Teacher Thursday

Ran across a number of links during my early morning coffee today, so here are few you can click through:

My Education Week feed featured an article on what teachers can learn from the career trajectory of Jay-Z. Since my students love Jay-Z, I read with interest. Of note, Robert Christgau recently made the case for Mr. Z as not only one of the greatest rappers ever but one of the finest pop stars of all time. Would that this Mr. Z had the other's unflappable coolth.

Also from EdWeek comes word of the Internet marketplace Teachers Pay Teachers, where you can make money selling lesson plans for mini-payments.  There are plenty of free lesson plans available on the Net, of course, but this seems like a nice way of supporting your fellow educators.

A recent Kos diary warms the heart with the story of a New York seventh-grader who sent care package to tornado-ravaged classroom in Joplin, MO. Read it and go Awwww.

Here in AZ, our schools continue to draw national attention for all the wrong reasons. Here's the story of a court striking down the insulting "accent police" witch hunt our state government inflicted on us. Here's one about our embarrassing state superintendent of schools, who's evidently never heard of Godwin's Law.

Finally, here's a tale of a professor who smiles on as his students provide a teachable moment or two for a young Republican. Would that the older ones had similar opportunities.

Okay, gotta go teach!

It's the Poverty, Stupid

Lots of edu-links in my history cache of late, so let's call this a Teacher Tuesday and I'll just upload a few of them on you.

We start with the ubiquitous Diane Ravitch, who, along with Harlem schoolteacher Brian Jones, was interviewed recently by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales:

DIANE RAVITCH: Well, to me, the big issue today is there’s a narrative that says teachers are the problem in American education. I have been arguing poverty is the problem. We tie right into your segment on Dr. King. Poverty is the problem. Thirty-five percent of black kids live in poverty. Twenty percent of all American kids live in poverty. That’s the problem.

There has been some lively discussion of the influence of poverty on educational outcomes over at Daily Kos this week. The diary "The Myth of Failing Schools" offers anecdotal evidence, but the comments section is full of links to supporting data. In response, diarist leftyparent offers a contrarian view; that regardless of income levels, the Critical Pedagogy movement offers a model to improve our schools on a metric independent of the debate over test scores.

Other links at the HuffPo Education Page survey some other solutions. Joe Kutchera looks at a writing program that succeeds in inspiring low-SES (sorry, edu-jargon...impoverished) students. And Gloria Bonilla Santiago reminds us of the research showing how ECE (sorry, early childhood education, AKA preschool) can help alleviate the disadvantages faced by students raised in poverty.

Smithsonian Magazine takes an in-depth look at the world's best school systems: those of Finland, where, not coincidentally, the child poverty rate is dramatically lower than in the US of A. At the same time, Michael Petrilli, in "One Size Fits Most," counsels a cautious approach in trying to replicate Finland's successes. and offers a possible compromise between competing pedagogies.

Back in these here United States, the one named Indiana has a voucher program producing predictable results: a giant sucking sound as funding and students are drained from the public schools systems.

A Missouri judge has blocked implementation of a law prohibiting Facebook contact between teachers and students. The broad language can be interpreted to ban text messages, voicemail and email contact as well, and has First Amendment advocates feeling a chill wind. Randy Turner, a teacher in the Show Me State, gives this idea the withering scorn it deserves.

A new paradigm in Nevada schools offers an alternative to the lunatic NCLB insistence on 100% proficiency by 2014: measure growth, not test scores. But it's still a testing paradigm, and offers the tempting route of blaming teachers for outcomes beyond their control. As one advocate puts it:

"It has to be used as a way to financially reward good teachers and get rid of poor teachers," he said. "You can't control if kids are poor, don't speak English or high truancy. Teacher quality is the greatest school control."

Actually, you can control if kids are poor, as LBJ's successful anti-poverty programs (largely abandoned by Nixon and Reagan) show us. We've simply given up on trying to do so. Budget deficits, doncha know.

Perils of EduBlogging

During my orientation for "new" teachers the district's lawyer gave a PowerPoint on legal issues for teachers. Most of it centered on mandatory reporting issues for students at risk, most of which was not new to me. But she also mentioned how it would be deemed inappropriate for a teacher to blog disparagingly about their students or colleagues.

This got my antennae up. I asked her afterwards about the grey area in such matters. We're a long way from the days when a teacher could be dismissed for interracial dating or for being gay (in some states, anyway). Obviously I'd be protected if I wrote a letter to the editor about educational policy, and if I blog about education issues or philosophy, I should expect the same rights.

But there's a grey area in between, and I wanted to know more about where the borders are. Her reply was that it would take an hour to answer my question and she didn't have an hour. But she advised me to simply stay out of the grey area, and to do a google on, say, "first amendment teachers rights" and see what comes up. At the top of the results, as you can see, is the website for "First Amendment Schools," a resource for both students and teachers, which I immediately bookmarked.

As if on cue, driving to work the next morning I heard a report on NPR about a teacher who had been suspended for... blogging disparagingly about her students or colleagues. The anchor seemed to think it amusing that she had been "sentenced" to going back and teaching those same students. And according to the account on HuffPo, she's mulling over whether to return.

It looks to me like her comments truly were inappropriate, and though she was blogging with the expectation of anonymity, that expectation was unrealistic in this day and age. Those are the kinds of things you wouldn't say over a restaurant dinner, either, because you never know who might be in the next booth.  And it's nothing that I would ever blog about, since I'm concerned with policy, which one would hope is at the other end of the spectrum. But note that her completely tactless comments were protected enough that she was reinstated.

On the other hand, First Amendment rights for students have generally been found by the courts to have fewer protections and more restrictions. There's a grey area there too, but this cyberbullying case clearly falls on the wrong side of that, an issue to which we shall no doubt return.

In the meantime, there is so much fertile ground to plow in the protected area of the sliding scale that there's barely enough time to discuss it all. Case in point: gotta get to work.

Unemployed No More

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 14.1 million unemployed persons in this country. As of yesterday, I'm not one of them.

I signed a contract with a local district to teach 7th grade language arts for the 2011-2012 school year. What's especially sweet for me is that I'll be teaching some of the same kids I taught as 3rd graders in 2007 and as 5th graders in 2009. Watching their progress is wonderful, and being a part of it is humbling and gratifying.

If you're just tuning in, I was laid off last May after several rounds of budget cuts to K-12 education from the Arizona legislature (and they're not finished with that, either). My job was saved from elimination in the 2009-2010 budget only due to President Obama's stimulus package. But that funding ran out, and the district ended up cutting jobs for 2010-2011. After the legislature cut the education budget still further, salaries were reduced as well, so I'll be making about what I did as a rookie.

But the "good news" is, if more jobs are eliminated next year, I have as much chance as anyone else of surviving. That is,  the last round of layoffs was based on seniority – everyone with three years or less experience was let go. But Arizona has also eliminated teacher tenure. So a 30-year veteran faces the same prospect of layoffs as I do – without due process.

What this means for the blog is that I'll probably be posting less frequently beginning next month – though that's already dropped off as I've spent more time with my kids during their summer vacation. I'll continue to write about education policy, though I won't mention names of students, staff, or the school. But I will be able to comment from the trenches about how policies at the federal, state and local level are affecting our kids. Hopefully the Arizona legislature won't outlaw that as well.

Teacher Tuesday

Welcome back to the ZepBlog, where we don't let the nomenclature of arbitrarily-delineated time periods get in the way of a nice alliterative blog post title. Have a few edu-links for your Saturday morning...

Both Jon Walker and Matt Yglesias highlight a study in Science magazine showing multiple cost-saving benefits from early childhood education. Walker titles his post "Universal Preschool: An Actually Smart Longterm Deficit Plan:"

The study found that the children who received preschool were more likely to finish high school, less likely to be arrested and make more money. 

In addition to preschool clearly making these individuals better, it must have had an impact on the federal and local budgets. Higher incomes means more tax revenue and less spending on social services/incarceration.

Kos diarist AlecMN highlights the same study in his post "The Education Theocracy of Michele Bachmann haunts Minnesota to this day." Counterintuitively, though not surprisingly, the theocrats backing Bachmann are arguing instead that pre-school is harmful to children, and are thus opposed to any state funding of same.

Meanwhile, there is continuing fallout from EdSec Duncan's condescending open letter to our nation's teachers. But the criticism that really got under his thin skin came from the righteous Diane Ravitch. Duncan dissed her, and Ravich responded calmly. Ravitch, by the way, blogs regularly at Education Week.

Finally, speaking of EW, they host a whole suite of blogs, and this post is a nice linky JGRTWT:

What if the reform vessel you invested a decade's worth of time and money into appeared to be ineffective, at best--or even downright useless in getting us where we wanted to go? Would you sail on, emphasizing the need to stay on schedule? Would you offer federal money to states who agree to sign on as passengers? Would you launch a slick advertising campaign to allay concerns? 

Or would you change course--even rebuild the ship?

The High Cost of Low Cost Meals

Speaking of education, this is why I skim a few political blogs in the morning before going out to the driveway and unfolding the legacy media:

Eating healthy food isn't always cheap, and some conservatives in Congress are concerned that the Obama administration's effort to make school lunches more nutritious is a luxury the nation can't afford. 

Many schools, especially the poorest ones, agree. They say new rules issued by the Agriculture Department in January will require them to buy pricier foods and more equipment at a time when federal and state budgets are tight and food costs are rising.

The AP story goes on to tell us that these odious requirements could cost as mush as fourteen cents a meal, or $7 billion over five years. So the annual cost is less than one-twentieth of one percent of the federal budget for 2011. Put another way, the giant hole in the deficit blasted through by the extension of the Bush tax cuts costs more than 300 times as much per year as the boost to the school nutrition program.

And why am I glad I woke up my computer first? Because annie em, one of the many helpful diarists at DailyKos, posted this piece: "NYC schools feed students good food, test scores rise 16%." The study she references is an old one, but similar results have obtained elsewhere.

This is one of the many reasons why the current mania for cutting "the size of government" is penny wise and pound foolish - or maybe penny dumb and pound dumber. The savings and gains to be realized by investments in education are legion – not least the amounts to be deducted from future prison costs. The diarist also references some of the outrages flowing from private-sector contractors skimming profits out of our children's nutritional needs.

Free market fundamentalists are ruining this country. Perhaps they were malnourished as children?

This Headline Makes No Sense

Is it just me, or has the quality of headline writing declined precipitously along with, you know, just about everything since Richard Nixon was elected?

I know its a tricky thing to write a catchy and informative head – I've contributed my share of counter-examples – but I keep noticing headlines that give a misleading idea of what the story really says.

I blame teachers.

Wasted, Man

When my daddy was a little boy, his mama used to tell him to finish up his meals, "because there are people starving in China." His response was, "Can we just send it to them, then?"

Now that I'm a parent myself, I see a lot of unfinished meals at the family table. Which is why I got a twinge of First World guilt when I saw this UN report that says roughly one-third of the global food supply is wasted. And guess where most of that waste comes from?

Freedom is as Freedom Does

Reader DG writes to redirect my attention to this excellent piece of reporting from Tim Vanderpool of the Tucson Weekly. It tells of the cash tossed by Charles Koch towards the University of Arizona's "UA Freedom Center."

The Koch Brothers, of course, are famous for their devotion to freedom – freedom, that is, from regulations that would otherwise prevent them from poisoning the planet's atmosphere and heating up our grandchildren's climate systems.

The Freedom Center, as it turns out, tends to define freedom the same way:

JGRTWT: A Teacher's Letter to the Secretary of Education

This smackdown of Arne Duncan and his policies by a career teacher is so good, and so full of useful links, that I'm keeping a link to it right here so I can always find it. And for the rest of you, JGRTWT.

UPDATE: Here's some more edu-surfing for you this morning...

Joy Resmovits runs down other teacher reactions to this condescension.

Valerie Strauss reads Arne Duncan's mind for you.

Jeff Bryant explains how the right has their way with education "reformers."

Matt Meyer puts the smackdown on Mayor Bloombeg's ed policies.

H. Richard Milner tackles the emphasis on "achievement" gaps.

(h/t to funkygal for putting me on this in the first place.)

Sarajevo & Abbotabad

I had a great time today as a substitute teacher for 7th grade social studies classes. On the teacher's desk were plans for me to teach about the causes of World War I, but I knew many of the kids would be interested in talking about the death of bin Laden. My job was to weave together the connections between those two topics. Luckily that wasn't hard to do.

Now There's a Modest Proposal

I tend to believe that 90% of all the world's problems come from bad parenting.  Bernie Madoff, Roy Cohn, Snooki, you name it. Who raised these people?

Now, in the nature/nurture debate, I keep a foot in both camps. I think that bad parenting can trump good genes, and sometimes vice versa.

In the classroom, you confront the results of other folks' parenting decisions every day, for better or worse. Author/activist David Macaray describes it thusly:

More EduRanting

I suppose it's a quant notion these days, but some of us educators don't actually think the purpose of schools is to provide a compliant and competent labor pool for the service industries of tomorrow. Instead, the idea is more or less that the job of the schools is to produce good citizens - well-informed, critical-thinking, enterprising young people who are equipped for success as adults.

Our national conversation about education has devolved to the point where it's all about test scores and the teachers who produce them, and not so much about why our kids need to know the things we test them on. And since the schools I taught in were stressed out trying to meet the Xeno's Paradox of scoring goals that rose every year, they largely focussed on math and reading and not much else. Since there was no social studies curriculum, I had to create my own, and try to squeeze it in for 5 minutes a day, and not without some pushback for even that much.

Some people have a different vision for our schools. I ran across a spirited rant from educator/activist Matt Meyer. And when I run across such things, it's my job to locate the money quote in order to get you to click over and, as the saying goes, read the whole thing:

After little more than 150 years of federally-mandated and coordinated schooling-for-all, the US commitment to publicly supported teachers and students is quickly coming to an abrupt end. The global corporate penchant for the privatization, commoditization, and enclosure of practically everything is having particularly chilling effects in policies that Henry Giroux suggests "seek nothing less than the total destruction of the democratic potential of American education."

Happy to help.

Stress Factories

My daughter is starting her week of high-stakes testing, which is designed to punish and/or reward schools based on their scores on this single battery of standardized tests. And I just ran across a great piece by Chris Hedges called "Why the United States is Destroying Its Education System." You want to read the whole thing, but here's a quote from a disgruntled educator that rings true for me:

“If the Bloomberg administration can be said to have succeeded in anything,” he said, “they have succeeded in turning schools into stress factories where teachers are running around wondering if it’s possible to please their principals and if their school will be open a year from now, if their union will still be there to offer some kind of protection, if they will still have jobs next year. This is not how you run a school system. It’s how you destroy one. The reformers and their friends in the media have created a Manichean world of bad teachers and effective teachers. In this alternative universe there are no other factors. Or, all other factors—poverty, depraved parents, mental illness and malnutrition—are all excuses of the Bad Teacher that can be overcome by hard work and the Effective Teacher.”

The stress is baked into the system at all levels. It's passed down from the federal level, to the states, to the school districts, to the principals, to the teachers, to the kids.

It was inherent in the NCLB paradigm that there would be sticks but no carrots, and the whole thing was underfunded from the beginning in a bait-and-switch maneuver that the Bush White House used to get Ted Kennedy on board. And untangling this mess will require more commitment than the Obama White House has shown to date.

If you work in a school, have kids in the school system, or depend on those kids to grow up and run this country when you retire, this should concern you. It's parked right here.

Thank a Teacher

One of the things I discovered when I first began teaching was how much I enjoyed hanging out with teachers. They are, by definition, smart people with big hearts. Right now I'm really enjoying being a substitute, teaching everything from kindergartners to high school seniors. It's quite the smorgasbord. And everywhere I go, I find smart, big-hearted teachers. Who are, of course, sucking our country dry with their bloated salaries.

Lately, I just finished reading two very different books about teaching. The first, by Robert Wilder, is called Tales from the Teachers' Lounge: An Irreverent View of What It Really Means To Be a Teacher Today. Wilder has a breezy comedic style, reminiscent of Dave Barry ( my favorite simile: "nodding off like Courtney Love in a custody hearing"). He lovingly runs down the various foibles of the folks who take on the work of teaching "other people's kids," along with the various challenges one encounters along the way: those other people, the wide range of human behaviors exhibited by their kids, and the well-meaning teachers who have followed the Peter Principle up into the administration of our schools. It's a million laughs, and you don't need to be a teacher to appreciate it - it's enough to have been taught by one.

The other book is a nonfiction graphic novel - ah, hell, a comic book - called To Teach: The Journey, in Comics. It's a collaboration between award winning cartoonist Ryan Alexander-Tanner and longtime educator William Ayers*. And it's a genuine collaboration, in that Alexander-Tanner wrote some of the text and Ayers consulted on the illustrations. It's an adaptation of Ayers's earlier work To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, which they quickly discovered was too heavy on theory to convert easily into a narrative format. So they told the story of Ayers' early years as a kindergarten teacher (and let me tell you, those people do not get paid nearly enough!). It's augmented throughout by interviews with other veteran teachers, all of whom help to sketch out Ayers' humanist approach to education. Well worth reading, whether you're a teacher, or have children who are taught by them.

*William Ayers is, in fact, the same William Ayers who very nearly succeeded in conspiring with Barack Obama to foment a marxist takeover of our economy, before he was exposed by Sean Hannity's fearless crusade for the truth. However, that has as little to do with the value of the ideas in this book as it did with who was qualified to be elected president in 2008.

Eduwonkery for Non-Wonks

If you're confused by current controversies in education policy, want to be able to talk ed policy at cocktail parties (always a hot topic) and reading this blog hasn't helped, you could do worse than to click over to the Mother Jones blogateria. There, Titania Kumeh gives a basic primer on standardized testing, and how we evolved into a "punish the schools" paradigm:

Why are some people unhappy with this system?

Schools are cutting back on teaching science, social studies, and art to become proficient in math and reading tests by NCLB's 2014 deadline, The New York Times' Sam Dillon reports. This is the reason the US lags so far behind other countries when it comes to science proficiency, researchers told The Hechinger Report. Also to make the goal, more than half of states have lowered their standards to redefine "proficient."

In a few weeks, my kids and yours will be taking these tests, and as mentioned, more and more schools will be falling off a cliff into "corrective action." This is why you don't let the Bush brothers design your school system.

Are there any questions?

Teacher Layoff Season Kicks Off

It's spring at last, which means school boards across the nation are preparing for yet another round of teacher layoffs. In Texas alone, 100,000 teachers could be losing their jobs. Mayor Bloomberg is pink-slipping 45,000 in New York City. 30,000 layoff notices have been sent out across California. And here in Arizona, with another quarter billion dollars set to be slashed from the state's education budget, we're just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Susan Straight calls this what it is, a national disgrace:

Old Block, Chip Off

My boy's first grade teacher was presenting a brain teaser that went:

1 4 $
2 4 show
3 2 get E
go (cat) go

And she gave them a hint: this song was written by Elvis.

So my boy raises his hand and says "I'm sorry, but 'Blue Suede Shoes' was written by Carl Perkins, not Elvis Presley.

Search Amazon.com for Carl Perkins

Nobody Could Have Predicted

This is a complete and utter surprise:

The number of schools labeled as "failing" under the nation's No Child Left Behind Act could skyrocket dramatically this year, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Wednesday.

The Department of Education estimates the percentage of schools not meeting yearly targets for their students' proficiency in in math and reading could jump from 37 to 82 percent as states raise standards in attempts to satisfy the law's mandates.

The 2002 law requires states to set targets aimed at having all students proficient in math and reading by 2014, a standard now viewed as wildly unrealistic.

"No Child Left Behind is broken and we need to fix it now," Duncan said in a statement. "This law has created a thousand ways for schools to fail and very few ways to help them succeed."

So the policy of punishing "failing" schools chugged merrily along as long as it mostly affected poor schools and districts. But who knew that "all students" meant 100% of all students in every school in America? If only somebody could have warned us that achieving this by 2014 was an unworkable goal.

Next thing you know people will be claiming there's waste and fraud in the Pentagon budget.

Diane Ravitch on the Daily Show

The Daily Show - Diane Ravitch
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook