Right Words

        Teaching is a skill that requires more than exposition of information.  Teachers work with young, impressionable people who are vulnerable to the words they hear.  Children are still learning about sarcasm, irony and hyperbole.  Those who work with them must always be careful of the way they use words with their students.  The following story illustrates an unintended positive result from a teacher's words.

        Jolie was a pretty typical teenager from my point of view, even though I really don’t remember her well.  She was undergoing a cognitive and physical transformation like most of the sixteen year old studnets in my U.S. History class.   She didn’t particularly like school, like most of my students, but she wasn’t oppositional.  She dressed appropriately, from a teacher’s point of view.  She didn’t have any of the outward characteristics that marked her as a risk taking narcissistic adolescent. No spiked hair, sexuality or crazy colors.   She was chatty and polite.  I remember she sat at the front and to the right of the podium in the large classroom I had been assigned.  She did her work, but missed more school than a learner can afford and still succeed.  I don’t remember what grade she got or even if she finished the school year.  I do know she transformed me as a teacher.  

Now my brain gets fuzzy and I can not tell you much more about her.  I spent my time practicing effective teaching and although I truly enjoyed my students, I didn’t really involve myself in their lives.  I had three kids of my own, 130 other students, two dogs, one wife and a soccer team I coached.  I was a pretty typical high school teacher, who after 15 years of teaching had found a rhythm that satisfied my life.  I had discussions with my students about life, behavior, schooling and other topics that many teenagers find more interesting than U.S. History.  I considered myself student centered, but in retrospect I was curriculum oriented and under pressure to present a certain amount of information on a schedule determined by our department chairman.

I began my teaching career in the Marine Corps teaching electronics.  I learned how to pour information into a brain and use discipline to make my students listen to me.  When I began teaching I was a follower of B.F. Skinner, the behaviorist.  Data in according to rules, apply certain formulas for information retention, and mix in the proper balance of discipline and reward.  That was my philosophy and it applied to all students,.  

After I was discharged I followed my wife’s suggestion and became a school teacher, like her.  I went to the university and encountered other ways of thinking about teaching; I was introduced to other philosophies, open schools, and alternative methods of discipline.  When I went into the classroom I continued to teach the way the Marine Corps had trained me to teach.    

I did not truly understand the power of words.  I thought if I loudly and firmly that was enough.  But, what we say to children and how we say it can have powerful effects over their thinking for many years.  It is sort of like one day finding a plant growing in your garden that you don’t remember planting.  One of the clearest examples of this was shown to me by the eight year old son of a friend.  We were playing a game of Boce, before we began he and I had a discussion about cheating.  My parting words were, “Cheaters are losers!”  After my side lost the game Dylan announced that I was a cheater.  That wasn’t what I meant for him to learn.  See what I mean, words are powerful and teachers have innumerable opportunities to grow unintended plants.

By the time Jolie had become a student in my class I had learned many ways of teaching my subject and managing my class, but I still did not understand the unintended consequences of words.  I did chat with my students from time to time.  I was not such an effective teacher that every moment was spent on content.  I tried to give my students time to make their own meaning of the information, and we often had conversations about things that were troubling them.  They were always interested in news about views of society about teens, romance, risk-taking, and other tidbits I tried to incorporate into my classes.  By now I knew that ordering adolescents around is like stacking ping pong balls and didn’t use the same type of bombastic language I used just after my discharge.  I realize now I was on a journey of discovery about education that was part of my maturation process.  Jolie helped me to complete that process.

The year after Jolie was in my class I could not recall her features and barely remembered her name.  She however remembered me.  One day  before Christmas break I entered my office and there on my desk was a letter from Jolie.  I must confess that what she said was the result of unintentional gardening, but what blossomed was truly wonderful.  She explained that she had been depressed, dropped out of school, and continued a downward spiral that eventually caused her to attempt suicide.  I say attempt with relief and joy, for what a loss each young life is.  What was truly wonderful was her explanation for her recovery and decision to live.  She explained that I told her things in class that upon reflection gave her hope and confidence about herself and her future.  

Jolie’s note gave me hope that I was accomplishing something worthwhile.  It is true if you can save one child it is worth any effort you have put into others.    She caused me to understand that kindness is the most important thing we can teach.   It is not the curriculum that matters, it is how we treat our children that is important.  With the right words we can create a garden of beauty.

Debunking PISA

I have been disappointed with America's response to reforming our education system. The things we need to do have been lost in irrelevant arguments about the problems. It seems as if the talking points for reform are the same as those of people who wish to destroy our public education system and replace it with a system of private schools fueled by vouchers.  Now, I am not opposed to vouchers.  I think it could be a better system of financing our schools than our current system.  I believe that vouchers could unleash educational entrepreneurs and give parents more control over their children's education.  Vouchers will only work after we have leveled the playing field for all American children.

The problem with vouchers and current reform is that corporate greed is at the heart of the movement.  I believe that vouchers are the dream of corporations getting their hands on all the federal and state money expended on education.  Anytime the feds spend money, corporations line up with their hands out like beggars because they know the federal government is easy to fool and they want that money.

We are all being fooled into believing that America's education system is failing everyone by the movement that wants to take over public education in order to enrich their shareholders and CEOs.  Unfortunately, much of the charter movement has been co-opted by this movement already.  Who benefits by nationwide standardized testing?  Who benefits by controlled standardized curriculums?  Not the small school district in the middle of Kansas who have particular needs and the know how to solve their problems!

Why do we believe that all of our schools are failing?  After years of research and anti poverty advocates like Ruby Payne and Jonathon Kozol, we still miss the point that what is failing are schools that serve a high percentage of children living in poverty, not all schools.  Vouchers, charters and high expectations will not solve this problem.

Stephen Krashen's article The Tiger Mom, and Inaccurate Reporting in the blog Schools Matter addresses this problem by pointing out the inaccurate reporting about education in Time Magazine's article Tiger Mom: Is Tougher Parenting Really the Answer written by Amy Chua .  Time Magazine reports that the indication our schools are failing can be found in America's scores on the PISA, an international test that places American children in the middle of other countries' overall scores on this standardized test.  He points out that when adjusted for poverty levels, our children from middle class homes score at the top and those children who live in poverty are at the bottom of the test results.

The article It's The Poverty Stupid! published by the National Association of Secondary School Prinicpals points out the following statistics about the PISA and  poverty.

 Of all the nations participating in the PISA assessment, the U.S. has, by far, the largest number of students living in poverty--21.7%. The next closest nations in terms of poverty levels are the United Kingdom and New Zealand have poverty rates that are 75% of ours.

·      U.S. students in schools with 10% or less poverty are number one country in the world.

·      U.S. students in schools with 10-24.9% poverty are third behind Korea, and Finland.

·      U.S. students in schools with 25-50% poverty are tenth in the world.

·      U.S. students in schools with greater than 50% poverty are near the bottom.

·      There were other surprises. Germany with less than half our poverty, scored below the U.S. as did France with less than a third our poverty and Sweden with a low 3.6% poverty rate.

America is number one at raising children who live in poverty!  Our response after years of failed programs to eradicate poverty is to simply say that poverty is not an excuse for poor academic perfomance.  That may be true, but the effects of poverty upon our children is signigicant.  All of the indicators of poor brain development are enhanced by living in poverty.  As Stephen Krashen so aptly writes:

Poverty means poor nutrition, substandard health care, environmental toxins, and little access to books; all of these factors have a strong negative impact on school success. The problem is poverty, not the quality of our schools.

Eric Medina in his work as a molecular biologist reports that Healthy brains require good nutrition, sleep, and little stress.   Many children from impoverished neighborhoods and homes do not come to school ready to learn because of their environment.  I find it difficult to understand why American's are so reluctant to attack the underlying cause of our problems and search for new solutions yet so willing  to embrace repackaged 19th century methods of education.  It is probably because that 19th century method of education has caused our thinking to remain static while technology and innovation march into the future.  That is what those who propose to destroy America's public education system want, a simple answer to a complex problem.  As long as poverty is not even on the table as a point of discussion in educational reform, we will continue to have many children who can not succeed in our schools.

Rejecting the Dream Act

          The rejection of the Dream Act is a repudiation American values because the American dream is about the future, not the past.  Our country was founded on the idea a person's worth is determined by what he or she does, not by what their parents did.  The children we have turned down for American citizenship have done exactly what we ask of all immigrants.  They have stood in line their entire lives earning the right to citizenship by learning American culture in our schools.  They are like all of our children, some are bright and ambitious, some are searching to find themselves and some have given up.  But, they are all Americans because we have insisted they be educated as Americans.
         Now that they wish to show their appreciation and serve their country, they have been told that because their parents broke the law, we do not want them.  How mean spirited can we be?  I once had a student from Mexico who told me her family had come to America because they were hungry.  Where is our compassion for our neighbors to the south?  Why do we refuse to lend a helping hand to them like we have done for the many people we have accepted because their home country was in chaos and they needed help?
         The rejection of the Dream Act could have grave consequences for American growth and development.  Children take the messages of culture and act upon them in unexpected ways.  For the children of our illegal immigrants the rejection of their application to serve our country must be disheartening.  I wonder how many of them are looking for another place where they can be accepted for their accomplishments, rather than turned away for the sins of their fathers?

College Ready

I have begun a change in life related to my career in education.  Upon retirement I felt like many and could not really stop working.  I concerned myself with education issues and worked as a substitute, did some post retirement work as a school librarian, attended conferences on the brain and learning, spent some time working for PBS Teacherline, taught an online University course, did some contracting at a charter school and started this blog.  I developed a belief that kindness and cooperation are the missing ingredients in education.  I read Nel Noddings' Happiness and Education and concluded that she is right, we have worried too much about the technical side of education and not enough about the social emotional growth of the young people in our country and the goal of education should be to learn how to be happy.

As I have been going through my various stages of retirement education reform has been proceeding full blast.  Predicated upon the perception that our children are not prepared for the future and worries that other countries beat our scores on standardized tests it seems as though my generation of educators have utterly failed.  This has been a constant moan since I began teaching.  The public schools are failing our children seems to be a consensus that has been building for a certain portion of the U.S. population.  They want to replace our community based local control of education with school choice.  Schools whose only responsibility are the students they are teaching.  This seems to me a narrow view of education and seems to undermine the value of learning cooperation, diversity and common societal values.  It feels to me that the basic premise of this movement is if you don't like it, go somewhere else.  I always thought the American spirit had something to do with working through problems by finding common ground.  My ideas of kindness, happiness and cooperation don't seem to be the thinking of the educational establishment nor society in general.

So, I have decided to become a participant in education as opposed to being a proponent for any particular pedagogy.  I hope to experience the same college education our recent graduates are getting.  Of course I can not afford to go to Harvard, but I did obtain a scholarship for Vietnam Veterans sponsored by the state of New Mexico and I have enrolled at the University of New Mexico  as an English major studying creative writing.  I am starting over and trying to develop a second career as a writer, an idea that began with this blog and blossomed when I self published Bombs Away Buckaroos.  These projects have made me realize I never had training as a creative writer and have much to learn.  So, I have a goal but along the way hope to share my observations of the capabilities of my classmates and the quality of my education.

It has been an interesting two weeks but my overall impression is positive.  If we failed these students, then we failed my generation.  The students who go to the classes I do are interested, mostly do their work, seem to be future oriented and introspective.  They are certainly young adults who have the same problems all young adults have had with the meanings and problems of life in our culture.  My creative writing class is full of young minds who understand what they are asked to do and seem capable of doing it.  My first impressions of their writing is that they are no better or no worse that the students I attended with in 1965.

We will see.  I hope to report my impressions and share some of the work I am assigned as I progress through the beginning of the final third of my life or hopefully the 3rd quarter.  It sort of depends on having a healthy body and engaged mind!

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!

National Standards

There are many movements to reform education and many of them do nothing to develop creativity.  We are in a race for high scores in reading and math at the expense of creativity. Recently, Governors and state commissioners of eduction developed a common core of state standards in English-language arts and mathematics for grades k-12.  According to their website,    

These standards define the knowledge and skills students should have within their K-12 education careers so that they will graduate high school able to succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing academic college courses and in workforce training programs. The standards are:

• Aligned with college and work expectations;
• Clear, understandable and consistent;
• Include rigorous content and application of knowledge through high-order skills;
• Build upon strengths and lessons of current state standards;
• Informed by other top performing countries, so that all students are prepared to succeed in our global economy and society; and
• Evidence-based.

Now the question is what exactly does the government want to do with these standards?  The Wall Street Journal on its editorial page sees national standards as a distraction from the work of firing teachers and handing out vouchers, but more importantly pointed out that monies from the Federal Government could end up being withheld for noncompliance

 With the Administration's blessing, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers have proposed a set of uniform K-12 math and reading standards for all states. Compliance will supposedly be voluntary, but Education Secretary Arne Duncan said states that support the effort will have a better chance of receiving Race to the Top money. And President Obama suggested that states that opt out risk losing millions of dollars in Title I grants for low-income students.

 I was raised in an Air Force family and we moved a lot.  I certainly see the sense in having national standards.  As a youngster some states were ahead of others and there was always a fear of being setback when your family moved to a new duty station.  However, as an educator I am in agreement with Tamim Anasary in Edutopias article From Education at Risk:Fallout from a Flawed Report

 Only on-site teachers can really make a broad ongoing assessment that gets at a range of achievements and takes the individual into account. By contrast, uniform standardized testing whose outcomes can be expressed as simple numbers allows someone far away to compare whole schools without ever seeing or speaking to an actual student. It facilitates the bureaucratization of education and enables politicians, not educators, to control schools more effectively.

NCLB has left a bad taste in my mouth for federal education mandates and I am fearful that the common core standards could become another mandate.  Just as we are a mobile society and need some standards across state lines, we are certainly a republic and our states and communities have aligned their education product nationally by adopting common curriculum created by educational organizations and through state development of benchmarks and standards.  Education corporations, specifically textbook companies have  gathered that information and created curriculum for our country.  Seems to me that is free market capitalism at work.

My  true fear is that as we work to create educational reform we are taking away the strength of our country.  The ability to create and innovate are not being encouraged in our schools.  Teachers should have the ability to create lessons based upon the needs of their students and local situations.  Children should be encouraged to explore and learn what interest them without being stuck in a timeline of instruction.  Unfortunately all of the reform to date is really based around the philosophy that teachers do not know what they are doing and the national standards are another method to undermine their authority and expertise.