I have been a supporter of Core Knowledge from its beginning. Indeed, as Don Hirsch will testify, I urged him to write the book that eventually became Cultural Literacy, after I heard him speak iat a conference in 1983. Like Don, I believe that children need a firm command of not just vocabulary and skills, but background knowledge that will help them understand new words and new ideas.
Over the years, I have come to understand that children need a strong, rich, coherent curriculum, filled with the amazing ideas, experiences, discoveries and people that awaken children’s passion to learn and keep on learning.
Will America’s achievement gap really be eliminated by testing kids more?
But I have discovered something else. It is very difficult for children to become deeply engaged in learning when they come to school hungry; when their eyesight is so poor that they can’t read; when their hearing is impaired but no one knows it; when their family moves from place to place because they don’t have a decent home; and when their family income is so uncertain that their home is filled with anxiety about meeting basic needs.
Continue reading ‘The Sharpton-Klein Education Reform Agenda’
A New York University study followed students entering the New York City public school system in the 1995-1996 school year and finds that about 40% of them had exited the system by 8th grade.
Student mobility is an underutilized, dead-bang argument for national content standards and curriculum. One out of four kids change schools three or more times over the course of their public school career. A GAO study showed one out of six children had attended three or more schools by the end of the 3rd grade. This high level of mobility has long been associated with lower student achievement and a higher likelihood of dropping out of school. While moving is disruptive for children in any scenario, continuity in curriculum would provide one less moving part, as it were.
Not surprisingly, it’s low-income and minority children whose education is disrupted by mobility the most. This is not news and the new NYU study reinforces it. The authors of the study are most concerned with continuous progression, grade-by-grade, associating “standard academic progress with higher performance on standardized tests.” (Huh? Do they mean to suggest that being held back caused lower performance? Isn’t low performance why they were held back?) Ignoring mobility is tantamount to writing off the academic outcomes of millions of kids.
Update: ASCD’s Educational Leadership has a story about student mobility online today (Thanks, Alexander Russo). It’s all about the emotional toll on teachers “I also thought of myself and the frustrations and heartbreak I had faced each year as students I cared about vanished,” writes Laura Hoeing, a 1st grade teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina. ”At what point would their frequent mobility discourage me from investing in relationships with my students and trying hard to teach them?”
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Good common sense from Eduwonkette on the the Bloomberg tenure track defeat. Reacting to some of the extreme blogging about it, she sounds a note of reason.
“If NYC wants to get serious about value-added, tests need to be given in September and June, and these tests need to be designed to measure growth, which NY state’s tests are not,” says EW.
I’ve resisted weighing in on this because as a former NYC teacher, I’m deeply ambivalent about it. Which is worse, no or phony accountability, or the nuance-averse, blunt instrument accountability of standardized tests? Frankly, neither one is remotely acceptable. I’m a strong supporter of muscular teacher accountability, but over my dead body would I accept being evaluated by a reading test administered short of the halfway mark in the school year. Neither would I want my efficacy gauged six months after my kids left my classroom.
A case could be made that under Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein, New York City has lived and died by standardized test scores. I can’t help but feel that this defeat is at some level the inevitable price they had to pay for their singular focus on testing.
Mike Antonucci, blogging at Intercepts points to a January 31 story by UFT staff writer Michael Hirsch, detailing a phone call from Hillary Clinton to the Delegate Assembly of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers right after the New Hampshire primary. The eyebrow raising quote: “‘Education and children are the causes of my life,’ [Clinton] said and promised that ‘we’re going to get rid of No Child Left Behind,’ a promise that brought delegates to their feet roaring approval.”
Antonucci points out that “get rid of No Child Left Behind” doesn’t exactly square with her campaign’s stated position, which promises to “use the pending reauthorization to expand support early childhood education, improve teacher training, lower class size, enhance parental involvement, eliminate environmental hazards in schools, and protect the programs that work for all of New York’s children” among other things.
I have avoided wandering into the crossfire about New York City’s plan to study the effectiveness of individual teachers based on test scores. Since I taught in a struggling South Bronx elementary school, I’m afraid that my reaction would be driven by my personal experience to an unhelpful degree. I prefer to bring light not heat to a discussion when possible.
But in reading the coverage and the ensuing debate, I’m left hoping there will be as much focus on effective curriculum and pedagogy in New York City as individual teachers. If the product is flawed, it’s hard to see why attention would focus exclusively on the person delivering it. The waiter is rarely blamed for the undercooked meal; the car salesman for the lemon. Before you say those are not comparable analogies to teaching, consider: As a teacher, I was required to use Everyday Math and the Teachers College Writer’s Workshop pedagogy (it’s not a curriculum) in my classroom. I found neither to be particularly effective for various reasons. Left to my own devices, I’m sure I could have devised more effective ways to help my students grow as writers and as mathematicians. In my mind, my students test results had at least as much to do with what they were being taught as how I was doing as a teacher. I certainly felt my effectiveness constrained by choices I could neither make nor influence.
If it were in my power, I would gladly make the following bargain: tell me what to teach, but let me decide how to teach it. If I don’t deliver the expected results, fire me. But if you insist on telling me what to teach and how to teach it, then the results are beyond my control.
Core Knowledge board member Diane Ravitch recently wondered how American education fell under the control of “Know Nothings from the world of business, law, and politics.” Here’s what I wonder: why they didn’t bring with them one of the business world’s most effective and powerful management practices: hire good people, give them the goal and get out of the way.
There were only two times in my 25-year professional life when I was explicitly told both what to do and how to do it. The first was when I was a 16-year old Taco Bell employee. The second was when I became a New York City school teacher.
NYC’s best education reporter, Elizabeth Green of the NY Sun, has a big piece this morning about anonymous blogger Eduwonkette, whose blog has become “a thorn in the side” of the New York City Department of Education.
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