic board and then Republican board took over or because a new principal wanted to hire a friend. Long ago my second grade teacher was fired because she got pregnant. 
2. Innovative Teaching Requires Risk Taking - Engaging instruction is often noisy and messy instruction. If teachers are afraid to take risks to provide good instruction, learning will suffer. Good teaching is also often experimental. If teachrs are afraid to experiment, learning will suffer.
3. Professionalism in  Teaching Requires Student Advocacy - The teacher must often act as an advocate for a child. Occasionally, this advocacy may come up against some goals, finacial or other, of the administration. A teacher must feel secure in the knowledge that advocating for children will not cost her her job, otherwise who will speak for the children?
4. Tenure Prohibits School Boards from Firing Experienced Teachers to Hire Cheaper Inexperienced Teachers - If you believe this can't happen look at what is happening in Newark, NJ with Teach for America.
5. Tenure Protects Teachers from Being Fired for Teaching Controversial Subjects - Any volunteers for teaching evolution or sex education or civics in a world without job protections?
6. Tenure Assures Due Process When a Teacher is a Target of an Accusation from Student or Parent - This should resonate with any teacher who was not backed by an administrator after a parent complaint.
7. Tenure Protects Teachers from Punitive and Unreliable Evaluation Systems - Think aboout the combination of value added measures basing teacher evaluation on student test scores and no job protections. That should scare us all.

If you have not already had your consciousness raised by the attacks on public education form the corporate education reformers, perhaps this California ruling will be your wake-up call. Arm yourself with knowledge and start advocating for yourself. Work together with others in our proud profession and do not stand idly by while the 1% work to destroy public education.

I Blog; Therefore, I Am

       Descartes said, “I think; therefore, I am.” I want our students to say, “I read and write; therefore, I can think.”

Rene Descartes

Yesterday I managed to get myself in the middle of a heated discussion with several of my colleagues over how learning takes place. It was a seminar provided by my university for teachers who frequently teach freshmen. The idea is to develop instructional strategies to meet the needs of these first year students who have widely varying backgrounds and academic preparedness. At one point I found myself positioned between a French language instructor, who also happened to be French, and a philosophy instructor.

The philosophy teacher discussed some ways that he got his students to read and think about philosophers like Plato and Kant. The French instructor animatedly argued that the problem with American students is that they cannot think critically about complex text because they have not been drilled in the basics. The gist of the argument was that American teachers and parents coddle their students too much, do not insist that they learn basic things in language, reading and other topics through drill and therefore, cannot think critically.

The philosophy instructor, looking for common ground, brought up the name of the great French philosopher, Rene Descartes, and offered how he was trying to get his students to read and understand the man who famously said, “I think; therefore, I am.” Our French colleague would have none of it, insisting that these students can’t think about Descartes because they have not been drilled in his writings or in the grammar of their own language for that matter. (I hope I am doing justice to the two professors’ arguments here, as the words were flying quickly to and fro).

I jumped in and suggested that they were arguing over the need for a frame of reference in critical thinking and that the real disagreement was over whether this frame of reference was a necessary prerequisite or something that was a part of the learning and critical thinking process.

This got me thinking about learning and critical thinking. Certainly, you need to know “stuff” in order to think critically about “stuff.” But does learning proceed in a linear fashion: first we learn that low level “stuff”, and then we think about it on a higher level. I don’t think so. I think the two go hand in hand. Let me cite an example.

About a year ago I started to write this blog with the purpose of providing my thoughts on literacy instruction, something I felt I already knew a great deal about after 45 years in the field. One of my earliest blog readers suggested that I read Diane Ravitch’s blog to see what was happening in public education and why teachers might be having difficulty implementing what I suggested. At the time I really did not know much about the corporate education reform movement. I had many concerns about the Common Core approach to literacy instruction and I thought charter schools were the wrong simple answer to a complex problem, but that was about it.

I read Diane’s blog. Then I read Anthony Cody and Valerie Straus and Mercedes Schneider and Bruce Baker and Jonathan Pelto and EduShyster and I became radicalized and a staunch advocate for public education through my blog, which changed from a teacherly advice column, to an anti-corporate education reform philippic.

I learned as I was going and my blog entries reflected my learning up to that point and later entries were more informed than earlier ones because I was learning more. What I believe I was doing, in the term coined by literacy researcher, Frank Smith, was “reading like a writer.” Smith says that there is entirely too much to learn about writing for it to be learned from instruction, no matter how good. Students learn most of what they know about writing by writing and reading. Reading in a special way. Reading like a writer. I would add to that getting timely feedback on their writing from teachers.

Because I was a practicing writer, I noticed things in what I read in a special way. I was simultaneously gathering information and thinking critically about that information. The two cannot be separated. My writing drove my learning and my critical thinking.

Of course, some things about writing can be learned through direct instruction: end punctuation, capitalization, punctuating dialogue. But most of the “stuff” of writing we learn by writing and reading in this special way. “Stuff” is acquired because we write.

Similarly for reading, we learn how to read, mostly, by engaged reading. The trick is, of course, that word “engaged.” If our philosophy instructor can get the students engaged in the reading of Descartes, the students will learn “stuff” about Descartes. Again some introduction will be necessary, some activation and building of background knowledge to get the students engaged, but once engaged students can gain basic information and begin to think critically about Descartes through the reading.

Essentially, of course, I am arguing from a constructivist perspective: the idea that students “construct” their understandings in the process of listening, reading and writing about a topic. For this perspective I borrow from not only Frank Smith, but Piaget, Vygotsky and Louise Rosenblatt among others. My French instructor colleague was taking a more behavioral approach; first learn the basics and then you can apply that knowledge to higher order thinking.

The behavioral approach has informed much of the periodic “back to basics” movements of the past 50 years. In reading this usually takes the form of a heavy emphasis on phonics, the basics of reading if you will, before focusing on “real reading.” The approach ignores that students learn much about what they know about phonics by reading for meaning in real reading situations and by writing in an effort to communicate.

So call me an unreconstructed constructivist, if you will.

What does all this have to do with the classroom teacher in today’s Common Core abused classroom. Just this: students mostly need to read to get better at reading and mostly need to write to get better at writing.

The Common Core instructional format of “close reading” may have a small place in overall reading instruction, but as it is presented by Common Core promoters it is a model that relies heavily on teacher centered instruction and teacher developed “text dependent questions.” We had another name for “close reading” in the 1950s – skill, drill and kill.

In writing it appears to call for formulaic writing emphasizing informational and persuasive writing. Not bad in itself, but when tied to testing it may drive us away from student selected topics toward writing toward the prompt. In fact, it is already doing so.

What do we lose with this type of instruction? Only student engagement in their learning. And when we lose student engagement, we lose our audience and the hope for developing the kind of critical thinkers we all seem to desire.

Descartes said, “I think; therefore, I am.” I want our students to say, “I read and write; therefore, I can think.”

.

Lessons for Corporate Education Reformers from Hamilton Township, NJ

Hamilton Township, New Jersey Schools Superintendent, James Parla, took a brave step the other day when he addressed the issue of defacto segregation in his school district. According to an article on nj.com the school leader said:

“Test scores are lagging and schools are crumbling and, more often than not, those conditions are at schools with large minority populations… [Parla] urged the school board to find ways to address "de facto segregation" in the district's 24 schools as it looks toward new school construction and redistricting.”

Good for Superintendent Parla for taking this stand publicly and good for the Hamilton Township School Board if they attempt to wrestle with the issue. Solutions will not come easily.

Hamilton Township is in many ways a microcosm of the issue of segregation in many urban areas. Hamilton is a large school district that borders the struggling city of Trenton on one side and wealthy suburbs of Robbinsville and West Windsor on the other. It will be no surprise that the relatively poor sections (with high concentrations of minorities) of Hamilton are near Trenton, while the relatively well-off (and white) sections of Hamilton border Robbinsville and West Windsor.

This geographic reality has led to segregated schools. Parla somewhat disingenuously said this was “not intentional”, but a reality. Perhaps. Certainly, it is in part a factor of socio-economics and geography. Almost certainly it is also a by-product of discriminatory real estate practices in the past. Nicholas Lippa, writing in the NCRP eJournal, summarizes the research on this topic:

“The housing market in the United States has a long history of discriminatory practices that has excluded people of color from integrating into more affluent neighborhoods and communities, which in turn, has led to the subordination of people of color.”

Even a cursory look at Hamilton Township schools puts a lie to the narrative of the corporate education reformers notion of “no excuses” education and poverty as just an excuse for the failures of teachers to provide a proper education to children and the failure of unions to police their own.

Let’s look at two elementary schools in Hamilton first. Greenwood Elementary, just across the border from Trenton, has a 96% minority population and 80% on free or reduced lunch (a typical measure of poverty). The school building is 96 years old and falling apart. At Greenwood, students scored in the 37^th percentile in English/Language Arts (ELA) and at the 67^th percentile in math on the New Jersey ASK standardized tests.

On the other side of the township, Alexander Elementary has 26% minority children and 15% on free or reduced lunch. Its NJASK scores are in the 75^th percentile in ELA and 81^st percentile in math.

Hamilton has three high schools, Nottingham, Hamilton West, and Steinert. Nottingham and Hamilton West have diverse populations and between 32 and 41 percent on free or reduced lunch. These two schools score similarly on standardized measures such as the SAT and ACT college entrance exams. About 60 -65% of the students take these tests. Steinert High school lies closer to the more affluent bordering districts, has an 80% white student body with 10% free and reduced lunch. Ninety per cent of Steinert students take the SAT or ACT and on average score 150 points higher than the students in the other two high schools.

Let’s focus on two lessons to be learned here. First of all, segregation matters. The Supreme Court got it right in Brown v. Board of Education– there can be no such thing as separate, but equal. The second lesson is that socio-economic status matters. Schools with higher numbers of kids living in poverty are going to struggle academically.

The corporate education reformers like to tell us that poverty doesn’t matter. Do they really want us to believe that the teachers and administrators at Alexander Elementary are better teachers because their children get higher test scores? Would firing all the teachers at Greenwood Elementary and replacing them with unqualified Teach for America recruits improve learning there?  If we closed down Greenwood and started a charter school in its place would this would level the playing field with the kids at Alexander? Of course not.

Hamilton Township demonstrates that this thinking is absurd. Hamilton Township has all the strengths and all the weaknesses of any large school district in a diverse area. They have well qualified and highly motivated teachers in all their schools (and a few less than great teachers as well). Those teachers all are members of the same union. They use the same curriculum. They follow the same discipline codes. If the Hamilton schools have problems, they are, for the most part,  societal problems and no amount of “teaching like a champion” or “waiting for Superman” is going to change that.

Only when we address the societal issues of poverty and segregation will we truly address the educational issues as well.

So congratulations to Superintendent Perla for shining a light on this issue. Solutions will be difficult and they will take time. Most parents would prefer to have their children attend a neighborhood school. As long as neighborhoods are segregated, these neighborhood schools will be segregated, too. 

One place to start will be to be sure that the buildings that the children attend across the district are clean and well repaired. Students and teachers should not have to learn and work in dilapidated buildings no matter what their race or socio-economic status.