Archive for the 'No category' Category

Hurry-Up. Offend.

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 14, 2009 in No category. 1 Comment

Veteran eduscribe Richard Whitmire argues in a Wash Post op-ed that DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee has “no choice but to play hardball” with teachers, unions and politicians.  

Running a hurry-up education offense is the only way Rhee can maintain a viable-sized school district that has dwindled to a mere 44,000 students, while the city’s charter school population is expected to grow to 28,000 this year….In the District, charters continue to attract more new students than Rhee’s schools. If Rhee can’t stanch or reverse that trend, her district slumps into irrelevancy, a fact of life that her union opponents seem incapable of grasping. If Rhee falters, the layoffs will continue.

I get the math, but not the logic.  If DC schools face an “existential threat” from charters (which Rhee supports), doesn’t it make more sense to make allies, not enemies of teachers unions?   The pitch is simple:  work with me or we’re both out of jobs.

National Curmudgeon Week Continues

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 9, 2009 in No category. 0 Comments

First Thomas Sowell goes off on a 5th grader.  Now Slate dismisses Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar for its ”lack of narrative creativity—a laziness and repetitiveness that in time can breed deep parental resentment.”  What’s next? A restaurant review blasting mom’s meatloaf?

The End of Education Reform

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 21, 2009 in No category. 11 Comments

A remarkable speech by Chester Finn of the Fordham Institute is all the more remarkable for the lack of chatter it has generated in the edusphere.  Titled “Is It Time to Throw in the Towel on Education Reform?” the September 9 speech at Rice University notes a broad consensus on education reform that has existed for better than two decades is coming apart at the seams.  “The overriding goal of that consensus was to boost America’s academic achievement at the K-12 level,” Finn notes, and it gave rise to “a tsunami of standards-based reform.”

He cites several major developments contributing to the fraying of that consensus.  Among them: unhappiness with NCLB and a palpable backlash against testing that “goes to the heart of standards-based reform.”  On school choice, he points out, far too many charters and schools of choice have been “disappointingly mediocre.”  Then there are the results of the reform era:

Despite all the reforming, U.S. scores have remained essentially flat, graduation rates have remained essentially flat, and our international rankings have remained essentially flat. You can find some upward blips but you can also find downward blips. Big picture, over 25 years, is flat, flat, flat. In other words, all the reforming has yielded little or nothing by way of stronger outcomes.

Finn also cites “principled critiques by serious people” as another crack in the ed reform wall:

E.D. Hirsch’s new book may be its most cogent example, at least until Diane Ravitch’s next book emerges—of both standards-based reform and school choice on grounds that these structural changes neglect crucial issues of content and pedagogy—neglect what actually goes on in classrooms between teacher and learner—while narrowing the curriculum and weakening the common culture. 

 Has the reform consensus “outlived its usefulness?”  Finn compares American education to the situation the nation found itself in when the Articles of Confederation proved insufficient to the needs of the new nation.  “We may be at a similar stage with regard to our public-education system,” he notes. “Further tugging and kicking at it from the banks of the Potomac is not going to modernize it.”

I’m suggesting to you that American education today resembles America itself in 1785. The old arrangement isn’t working well enough and probably cannot be made to. A new constitution is needed. It’s in that sense that we should throw in the towel on education reform and think instead about reinvention.

 Checker briefly lists his ideas for “essential ingredients” of this new constitution including national standards and measures; portable statewide “weighted-student” financing; and the replacement of traditional school districts “with an array of virtual systems and regional or national operators (some of them technology-based).”

Follow You, Follow Me

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 2, 2009 in No category. 0 Comments

In what is surely a rock-solid indicator that the trend has peaked and will now rapidly decline, I’m now on Twitter.  http://twitter.com/rpondiscio

People, Some, With Words Have a Way

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 25, 2009 in No category. 15 Comments

Law professor and New York Times blogger Stanley Fish describes becoming alarmed about the inability of his students to write a clean sentence–even those who were instructors in his college’s composition program.  What was going on?

I decided to find out, and asked to see the lesson plans of the 104 sections. I read them and found that only four emphasized training in the craft of writing. Although the other 100 sections fulfilled the composition requirement, instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues — racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.

Unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, Fish writes.  Colleges, however, aren’t the culprit. The damage is done long before.  If he were to look in elementary schools, Fish might find the same issue, writ small.  Writing instruction–especially in “writer’s workshops” concerned primarily with student engagement and developing a child’s “voice” – tends to be more concerned with teaching a child to have something to say, rather than developing the ability to say it clearly, cogently, or grammatically. 

A commenter on Fish’s blog who works for a testing company describes his amazement ”that a ‘writing’ test often is scored without regard for punctuation, sentence composition or spelling. The instructions provided by the state for scoring these essays makes it clear that these factors should be disregarded.” 

Translation:  The war is over.  The bad guys won.

Calling All Parents

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 21, 2009 in No category. 3 Comments

So let me make sure I’ve got this right.  If you want parents to be involved in your school — even low-income parents — you have to call them?  You mean, like on the telephone?!?

(H/T: Joanne Jacobs)

Voluntary National Standards Dead on Arrival

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 22, 2009 in No category. 21 Comments

A draft of the newly developed common core state standards purports to offer “sufficient guidance and clarity so that they are teachable, learnable and measurable,” however the ELA guidelines offer almost no specific content and little that would be of use to teachers in planning lessons–or parents in understanding what their child is expected to know.

Copies of the draft, an effort spearheaded by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association (NGA) have begun circulating among reviewers.  A copy found its way to me without any restrictions on its use or circulation.  I have posted the draft document here.  (Trouble with the link?  Try here instead)

The draft insists that the voluntary standards be “coherent” but defines coherence to mean they “should convey a unified vision of the big ideas and supporting concepts within a discipline and reflect a progression of learning that is meaningful and appropriate.”  Framed as a series of benchmarks students must reach “to be college and career ready,” the draft enumerates standards such as the ability to “determine what text says explicitly and use evidence within text to infer what is implied by or follows logically from the text.”

To put this as blandly as possible, this is neither a revelatory insight nor a meaningful standard.  Educators hoping for guidance on what particular texts are expected to be taught, or how to get students to reach the bland and obvious standards will be disappointed.  On specific “texts” the draft says merely:

The literary and informational texts chosen should be rich in content….This includes texts that have broad resonance and are referred to and quoted often, such as influential political documents, foundational literary works, and seminal historical and scientific texts.

“At first glance, these language standards are, despite the brave descriptors, very similar to the dysfunctional state standards already in place,” notes Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, Jr.  “Like most state standards, they naively take a formalistic approach to language ability.   They assume that the ability to understand literary and informational language is chiefly a how–to skill, whereas it is chiefly a topic-dependent skill that varies with specific topic familiarity.”   

 A sample scientific text on covalent bonds in the draft document, Hirsch notes, is a “a good illustration of this general point.  Will it be more useful for understanding such texts to spend class time teaching some will-o-the-wisp language proficiency or to impart a good general education in science and the humanities?  

“One begins to despair,” Hirsch concludes.

Bringing Home Life “Out of the Shadows”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 20, 2009 in No category. 8 Comments

Making schools better “should be only one part of our national strategy” on education, writes Harvard’s Ronald Ferguson.  “Life at home has been a relatively neglected topic and needs to come out of the shadows.” In a commentary at CNN.com Ferguson, who heads the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University, says helping parents do their best needs to be as big a priority as achieving excellent schools.

This goes beyond public policies. I am talking about changes in mindsets and lifestyles in a national social and cultural movement to close achievement gaps between groups — a movement to achieve excellence with equity.  More reading at home is a place to start….Black and Hispanic students reported less leisure reading at home compared to whites, watched television more, were much more likely to have televisions in their bedrooms and (perhaps as a consequence) were more prone to become sleepy at school. Also, blacks and Hispanics, including those with college-educated parents, reported fewer books in their homes than whites whose parents had fewer years of schooling.

Ferguson cites research indicating that high achieving students across racial lines have parents who are “both responsive and demanding.”

According to the study, white parents were much more likely to be both responsive and demanding than black and Hispanic parents; whereas black parents, in particular, were often highly demanding, but tended not to be as responsive in the ways the study measured. Among early adolescents, differences along these dimensions helped account for the higher test scores of whites as compared with blacks and Hispanics.

“Findings like the above should be part of the conversation among black and Hispanic community leaders as they respond to the fact that even the children of college-educated parents often achieve at lower-than-expected levels,” Ferguson writes. 

Is Pittsburgh Hard to Spell? Definately.

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 14, 2009 in Education News and No category. 2 Comments

For 80 years, a beacon atop the Grant Building in downtown Pittsburgh has flashed out the word “Pittsburgh” in Morse code.  At least it was supposed to.  No one knows for how long it’s been happening, but a sharp-eyed city resident waiting for a 4th of July fireworks show noticed the dots and dashes actually spell out P-I-T-E-T-S-B-K-R-R-H

“I was looking at it, and I saw the letter ‘K,’ which is dash-dot-dash,” Tom Stepleton tells the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “I remembered ‘K’ because my sister’s name starts with ‘K.’ And I knew that wasn’t supposed to be there.”   He took a video of the dotty message and dashed it off to YouTube.

<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=3fTYzoSDAS4">http://youtube.com/watch?v=3fTYzoSDAS4</a>

Meanwhile, a survey reveals that “definitely” is the most misspelled word in the English language.  A significant number of people insist on spelling it “definately,” the UK’s Daily Record notes.   The other most commonly misspelled words include sacrilegious, indict, broccoli, and prejudice.  The poll also finds that “57 percent judge other people on their spelling, with 42 per cent admitting they believe people who can’t spell are ‘thick.’”

Personally, I always need to check “embarrass” and ”cemetery” and for some reason, “judgment” never looks right to me, no matter how many times I’ve written it.

The Partnership for 19th Century Skills

Published by Diane Ravitch on July 6, 2009 in No category. 12 Comments

I for one have heard quite enough about the 21st century skills that are sweeping the nation. Now, for the first time, children will be taught to think critically (never heard a word about that in the 20th century, did you?), to work in groups (I remember getting a grade on that very skill when I was in third grade a century ago), to solve problems (a brand new idea in education), and so on.

Let me suggest that it is time to have done with this unnecessary conflict about 21st century skills. Let us agree that we need all those forenamed skills, plus lots others, in addition to a deep understanding of history, literature, the arts, geography, civics, the sciences, and foreign languages.

But allow me also to propose a new entity that will advance a different set of skills and understandings that are just as important as what are now called 21st century skills. I propose a Partnership for 19th Century Skills.

This partnership will advocate for such skills, values, and understandings as:

  • The love of learning
  • The pursuit of knowledge
  • The ability to think for oneself (individualism)
  • The ability to stand alone against the crowd (courage)
  • The ability to work persistently at a difficult task until it is finished (industriousness, self-discipline)
  • The ability to think through the consequences of one’s actions on others (respect for others)
  • The ability to consider the consequences of one’s actions on one’s well-being (self-respect)
  •  The recognition of higher ends than self-interest (honor)
  •  The ability to comport oneself appropriately in all situations (dignity)
  • The recognition that civilized society requires certain kinds of behavior by individuals and groups (good manners, civility)
  • The willingness to ask questions when puzzled (curiosity)
  • The readiness to dream about other worlds, other ways of doing things (imagination)
  •  The ability to believe that one can improve one’s life and the lives of others (optimism)
  • The ability to believe in principles larger than one’s own self-interest (idealism)
  •  The ability to speak well and write grammatically, using standard English

I invite readers to submit other 19th century skills that we should cultivate assiduously among the rising generation, on the belief that doing so will lead to happier lives and a better world.

(Ed’s Note:  Diane Ravitch wrote the above for the blog of Common Core, which advocates for comprehensive education in the liberal arts and sciences.  She is the organization’s co-chair.  It is published here as well, with her permission.)