School Improvement Grants

I read Jonathon Kozol's book Savage Inequalities many years ago and still wonder why we have not developed programs to turn our inner cities and their schools around.  I remember talk about enterprise zones and throughout my career people have acknowledged the sad conditions people in inner cites endure, yet nothing seems to have been done to help bring dignity and humane conditions to these areas where many of most needy children grow up.  That is why I wonder why the current reform movement is so intent upon creating conditions to punish all schools for failure when we need to marshal our resources to help those who live and go to school in intolerable conditions.

Yesterday the U.S. Department of Education news releases reported that a handful of states are receiving School Improvement Grants to turn around their persistently lowest achieving schools.  This seems like a really great thing to do.  Unfortunately the states must present one of the following plans for these schools to receive the money.

• TURNAROUND MODEL: Replace the principal, screen existing school staff, and rehire no more than half the teachers; adopt a new governance structure; and improve the school through curriculum reform, professional development, extending learning time, and other strategies.
• RESTART MODEL: Convert a school or close it and re-open it as a charter school or under an education management organization.
• SCHOOL CLOSURE: Close the school and send the students to higher-achieving schools in the district.
• TRANSFORMATION MODEL: Replace the principal and improve the school through comprehensive curriculum reform, professional development, extending learning time, and other strategies. 

These steps constitute doing more of the same old thing.  The problem is not the schools nor the teachers, it is the condition in which many of these schools operate and the despair within their communities.  These grants are another opportunity to turn America's public schools over to corporations and privatize education.

I firmly believe that any child can receive the best education in the world at almost any American public school.  It is the responsibility of the adults in the community and the governments that support those communities to provide  models and the ethics of success for their children.   This can not be done if the adults, children and the community are in states of stress and disrepair.  Let us solve the problems for our children and not pander to political whims.

Illiterate America

The battle for literacy is being fought in our classrooms daily, but the true cause of illiterate America is not being addressed by endless hours of reading instruction.  Just as the innumeracy will not be defeated by hours of solving long division problems.  The problem is not our inability to read or compute algorithms, it is our inability to make meaning of the information we read.  As I follow the news about our diverse political thinking it seems as though everyone believes what they hear if the information comes to them from someone with whom they agree.

I had this problem when I was teaching online.  I taught a basic research class for college freshmen who had just finished a course in writing opinion papers.  Many of my students could not make the switch to writing an objective paper.  They were out to prove their point of view and used research from sources that agreed with them rather than searching and reporting on all points of view on their topic.

I fear this type of thinking is becoming epidemic with the Internet.  I regularly receive informative emails from people who want me to agree with their point of view.  They regularly use information that comes from unreliable sources and pass it on as if it were true.  One of the emails that sticks in my mind concerns Jane Fonda.  She is hated by many Vietnam veterans and other patriots who periodically pass on information about her behavior during her visit to N. Vietnam.  No matter how reprehensible her behavior was, most of the information has been refuted by those whom she reportedly harmed.  A quick check of different sources on the Internet shows much of the information in these emails to be false. 

It seems to me our failure in schools is not that we do not teach our students to read, it is that we do not teach them to discern propaganda and rhetoric from fact!