Watching this helps one to gain some perspective. And by perspective I mean finally understanding just how much money this country requires to survive, and how little Obama has actually removed. Obama’s killing himself and pissing everyone off in order to save the most pathetic sliver of money. And the fallout from the various federal programs losing their funding is fully, mind-blowingly noticeable. If there’s not a huge line at the border crossing today, I could be in Canada in less than three hours.
Because everyone deserves to explain themselves, especially after a few high-profile articles come out telling the general public you’ve recanted your strongly held beliefs in your new book, below are some excerpts from Diane Ravitch’s Education Week blog, Bridging Differences. In the post, she explains what in the hell is actually going on, what she believes, and why she thinks her book is doing so well amongst the education community despite everyone else’s crankiness.
I have not changed my fundamental belief that all children should have a great education that includes not just basic skills, but history, literature, geography, civics, the arts, science, foreign languages, and physical education. I have never changed my wish that all children should have well-educated teachers who love their subjects and are well prepared to teach them to their students. I have never changed my skepticism about fads, miracles, and silver bullets, which come and go with great frequency in U.S. education. I have never abandoned my respect for the men and women who teach children and do the daily work that others (including me) talk and write about. I am not opposed to testing, but to the misuse of testing to punish people and close schools.
What did I abandon? The hope that choice and accountability could magically achieve the ends that I believe in. I am not opposed to choice—everyone should be free to choose another school if the school their child attends is not right for the child. And I do not oppose accountability, so long as it is used to help teachers, principals, and schools do a better job, not to punish them.
All of this is to set the record straight. On the whole, I am staggered, astonished really, by the response to the book. I am especially gratified by the warm reception it has received from teachers. Nothing good can come of any reform that teachers do not embrace: That is one of the lessons of my book. More…
I respect Ms. Ravitch immensely, and have been impressed always by her intellectual and logical take on education. I therefore find it hard to believe that she would suddenly do an about-face with no cause or forethought. She has nothing to gain by doing that, and she has her credibility to lose. The only humans that can claim open-mindedness are the ones that take in all available information, ponder the hell out of it, and then decide what their opinion is.
Included in a person’s claim to being open-minded is the ability and responsibility to continue absorbing information as the situation changes. How stupid would some jackass on the Titanic have been if he’d stood his ground and been sucked into the cold, dark sea screaming, “It’s unsinkable, I tell you! Unsinkable! You’re all idiots! Stay on board! It’s unsinkable!” Things change. Situations change. The world changes. Good thing we higher-thinking humans have the capacity to change our thinking.
However, so far his plans for higher education look to be an improvement. I’m especially liking the Pell Grant increases, the lessening of student loan malevolence, and the attempt to have colleges and universities knock it the hell off already with the insane tuition increases.
Still, in this economy, a high school diploma no longer guarantees a good job. That’s why I urge the Senate to follow the House and pass a bill that will revitalize our community colleges, which are a career pathway to the children of so many working families. (Applause.)
To make college more affordable, this bill will finally end the unwarranted taxpayer subsidies that go to banks for student loans. (Applause.) Instead, let’s take that money and give families a $10,000 tax credit for four years of college and increase Pell Grants. (Applause.) And let’s tell another one million students that when they graduate, they will be required to pay only 10 percent of their income on student loans, and all of their debt will be forgiven after 20 years — and forgiven after 10 years if they choose a career in public service, because in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they chose to go to college. (Applause.)
And by the way, it’s time for colleges and universities to get serious about cutting their own costs — (applause) — because they, too, have a responsibility to help solve this problem.
I think we all know how I feel about standardized testing and the No Child Left Behind profanation. If there remains any confusion as to my opinion regarding those particular atrocities (and if my hints haven’t been overt enough), there will be an opportunity to catch up on your reading below.
Standardized testing, while possibly necessary in that there currently exists no practical way to collect student-achievement data from every public school in America, is still evil and has crushed an already handicapped education system into a non-functioning machine that has time and money only for teaching to the test. It has failed utterly and I work at maintaining some level of optimism that my kiddos will somehow manage to escape its evil clutches.
Bad news for me and my innocent progeny: New and exciting standards in science and math for public school kids are being implemented now, with the new assessments to begin in 2011 for math, and 2012 for science. The fabulous-er dog and pony show requires that students pass the exams in order to graduate. Were educators not teaching to the test enough already?
On the bright side, State Superintendent Randy Dorn is trying to convince the powers that be that the time between implementation and assessment is too speedy for the first wave of kids to be tested. People should pay attention when a politician uses the word “fair.”
Dorn said students and schools will need more time with new math and science learning standards that are now being implemented around the state. The new standards won’t be assessed until 2011 for math and 2012 for science. That doesn’t provide ample opportunity for the class of 2013, current ninth graders and the first class required to pass four state exams, to learn the standards, or teachers and schools to align curriculum and materials to them, he added.
“It doesn’t take a mathematician to see that we have a big problem in our state. Less than 50 percent of our 10th graders are passing the math and science exams,” said Dorn, who noted 10th graders’ passing rate on the reading and writing exams is more than 80 percent. “We need to be fair to our students and give them time to learn the new standards. It’s simply a matter of doing what’s right.”
This fiasco is happening in several other states as well. The only choices eye-rolling, head-shaking, utterances-of-disgust-making parents have are (a) suck it up and hope for the best, (b) private school, (c) home school, or (d) give the offspring a handbasket each and wish them well on their subterranean journey.
While writing the previous post, I went searching in the archives for relevant previous posts. I found entirely too many to tack onto the end of an already-lengthy post. Here they are, including some Education Reform posts proving I’m not always in disagreement with President Obama.
I’m running out of productive things to say about the education system in the U.S. Mostly I just want to slap everyone involved and ask them what the f**k is going on. Is the answer to why our public schools are struggling so hard to put out decently educated students so obvious that no one can see it? It’s funding, people.
The other countries we’re “competing” against manage to educate their kids just fine. The documentary Two Million Minutes did a stunning job of freaking competitive Americans out. Really? That’s our main concern? That China and India make us look like a country of opportunity-having losers who cannot figure out how to teach our kids and so we will be losing our current status of World-Leading Awesomeness soon?
I agree with us, we are losers. In addition, I think any country with its priorities so far out of whack (us again) that its schools have been shafted for decades while it remains at the top of the war game, deserves to fall off the We’re #1! pedestal for a while. My phones will be tapped 70 seconds after this post is published, but whatever. I love America, I do—it’s my home. But pathologically honest me has to admit that we suck at teaching K-12.
There have been several American moments that have made me wince, shake my head, and avoid traveling outside the American gates. The longest-running example has been our blatantly obvious choice to always put war before education. We spend a lot of damn money on being the country with the biggest guns (if you know what I mean…). We are a country of dumb kids with shiny weaponry. I’m real proud.
Americans are like the family whose children have inadequate clothing, insufficient food, and don’t get what they need from the adults in their lives, but their living room wall is host to the biggest flat-screen t.v. within a fifty-mile radius. (We win!)
Chalking the suck-fest that is the American Education System up to a wicked cash-flow problem is realistic. I’m sure there are a few crappy educators out there, and by all means do away with those ones. But knock it off with the competition thing; making kids take tests in order to prove their teachers’ worth, or making teachers (who already do more than should be reasonably expected with scant fundage) compete with one another for federal grant money is unforgivable and also kind of evil.
How horrible a mother would I be if I sat my kids down, looked them in their sweet, trusting eyes, and told them that only the most ass-kicking one of them was going to get funding for food, shelter and clothing, and the loser was going to be on their own? I would be deemed an unfit parent because there is just no way to make it acceptable to have people compete for what are supposed to be basic rights.
I’m a big dumb sucker, and have apparently been suffering under the delusion that, much like food, shelter and clothing for offspring, education was one of the most basic rights an American citizen could expect. Aaah, now I hear it, the big giant buzzer going off in my ear, rudely letting me know that I was mistaken. Crap.
Only the winners get the funding. And how will the “winners” be decided? By data. And since there seems to be only one way to collect and analyze that much data (there are a lot of schools in this country), I’m assuming we’re back to the a**loads-of-standardized-testing portion of education reform. Woohoo! I was just missing that GW guy so much, and now it feels like we’ve got him back. I’m so relieved.
The less-cranky optimist (and usually fervent supporter of Obama) in me is hoping for some really excellent fine print that will prove my fears about this education reform plan wrong. Seriously, someone tell me I’m wrong and this plan isn’t evil. Maybe competition will bring out the best in everyone, and every school will get the money it needs.
President Obama is saying that the testing will be different this time, that it will be better. Let’s hope so. I get it that fixing the education system is probably very close to being insurmountable, and I get it that there isn’t enough cash available to hand out to every school that needs funding. But really with the competition and the data? The American Way bites.
Sometimes I wonder why the decision-makers are so backward in their thinking, and then I wonder which one of us non-decision-makers was responsible for putting them in charge in the first place. Outdoor recess and unstructured, in-classroom play time have been decreasing so as to make time for the fully structured knowledge-absorption parts of the school day. The yahoos in charge of how much time is spent learning vs. playing in elementary schools need to spend an afternoon finger-painting and remember what it was like to be a kid.
Alternatively, they could read all the research backing up the idea that kids who are given time during the school day for physical activity (the crux of the recess invention) and to play in the classroom during free choice time (they learn while they play indoors, too) are better able to sit down at their desks and absorb more info when it comes time for the focusing.
I’m a big recess fan, so I’ve always been cranky about the slow but sure disappearance of primary school recess times. But there’s also an entire portion of in-classroom free time, also known as child-directed educational play, which is being squeezed out in favor of fully structured, sit-still-and-absorb-the-information learning.
The traditional kindergarten classroom that most adults remember from childhood—with plenty of space and time for unstructured play and discovery, art and music, practicing social skills, and learning to enjoy learning—has largely disappeared. The results of three new studies, supported by the Alliance for Childhood and described in this report, suggest that time for play in most public kindergartens has dwindled to the vanishing point, replaced by lengthy lessons and standardized testing.
The studies were conducted by researchers from U.C.L.A., Long Island University and Sarah Lawrence College in New York. The researchers found that
• On a typical day, kindergartners in Los Angeles and New York City spend four to six times as long being
instructed and tested in literacy and math (two to three hours per day) as in free play or “choice time” (30 minutes or less).
• Standardized testing and preparation for tests are now a daily activity in most of the kindergartens studied, despite the fact that most uses of such tests with children under age eight are of questionable validity and can lead to harmful labeling.
• Classic play materials like blocks, sand and water tables, and props for dramatic play have largely disappeared from the 268 full-day kindergarten classrooms studied.
• In many kindergarten classrooms there is no play- time at all. Teachers say the curriculum does not
incorporate play, there isn’t time for it, and many school administrators do not value it.
Kindergartners are now under great pressure to meet inappropriate expectations, including academic standards
that until recently were reserved for first grade. At the same time, they are being denied the benefits of play—a major stress reliever.
If teachers were in charge, I can guarantee there would be more free time in the classroom for the kids to engage in child-directed, imagination-saturated, problem-solving, cognition-developing play. Anyone who has learned anything about the psychology of kiddos and their brain wiring knows that they are learning even when they are playing, and that they learn better during the in-desk formal learning part of their school day if they’ve have a chance to blow off some steam and decompress a little.
Someone with a conscience and the proverbial balls to use their powers for good needs to get some official documentation of their qualification to tell the powers that be what it is, exactly, that kids require to be happy and healthy. (The answer is: More play, on and off the monkey bars.)
I think educational psychology carries some excellent potential for bureaucratic ass-kicking. Educational psychologists understand the whys and hows of who is learning what, how they’re learning in any given situation, and who is teaching and what makes those educators tick, and why the curriculum is or isn’t working for all parties involved. They’re the ones who grok the whole educational picture of a school and can use torrents of gorgeous vocabulary to explain to the policymakers why recess matters. Someone go to it and save our kids.
President Obama made his first speech yesterday about the state of education in America and what his plans are for fixing it. His education reform plan is heavy on the charter schools, which I admit I haven’t yet gotten off the fence about. While I like the idea of a charter school, I’m wary of any new plan that could conceivably take money away from the standard, run-of-the-mill public schools.
The whole point, to me, of a good public school system, is that every kiddo has access to well-taught knowledge and information, not just the kids with parents who have the time and energy at the end of the day to create, and fight for, a new and different kind of school.
Generally speaking, the kids whose parents have the get-up-and-go to battle the powers that be for their kids’ educations are usually the kids who will grow up knowing, and possibly taking for granted, that they’ll be going to college after high school. I want everyone to have a solid education, but I especially want it for the kids who are shuffled off into the under-funded public schools with burnt-out teachers.
Obama’s merit-based teacher pay idea concerns me because as much as I want the awesome teachers to bring home a living wage, I really don’t want the teachers who are trying to perform miracles on little or no classroom funding to get low pay (or the boot) because they haven’t figured out how to grow six more arms and do open-heart surgery using only a rubber band and some paper clips.
I’m stoked about Obama’s support of preschool programs and early education; that’s huge. Also, I’m happy that he’s trying to lengthen the academic calendar. He’s right, most of us aren’t farmers who need the kids home for the summer to help out. The ten-year-old Alexa of Summer Vacations Past is going to show up and slap me for supporting a summer-vacation decrease, but there it is.
Finally, I agree with President Obama that the old education system isn’t working. Everyone can sit around discussing change indefinitely, but at some point jumping on in and implementing the changes has to happen or we’re all just talking heads who get nothing accomplished. If the changes work, we can all smile for a while and breathe big fat sighs of relief. And if they don’t, we can start over and make some more changes.
So I’m taking a deep breath and letting the education reform begin. And by “letting,” I mean that I’m accepting what will occur regardless of how I feel because (a) I’m not the President, and (b) I don’t have a direct line to the Oval Office (if I did, we could have avoided that whole NCLB debacle…all I need is a red phone and a little more power and I think we would all sleep easier at night).
Now I have scientific backing should I need it to argue my case for decent recess-time allotment. Thus far, my kids’ schools allow my progeny to play outside a few times a day. If outside exercise time should be reduced, however, I’ll wave science or a doctor’s note in some administrative faces until my kids can go back outside. If that doesn’t work, I’ll sign them out for their daily dentist appointment and let them run laps around the block.
My kids are fortunate in that they live in Seattle, which isn’t as urban as some cities. Plus, they live in a mostly white, middle-class area of the city, which means their recess times will probably be maintained. According to a study released by The Center for Public Education, not only is NCLB affecting outside time, there’s also a “recess gap” for kids who attend school in the less-white, less-fortunate areas of town:
…the pressure on schools to find more instructional time is real, and it seems to be leading many districts to shave minutes from the recess time they provide. In addition, children who attend high-poverty, high-minority, or urban schools are far more likely than their peers in other locations to get no recess at all—a definite “recess gap” that commands our attention.
Kids are not medical residents, they aren’t grad students, and they aren’t studying for the Bar exam; it is okay for them to leave the classroom a few times a day and get their blood pumping. Even adults are supposed to get up for five or ten minutes every hour and move around.
Exercise, especially the way kids do it—the full-on running and throwing themselves around on the playground equipment—is good for the human body on several levels. It’s good for the heart (cardio and all that), the muscles (stretches and strengthens), the bones (increased bone density), it decreases stress, and it makes for happier and more energetic beings. An article in New Scientist points out that exercise increases memory function and promotes new brain cell growth:
There’s another reason why your brain loves physical exercise: it promotes the growth of new brain cells. Until recently, received wisdom had it that we are born with a full complement of neurons and produce no new ones during our lifetime. Fred Gage from the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, busted that myth in 2000 when he showed that even adults can grow new brain cells. He also found that exercise is one of the best ways to achieve this.
Why are the people in charge so backward in their thinking? Making kids sit still for hours has never made them better learners. It makes them spazzy and cranky and unfocused and unhealthy and does absolutely nothing to up a school’s standardized test scores.
