newteacher

How Curriculum Gets Made

Folks in curriculum have been following this story from Texas pretty closely.  This has always been the case in the political fights over "what knowledge is of most worth" but its rare that it happens out in the public view.

How Christian Were the Founders?

By RUSSELL SHORTO

LAST MONTH, A WEEK before the Senate seat of the liberal icon Edward M. Kennedy fell into Republican hands, his legacy suffered another blow that was perhaps just as damaging, if less noticed. It happened during what has become an annual spectacle in the culture wars.

Over two days, more than a hundred people — Christians, Jews, housewives, naval officers, professors; people outfitted in everything from business suits to military fatigues to turbans to baseball caps — streamed through the halls of the William B. Travis Building in Austin, Tex., waiting for a chance to stand before the semicircle of 15 high-backed chairs whose occupants made up the Texas State Board of Education. Each petitioner had three minutes to say his or her piece.

“Please keep César Chávez” was the message of an elderly Hispanic man with a floppy gray mustache.

“Sikhism is the fifth-largest religion in the world and should be included in the curriculum,” a woman declared.

Following the appeals from the public, the members of what is the most influential state board of education in the country, and one of the most politically conservative, submitted their own proposed changes to the new social-studies curriculum guidelines, whose adoption was the subject of all the attention — guidelines that will affect students around the country, from kindergarten to 12th grade, for the next 10 years. Gail Lowe — who publishes a twice-a-week newspaper when she is not grappling with divisive education issues — is the official chairwoman, but the meeting was dominated by another member. Don McLeroy, a small, vigorous man with a shiny pate and bristling mustache, proposed amendment after amendment on social issues to the document that teams of professional educators had drawn up over 12 months, in what would have to be described as a single-handed display of archconservative political strong-arming.

McLeroy moved that Margaret Sanger, the birth-control pioneer, be included because she “and her followers promoted eugenics,” that language be inserted about Ronald Reagan’s “leadership in restoring national confidence” following Jimmy Carter’s presidency and that students be instructed to “describe the causes and key organizations and individuals of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and theNational Rifle Association.” The injection of partisan politics into education went so far that at one point another Republican board member burst out in seemingly embarrassed exasperation, “Guys, you’re rewriting history now!” Nevertheless, most of McLeroy’s proposed amendments passed by a show of hands.

Finally, the board considered an amendment to require students to evaluate the contributions of significant Americans. The names proposed included Thurgood Marshall,Billy Graham, Newt Gingrich, William F. Buckley Jr., Hillary Rodham Clinton and Edward Kennedy. All passed muster except Kennedy, who was voted down.

This is how history is made — or rather, how the hue and cry of the present and near past gets lodged into the long-term cultural memory or else is allowed to quietly fade into an inaudible whisper. Public education has always been a battleground between cultural forces; one reason that Texas’ school-board members find themselves at the very center of the battlefield is, not surprisingly, money. The state’s $22 billion education fund is among the largest educational endowments in the country. Texas uses some of that money to buy or distribute a staggering 48 million textbooks annually — which rather strongly inclines educational publishers to tailor their products to fit the standards dictated by the Lone Star State. California is the largest textbook market, but besides being bankrupt, it tends to be so specific about what kinds of information its students should learn that few other states follow its lead. Texas, on the other hand, was one of the first states to adopt statewide curriculum guidelines, back in 1998, and the guidelines it came up with (which are referred to as TEKS — pronounced “teaks” — for Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) were clear, broad and inclusive enough that many other states used them as a model in devising their own. And while technology is changing things, textbooks — printed or online —are still the backbone of education.  

READ MORE:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14texbooks-t.html?pagewanted=all

Teachers Matter (and students remember)

Ask anybody.....teachers matter. Regardless of the current fad of blaming teachers for all of the challenges in education and society, if you think about it, a teacher mattered for you and teachers still get up everyday to do the work. We need to think about how to support them instead of using them as scapegoats as politicians cut funding, deprofessionalize their work, and intensify the work load.

Happy New Year, newteacher.

FIve Myths about US Education

This is a little old but the general caution to be careful about international comparisons in education still holds true.  This notion that we're "behind" other countries is being used to attack schools of education and move to de-regulated, privatized model.  Unfortunately, this rhetoric still works out there in the public (across the political spectrum).  We need to read better, think harder, and ask questions to those with hidden (or not so hidden) agendas.

Five Myths About U.S. Kids Outclassed by the Rest of the World

By Paul Farhi,  Sunday, January 21, 2007
The usual hand-wringing accompanied the Department of Education's release late last year of new statistics on how U.S. students performed on international tests. How will the United States compete in the global economy, went the lament, when our students lag behind the likes of Singapore and Hong Kong in math and science? American fourth-graders ranked 12th in the world on one international math test, and eighth-graders were 14th. Is this further evidence of the failure of the nation's schools?

Not exactly. In fact, a closer look at how our kids perform against the international "competition" suggests that this story line may contain more than a few myths:

1. U.S. students rate poorly compared with those in the rest of the world.

This is true only if you cherry-pick the results. University of Pennsylvania researchers Erling E. Boe and Sujie Shin looked at six major international tests in reading, math, science and civics conducted from 1991 through 2001. Their conclusion: Americans are above average when compared with 22 other industrialized nations. In civics, no nation scored significantly higher than the United States; in reading, only 13 percent did. Even in math and science -- the two subjects considered "vital" to future technological competitiveness -- the United States fell in roughly the middle of the pack. No gold star, but hardly a crisis, either.

More interesting, when compared with students in the world's most industrialized countries, U.S. students were on par with the others in every subject (and outperformed everyone in civics). And every Western country, not just the United States, lagged behind Japan in math and science, suggesting that the "achievement gap" in these subjects is an East-West phenomenon rather than an American one.

2. U.S. students are falling behind.

Actually, American students are mostly improving, or at worst holding their own. As the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) shows, America's eighth-graders improved their math and science scores in 1995, 1999 and 2003. Only students in Hong Kong, Latvia and Lithuania -- three relatively tiny and homogenous entities -- improved more than the United States did. Indeed, no nation included in the major international rankings educates as many poor students or as ethnically diverse a population as does the United States. Yet even as the percentage of historically low-achieving students has increased, our test scores have risen. Unfortunately, news accounts focus on the relative position of American students (are we No. 1 or No. 12?) rather than on their absolute performance (did they improve, regardless of what others did?).

3. U.S. students won't be well prepared for the modern workforce.

This myth has been bandied around since at least the turn of the century -- the 19th century -- by business leaders who blame schools for inadequately preparing workers. It's part of the never-ending notion that U.S. schools are in crisis.

Education researcher Gerald W. Bracey cites a March 1957 cover story in Life magazine -- at the height of post-Sputnik paranoia over Soviet scientific prowess -- that contrasts the stern, rigorous education of a Moscow teenager (complicated physics and chemistry courses) with the carefree lifestyle of a Chicago youth (rehearsals for his high school musical). The cover headline: "Crisis in Education." In the 1980s, when Japan seemed to be an unstoppable economic juggernaut, the seminal policy manifesto "A Nation at Risk," written by a blue-ribbon panel at the behest of the Department of Education, warned that deficiencies in high school graduates "come at a time when the demand for highly skilled workers in new fields is accelerating rapidly."

Despite these doomsday cases, the United States survived and, by many measures, bested the competition. Today, with the Soviet Union a memory and Japan facing its own economic and demographic problems, the anxieties have shifted to China and other Asian rivals.

4. Bad schooling has undermined America's competitiveness.

This canard -- perhaps the biggest of them all -- was given a boost by the recent World Economic Forum survey of international economies. Typically this annual survey ranks the U.S. economy as the most competitive in the world, but last year it put the United States in sixth place. However, the drop had nothing to do with test scores or school performance. Rather, the forum cited U.S. trade and budget deficits, a low savings rate, tax cuts and the federal government's increased spending on defense and homeland security.

Another recent survey, by the Council on Competitiveness, a Washington-based business advisory group, found that over the past two decades the U.S. economy grew faster than that of any other advanced nation, and generated a third of the world's economic growth. Yet this performance followed a period in which the authors of "A Nation at Risk" were warning that a "rising tide of [educational] mediocrity . . . threatens our very future as a nation." That was in 1983. Those high-school mediocrities are now turning 40, and presumably have been playing a part in helping the U.S. economy grow "faster than any other advanced economy" over the past two decades.

A dynamic economy is much more than the sum of its test scores. It's part of a culture that rewards innovation and risk-taking, and values unconventional problem-solving. Much of this is nurtured in our schools, even if it can't be quantified on a test.

Recently, Newsweek International's Fareed Zakaria noted Singapore's success on international math and science exams, but asked Education Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam why Singapore produced so few top-ranked scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors, business executives and academics. "We both have meritocracies," he replied. America's "is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. There are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well -- like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority. These are the areas where Singapore must learn from America."

Our current (and past) economic success suggests something that educational alarmists and their sky-is-falling friends in the news media seem reluctant to admit: American schools may have a lot to fix, but they may be doing a few things right, too.

5. How we stack up on international tests matters, if only for national pride.

Yes, we're a nation of strivers and self-improvers; the American drive to be the biggest and the best in everything seems part of our national character. But if being No. 1 in education is our goal, shouldn't we also want to be No. 1 in all the things closely linked to academic achievement, such as quality of childhood health care and reduction of childhood poverty? National pride can be a destructive concept, especially when it views learning as a zero-sum game ("their" gains are "our" losses, and vice versa). Continuous improvement should be our goal, regardless of whether we're No.1 in the test-score Olympics.

Paul Farhi is a Washington Post staff writer.

New Teaching in a New Year

a group of thinkers was asked to speculate on what would new ideas would change the world....one thought about teaching.  interesting stuff....See other responses at The Edge

WEB-EMPOWERED REVOLUTION IN TEACHING

CHRIS ANDERSON Curator, TED Conference 

  Today when we think of the world's teeming billions of humans, we tend to think: overpopulation, poverty, disease, instability, environmental destruction. They are the cause of most of the planet's problems. What if that were to change? What if the average human were able to contribute more than consume? To add more than subtract? Think of the world as if each person drives a balance sheet. On the negative side are the resources they consume without replacing, on the positive side are the contributions they make to the planet in the form of the resources they produce, the lasting artifacts-of-value they build, and the ideas and technologies that might create a better future for their family, their community and for the planet as a whole. Our whole future hangs on whether the sum of those balance sheets can turn positive. What might make that possible? One key reason for hope is that so far we have barely scraped the surface of human potential. Throughout history, the vast majority of humans have not been the people they could have been. Take this simple thought experiment. Pick your favorite scientist, mathematician or cultural hero. Now imagine that instead of being born when and where they were, they had instead been born with the same in-built-but-unlocked abilities in a typical poverty-stricken village in, say, the France of 1200 or the Ethiopia of 1980. Would they have made the contribution they made? Of course not. They would never have received the education and encouragement it took to achieve what they did. Instead they would have simply lived out a life of poverty, with perhaps an occasional yearning that there must be a better way. Conversely, an unknown but vast number of those grinding out a living today have the potential to be world-changers... if only we could find a way of unlocking that potential. Two ingredients might be enough to do that. Knowledge and inspiration. If you learn of ideas that could transform your life, and you feel the inspiration necessary to act on that knowledge, there's a real chance your life will indeed be transformed. 

  There are many scary things about today's world. But one that is truly thrilling is that the means of spreading both knowledge and inspiration have never been greater. Five years ago, an amazing teacher or professor with the ability to truly catalyze the lives of his or her students could realistically hope to impact maybe 100 people each year. Today that same teacher can have their words spread on video to millions of eager students. There are already numerous examples of powerful talks that have spread virally to massive Internet audiences. Driving this unexpected phenomenon is the fact that the physical cost of distributing a recorded talk or lecture anywhere in the world via the internet has fallen effectively to zero. This has happened with breathtaking speed and its implications are not yet widely understood. But it is surely capable of transforming global education. For one thing, the realization that today's best teachers can become global celebrities is going to boost the caliber of those who teach. For the first time in many years it's possible to imagine ambitious, brilliant 18-year-olds putting 'teacher' at the top of their career choice list. Indeed the very definition of "great teacher" will expand, as numerous others outside the profession with the ability to communicate important ideas find a new incentive to make that talent available to the world. Additionally every existing teacher can greatly amplify their own abilities by inviting into their classroom, on video, the world's greatest scientists, visionaries and tutors. (Can a teacher inspire over video? Absolutely. We hear jaw-dropping stories of this every day.) Now think about this from the pupils' perspective. In the past, everyone's success has depended on whether they were lucky enough to have a great mentor or teacher in their neighborhood. The vast majority have not been fortunate. But a young girl born in Africa today will probably have access in 10 years' time to a cell phone with a high-resolution screen, a web connection, and more power than the computer you own today. We can imagine her obtaining face-to-face insight and encouragement from her choice of the world's great teachers. She will get a chance to be what she can be. And she might just end up being the person who saves the planet for our grandchildren.

On rethinking teaching

A former student sent this along for us to think about. The suggestion is that we're thinking about this work in fundamentally wrong ways. How very John Dewey, yes? She could be on to something.....thoughts?

Rethink ways to teach

By EILEEN LANDAY, The Providence Journal
Thursday, December 6, 2007

As a society, we've raised the bar on what it means to comprehend a text. At the same time, we've increased the percentage of students we expect to master these processes well beyond the 50 percent who graduated from high school half a century ago. Recognizing that many students don't achieve the standards now being set, we have labeled them "struggling readers." That label seems incorrect and inadvertently ironic, and it signals the murkiness of our own understanding.

Mamacitas- a video from El Puente

Again, playing with new technologies here. Below is a video aimed at latina secondary school students regarding teen pregnancy from the El Puente Project. The focus here it seem is in the power of stories to impact people--real stories from real folks. There's alot of ways a converstion sparked by this video could go. I'm increasingly interested in what folks think of these new media efforts at reaching young people. Heck, there was recently a presidential debate via YouTube. Any thoughts?

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Mindfulness & Classroom Practice

In the Classroom, a New Focus on Quieting the Mind- Theodore Rigby for The New York Times

The lesson began with the striking of a Tibetan singing bowl to induce mindful awareness. ...

With the sound of their new school bell, the fifth graders at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School here closed their eyes and focused on their breathing, as they tried to imagine “loving kindness” on the playground.

“I was losing at baseball and I was about to throw a bat,” Alex Menton, 11, reported to his classmates the next day. “The mindfulness really helped.”

As summer looms, students at dozens of schools across the country are trying hard to be in the present moment. This is what is known as mindfulness training, in which stress-reducing techniques drawn from Buddhist meditation are wedged between reading and spelling tests.

Students & Intelligence

A study reviewed on NPR, Students' View of Intelligence Can Help Grades by Michelle Trudeau, finds that students' view of intelligence enables higher achievement in math scores.   Talk about metacognition!  The implications here are profound in that working with children around issues of the process of learning itself allows them to see how they have some control over their learning lives--they work harder, they develop a sense of ownership in their learning, the see possibility.  In SOE's, we often get a lot of flack about our constructivist approach but, as I like to say, constructivism has moved out of the philosophical and into the biological as we learn how the brain works.  Of course, this study prompts me to think about how that process works the other way as well....back to the psychology.

This also make me think of some to the hubbub around the recent visit of Ruby Payne to our area.  Her ubiqituous (for reasons I may go into elsewhere) work defines a "culture of poverty" (nice to see you again Senator Monyihan) that educators should "understand."  I see this work as precisely oppossed to what we learn from this study from Stanford University.  Instead of labelling and stereotyping, we need to be encourage kids to think about thinking.  But of course, and I think this is why some of our preservice students are so resistent to social constructivist learning theory, it is a lot harder....and it implicates us, as teachers, in the project of student learning.

Charters: Rant 1 (I'm assuming there'll be more...)

  An opinion piece in the Indy Star on charter schools suggests that "IPS must not recoil from charter competition" and suggests that, "Charter schools are enriching Indianapolis and Indiana."  The problem of course is that the author [Keven Teasley of Greater Educational Opportunities Foundation] uses their existence to somehow prove their worth.  We can't deny the fact that they exist, and that they have waiting lists, but this is far from proving that they're good for the children of Indiana.  In fact, as recent research from the Bush administration proves, they actually do WORSE than public schools in teaching children coming from high-poverty environments [see an earlier post Ignoring Research...]. 

Perhaps more troubling is a statement from the ol' GEO itself that cites their core belief in and support of "all quality means of educating children including public, private, charter, religious, and home (see above website)."  Do you know what that means kids?  Vouchers.   Yes, tax vouchers for religious schools (of the kind that I myself graduated from), private schools, home schools.   I advise you take a look at the Republican 2007 Education Agenda in Indiana which has this very component as part of the platform.

Ignoring Research on Schools

Oh, boy is this a good one!  Not sure if folks followed the recent scandal out of the Dept of Education [see another blog's review] recently but it points to something big.  Continually, the folks making education policy don't seem to know anything about education [see recent editorial in the Indy Star], or, as it often appears, they don't seem to care about what we do know.  Now what could be going on here??

Kudos to Dr. Kennedy for getting the good word out there. Me?  I'm just talking to the ether...

sheila suess kennedy

Ignoring education evidence

Americans are absolutely smitten with detective shows where justice triumphs after a painstaking collection and analysis of all available evidence. The popularity of these shows reflects--accurately, I think, America's pragmatic culture, our desire to "get to the bottom of things" and to base decisions on hard evidence.

So how do we explain an American policy process that increasingly displays a positive contempt for evidence?

August 7, 2006