Race To The Top

The federal government is putting its money for educational reform behind a program called Race To The Top. The goals of this program are to:

provide $4.35 billion for the Race to the Top Fund, a competitive grant program designed to encourage and reward States that are creating the conditions for education innovation and reform; achieving significant improvement in student outcomes, including making substantial gains in student achievement, closing achievement gaps, improving high school graduation rates, and ensuring student preparation for success in college and careers; and implementing ambitious plans in four core education reform areas:

• Adopting internationally-benchmarked standards and assessments that prepare students for success  
  in college and the workplace;
• Recruiting, developing, retaining, and rewarding effective teachers and principals;
• Building data systems that measure student success and inform teachers and principals how they  
  can improve their practices; and
• Turning around our lowest-performing schools.

While these are important goals I believe they miss  half the needs of the children in our education system. A recent survey from the justice Department claims that over 60 per cent of our children are exposed to violence.  The survey found that, “Nearly half of all children surveyed were assaulted at least once in the past year, and about 6 percent were victimized sexually."

Reform that does not address the social emotional needs of our children is not a complete reform program. There are students sitting in our classes that can not focus because their daily lives are chaotic. NCLB has caused us to focus on the competitive nature of our society and provide even more stress for children, teachers and adminstrators. I fear that Race To The Top is more of the same.

While it is important to address academic performance and student outcomes it need not be framed in terms of competition. There were a number of reforms that began in the 90s such as portfolios and individualization. These reforms have been lost in NCLB reform.  With the advance of technology it seems to me that those ideas should be looked at again. We need to reduce the amount stress caused by the high stakes testing that has become the norm.

While we have been ratcheting up our testing to meet international standards, other countries have adopted our ideas of the 90s. Singapore comes to mind. They worked to reduce stress in their schools by developing programs emphasizing critical thinking skills. Yong Zhao, a professor at Michigan State, in a new book, Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization, draws upon his experience in the Chinese education system and argues that Chinese officials are changing their system to reduce their high stakes admission tests and promote critical-thinking skills. Education Week reports that Zhao says, "Clearly, American education has been moving toward authoritarinism".

As the feds pour money into education and seek national standards our national fixation on fear of "losing" will cause them to replace our system of local control of schools. Graduates of our schools have created the strongest economy in the world with freedoms others do not enjoy.  To limit our freedoms to compete with authoritarian regimes does not seem logical.


SITE OF THE WEEK

National Standards

Common Core
The National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers released the first official draft of the Common Core State Standards Initiative and will be accepting feedback on the draft until October 21, 2009. This initiative is a set of Core Standards for college and career readiness in maths and language arts. Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, has applauded this initiative and stated, "There is no work more important than preparing our students to compete and succeed in a global economy, and it is to the credit of these states that this work is getting done.” I am not opposed to national standards that are process oriented but believe that the problems these standards propose to solve are systemic in our culture not failures caused by the schools. It is more important to address the skills of living in our culture and motivating children to love learning before we set standards that address the problems of universities and career development.

In his article entitled National Subject-Matter Standards? Be Careful What You Wish For Marion Brady wrote “ It will fail for the same reason the No Child Left Behind Act failed—because it will be driven by data derived from simplistic tests keyed to simplistic standards keyed to a simplistic, dysfunctional, obsolete, 19th-century curriculum.” I agree with his assessment of national standards when viewed as a core of knowledge. Standards for college bound students can be controlled by universities. If they have higher expectations, students will meet them. Those who truly want to go to college work hard to achieve their dreams.

A reading of the standards led me to think that we are trying too hard to quantify what we learn as opposed to how we learn. Most of the standards have been in place in our schools for a long time. I guess that pulling them together into a list is a good idea but, I am not sure it is necessary. The standards for world wide competition can be met if we devise an education system of cooperation that individualizes skill development, teaches problem solving and how to find answers to questions. These are skills needed to succeed in the 21st century.

I fear that common core standards will lead us to spend more time teaching a common core of knowledge rather than those skills students will need for the future. I can’t help but think about a video I saw where a teacher was working with a group of elementary students who were developing a project. As she questioned them about their project they would pull out their mobile devices and look up the information they needed to answer the questions and fully develop the project. This points out that the common core of knowledge needed for any project is available to anyone who can use today's technology and knows how to ask the right questions.

The standards that are being developed do not, in my opinion, address the primary aim of our schools. A set of common standards should address the notion of literacy, citizenship and problem solving skills you need in life. Our present aim to send everyone to college is unrealistic just like our expectations in No Child Left Behind. Not everyone is going to go to college or begin a career when they are 18. It seems to me that as our population ages, childhood should be extended to provide life experiences and some time for fun. We are all going to work for 30 or 40 years. Let’s ease up on our kids and let them explore the possibilities of life and develop lifelong learning and coping skills before going to work.

The core standards being developed are more of the same stuff we have been doing since the 19th century. We need some ideas for the 21st century!!

Some Sites of Interest
Flowing Data is a website all about visualizing data so that it can be used. You can't visualize it if you don't find it. A problem I encountered time and again with students doing research was there total reliance on Google for information. It is a fine search engine but there are other places to go. Flowing Data's 30 Resources to Find the Data You Need could be helpful to extend a student's understanding of how to find informtion.

Fighting Drug Use
Teachers frequently encounter adolescent attitudes towards drugs and alcohol that are based upon popular culture's view of their use rather than facts. I was always looking for ways to try to convince my students that children's brains are growing and the use of drugs and alcohol can be detremental to them. They were frequently skeptical. Here are two sites that have some information about the effects of drugs and alcholol on the teenage brain from Scientific American Online:

Marijuana Hurts Some and Helps Others and Is Bad Judgment the Cause and Effect of Adolescent Binge Drinking have some useful information for teenagers.

Some sites for teachers and a thought!

I have been looking at some different websites this week and have some I would like to share with you.

This one struck me because of my recent work as an elementary librarian. I found that my 3rd to 6th graders would play almost any kind of game on the computer. I have found a website that looks a lot like the sites they enjoyed using, but have great value as ways to practice math, reading and other skills. Take a look at gameclassoom.com , I think you can agree that k-6 students will like this site!

As teachers you know that teaching reading really take a lot of your time. One of the areas of reading that does not get as much time as it needs is how to pose questions. This is an important reading comprehension strategy highlighted by Sheena Hervey in her article Who Asks the Questions in Teaching K-8 Online. This is not a long read and will give you some good ideas.

I am always looking for free books on the web and I found a site that is very easy to use to find them. The site Freebook-s.com has a very nice search engine and pulls up books by keyword, title, or author. You may even be able to find some textbooks.

Searching through information you find on the web can be a daunting project. As a former school librarian I found the site Findingdulcinea satisfying. They claim to be the internet librarian and are working to provide your students with searches that are germane to classroom assignments.

A Thought

“When I think back on all the crap I learned in High School it’s a wonder I can think at all,”
This line from the album Kodachrome by Paul Simon has stuck in my mind throughout my career as an educator. I am always hearing that an education is important but frequently our popular culture belies that value. Throughout American popular culture you can find numerous references to the wasted time people spent in school.

Why is this? The message to students from adults is that school is important, but we let our entertainers tell them something different. I believe one of the underlying problems of education causes this disconnect in our society. As long as schools view the student as a product and our education systems only allow children to learn what has been decided is important this disconnect will exist.

Each of us is different and crave to be treated that way. Schools have to respect that feeling and understand that their product is not the student but the curriculum. That includes delivery of information. Technology has made it possible to create a curriculum that will decrease the dissatisfaction with being in school, we just have recognize what we have!

Instructional Television

Instructional Television has been an interest of mine throughout my career. I have worked both inside and outside the classroom in this field and find it to be a neglected topic today. This blog presents some information and ideas about this topic for your consideration.

Recommended Video Program
I have often been dismayed by students in the U.S. who do not understand the potential of an education while students in other parts of the world will overcome overwhelming odds to obtain an education. I have tried to explain this in schools where I have taught without much success. WIDE ANGLE on PBS has created an award-winning 12-year documentary project, Time for School, which follows seven children - from Afghanistan, Benin, Brazil, India, Japan, Kenya and Romania - who are struggling to achieve what is not yet a global birthright - a basic education. This series of videos will open eyes about going to school. The video made me think about who the next world leaders will be.

To get more information or watch the series go to PBS WIDE ANGLE

Alternative to Channel One
I believe that video and television are important tools in the classroom. One of the companies deeply involved with video in the schools is Whittle Communications who sponsor Channel One News and other commercial promotions in schools ( click here to read an article about Whittle ) As a media specialist I tried to provide alternatives to Whittle’s commercial new programs for teachers. However, Whittle offered free televisions and other hardware that school leaders wanted to acquire. Now, with the advent of high speed internet it is easy for a teacher to develop a program for using the news in their classroom without intervening commercialization. One way to do this is by using CNN Student News. This is a daily news broadcast for students that provides questions and other media literacy information with the daily broadcast. I thin that a teacher who wants to incorporate the news into their curriculum and has access to a couple of computers in their classroom can use CNN Student News.

To get more information go to: CNN Student News

TV Production Skills
In my experience that the most productive use of TV in the classroom is video production. This job is frequently given to the technology teacher (it may be better placed in the drama department but that is another story). Usually students are sent out in teams or as individuals to make a video program about something they think is interesting. This is a good project but it does not really provide an understanding of how TV works.

When I began teaching schools were creating video studios based on the idea that learning to create a studio program might be a lot like work students might be able to find after graduation. It was the beginning of authentic curriculum. In the district where I began working, all the studios were dismantled in the 1990s and computers replaced television as the preferred technology. The computer provides opportunities for different kinds of video instruction and can be a central part of a studio. But, students seldom get an opportunity to expericence video production from the perspective of a team in a studio. Students I worked with who did studio work learned a whole new way of watching television, a spirit of team work and tons new information.

If you are interested in this idea, E school News has a great video about the benefits of students using a studio. In this video students at Minnesota's Eagan High School talk about their experience working with the Student Video Network (SVN) . SVN is a project-based educational program provided to selected schools free of charge by the national news organization eSchool Media. Learn about the opportunity for students to earn valuable video-production experience--and a shot at national recognition for their efforts.

Educators may obtain more information about SVN from Associate Editor Meris Stansbury at mstansbury@eschoolnews.com.

You can read more at eSchool News

Book Review

Daniel T. Willingham is a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Why Students Don’t Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What it Means for the Classroom (Jossey-Bass, 2009). I have always been intrigued by the question of "liking" school. In my experience most people do not like doing things they do not want to do. School seems to be a place that fits that profile for almost everybody at some time during their education. I disagree with the premise of this book. Children do like school! They like meeting their friends, they like learning new things, they like activities, they like some teachers, they like some subjects, but they do not like all of school every day. In other words they feel about school much like adults feel about work. This book presents some other ideas about "liking" school.

Willingham brings some important ideas to the classroom teacher. As a cognitive scientist he discusses the importance of story, emotion, memory, context and routine in building knowledge and developing learning experiences. He also dispels some cognitive myths that pervade the teaching profession. He shows that learning styles are much less important than the fact that people’s processes for learning and thinking are more similar than different and he provides information about the plasticity of the brain and intelligence.

Willingham’s most important argument has to do with his definition of thinking. He argues that the brain has limitations in terms of our ability to think and that if we do not teach with this idea in mind, children will not like school. His definition of thinking is that working memory receives input from the environment and then connects with long term memory to begin to create new neural pathways that remember this new information in the context of our old information. This seems logical and I think it is a useful way to define thinking.

The limitation is that our brains are not designed for thought, but for the the avoidance of thought. Most of our brain is devoted to seeing and moving and those functions operate efficiently and reliably while thinking is effortful, slow and uncertain. One of the problems is working memory, remember the model of how thinking works? Working memory is at the center of that process. One of the things neuroscientists know is that working memory can only hold about 5-7 thoughts at a time. So if thinking is retrieving information and procedures stored in long-term memory to create something new and working memory has limitations, how do we make thinking easier. Willingham believes that one must know the information and procedures well in order to come up with something new. It is our background knowledge that facilitates thinking.

Despite the brain’s limitations Willingham stresses that hard work in the form of practice pays off. IQ is not totally genetic and has been steadily rising around the world for some time. The message this should send to students is that the only limitations they have are ones they place on themselves. But, this work coupled with lots of practice that is too hard cause students to not like school.

In my opinion Willingham has overlooked the importance of motivation and seems to believe learning core knowledge is at the heart of student success. The pursuit of core knowledge often kills motivation in children. It also seems that a person can only obtain this information in school through hard work and it must be learned at a determined rate to be successful. Students will tell you they like to learn but want to have fun. Willingham believes that if the work is too hard it turns students off and if it is too easy it turns students off. I believe that if the students enjoy most of the work they will not be turned off!!

Verbal Put Downs

In my last post I talked about unkind words at school. How frustration leads to anger causing verbal outbursts which raise stress levels. I believe that stress is one of the primary problems in our schools today.

Verbal put downs are a part of our youth culture. Young people, adolescent boys in particular, are constantly putting each other down. This is different than outbursts of frustrations. It is probably caused by the stress of competition in our schools. Young people have not yet learned the power of words and do not understand the devastating effects of verbal harassment and put downs. The see it as an accepted part of the culture. After all trash talk in sports is all about winning!

"We need to get away from the idea that bullying is always physical. Bullying can also include verbal harassment, which can be just as damaging and detrimental to student learning," said Christy Lleras, a U of I assistant professor of human and community development.

Her study used data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study and included 10,060 African American, Latino, and white tenth graders in 659 U.S. high schools. "In looking at whether students felt safe at school, students' fear for their physical safety was actually pretty low. But 70 percent of the students said they were bothered by disruptions in their classroom, and one in five students said that they were often put down by their peers in school," she said.

One of the primary human needs is for safety. This study points out that put downs and verbal harassment at school probably cause stress levels to rise in students causing a climate of fear to exist in our classrooms. Ms. Lleeras speculates that verbal put-downs in schools may be a coping strategy that students use when they don't have the skills to do the work and have little hope of acquiring them in their academic environment.

I believe that as long as competition is at the heart of our educational system, these problems will persist.

You can access the full article at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090901105142.htm

Kindness

School has always been a place that gathers frustrated people whose unkind words are often heard on the playground, library, classrooms and the office! John Medina, in his book Brain Rules, has as his 8th rule "stressed brains don't learn the same way."

When frustration is released with unkind words, stress is one of the side-effects and learning is the casualty. The Red Robin Foundation is doing something about this problem by providing grants of up to $15,000 with their U-Act program.

The goal of the Red Robin Foundation U-ACT Program is to encourage kindness among students and help create a sense of neighborliness inside and outside of school settings. U-ACT which stands for Unbridled Acts, or random acts of kindness, is a character-building initiative specifically for middle and junior high schools with grades six through eight, which aims to inspire and energize students about the value of being kind to others.

You can find out more at http://www.redrobin.com/rrfoundation/uactprogram.aspx
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