New Dallas superintendent Mike Miles warns the troops

Dallas ISD superintendent-designee Mike Miles held a press conference and sat down for an interview with the in-house television production group this week.

Miles starts the job in Dallas at the first of July, but he is working at Dallas ISD headquarters under a consulting contract until then.

Should the interview, below, be regarded as anything other than a warning to Dallas teachers and administrators?

Is this any way to rally the troops one depends on?

This interview with Dallas ISD Superintendent-designate Mike Miles occurred on May 22, 2012.

More, Related, and Tangential articles:

• Colorado’s Mike Miles named “sole finalist” for Dallas ISD Superintendent job (timpanogos.wordpress.com)
• Dallas ISD Names Lone Finalist For Superintendent Post (dfw.cbslocal.com)
• DISD Board Voting On Miles Thursday (dfw.cbslocal.com)
• New DISD Superintendent Details Restructuring Plan (dfw.cbslocal.com)
• New Dallas superintendent requires some to reapply (click2houston.com)
• Enter the New Dallas Superintendent (dianeravitch.net)
• DISD Restructuring Leadership Staff (dfw.cbslocal.com)
• Teachers outraged after athletes caught stealing (khou.com)
• New DISD Chief’s Contract Has Lots Of Incentives Based On Progress (dfw.cbslocal.com)

Some stuff teachers don’t need in education

Tip of the old scrub brush to Valerie Strauss, who blogs about education issues at The Washington Post site; she borrowed it from Daily Kos.

What teachers don’t need (but are getting anyway)

By Valerie Strauss

This was written by Paul Thomas, an associate professor of education at Furman University in South Carolina. A version of this first appeared on dailykos.com.

By Paul Thomas

Just days ago, I completed my 28th year as a teacher — 18 as a high school teacher of English followed by 10 years as a professor of education.

And I am excited about the coming semesters because, as I have felt every year of my teaching life, I know I failed in some ways this past academic year and I am confident I will be better in my next opportunities to teach.

As a teacher, I am far from finished — and I never will be.

I want to make a statement to the many and powerful leaders in education reform, all of whom have either no experience or expertise, or very little, as teachers:

I don’t need standards to teach. I need students.

If You Have Never Taught, You Simply Don’t Understand

Governors, policy wonks, and think tanks, I don’t need the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

Secretary Arne Duncan, I have no interest in racing to the top, when that means the top of the pile of my fellow teachers trampled by the policies you have created and promoted.

Bill Gates, I don’t want a dime of your billions; in fact, I am not even interested in what you do (I have always used Apple products) as long as you drop education as your hobby.

Michelle Rhee, I have no interest in my students having mouths forcibly shut by me. I am here to hear their open minds and mouths.

Pearson, Macmillan/McGraw-Hill, and every company seeking to sell me anything to support my implementing CCSS or preparing my students for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, state high-stakes tests, or the SAT, I am not interested in buying anything. No software, no hardware, no textbooks, no worksheets. Nothing.

Professional organizations and unions, I need you to stop racing for a place at the table with the reformers and corporations noted above, and instead, seek ways to support my autonomy and agency as a professional so that the autonomy and agency of the children in our schools can become the primary focus of universal public education for free people.

And, finally, to anyone who thinks you know what I should teach and how, please seek a place at the front of a classroom filled with other people’s children, teach for a few years, and then let’s get together and talk. I am eager to be collegial in the pursuit of community as a key part of teaching and learning.

Then What?

Becoming and being a teacher is a constant state of becoming. A teacher must be always a student and scholar of her/his field(s), her/his pedagogy, and her/his students.

What the people and groups identified above seem not to understand is that for my eighteen years of teaching high school English, I probably taught about 2,000 students; thus, I taught about 2,000 different classes. And not a single measurable outcome of any of those students predicts much of anything about my effectiveness or if I’ll succeed with any future student. Some of the students who appear successful did so in spite of my failures. Some of the students who appear to have failed were provided my very best as a teacher. Almost all of the good and bad I have created as a teacher are not measurable or apparent in manageable ways.

I wasn’t concerned about meeting anyone’s standards or preparing any student for a test or making sure any student was prepared for the next grade, college, or the workforce.

And I never will be.

Instead of standards, testing, competition, labeling, ranking, and sorting (all the cancerous elements of traditional schooling and the current accountability era), as a teacher, I need to offer my students authentic learning opportunities in which they produce artifacts of their understanding and expertise. My students need from me my authoritative feedback to those authentic artifacts.

I have no interest in competing with my fellow teachers for whose students score highest on tests so I can earn more money than my colleagues. I don’t, either, want to join forces with my in-school colleagues to outperform other schools in order to compete for their customers. I couldn’t care less how my state’s schools compare with other states or how U.S. schools compare on international tests.

Absolutely none of that matters.

While not unique to Howard Gardner, we have a very clear idea of what it is teachers should do in the pursuit of learning. Gardner’s “The Disciplined Mind” examines a conception of education not distracted by accountability.

Teaching and learning must be primarily collaborative, a community of learners.

The goals of learning must be the broad and clear — although always evolving — defining qualities of the fields of knowledge we honor in academia.

Every history course, for example, would pursue, What does it mean to be a historian? Every science class, What does it mean to be a scientist? Every writing class, What does it mean to be a writer?

Teaching and learning are the collaborative pursuit of questions. Anything else is indoctrination, dehumanizing, and antithetical to democratic ideals and human agency.

Humans never will—and never should—learn the same box of knowledge. Humans never will—and never should—learn in linear, sequential ways.

And there is no need for any of that anyway as long as we seek to be a community instead of barbaric individuals committed to the conquest of goods at the expense of others.

I don’t need standards to teach. I need students.

(My becoming a teacher can be traced directly to the wonderful and rich influence of my mother, and that influence is inextricable from the powerful and enduring influence of my father.)

-0-

I don’t expect anyone to agree 100% with Prof. Thomas’s views — but anyone concerned about education, about job training, about their children, or about our nation, will listen.

Would you even know a good teacher, if she pushed your kid to great achievement?

Yes, that’s Rod Serling‘s shadow, and that’s the “Twilight Zone” music you hear.

Consider the curious case of Carolyn Abbott in New York City (links added):

Carolyn Abbott was, in one respect, a victim of her own success. After a year in her classroom, her seventh-grade students scored at the 98th percentile of New York City students on the 2009 state test. As eighth-graders, they were predicted to score at the 97th percentile on the 2010 state test. However, their actual performance was at the 89th percentile of students across the city. That shortfall—the difference between the 97th percentile and the 89th percentile—placed Abbott near the very bottom of the 1,300 eighth-grade mathematics teachers in New York City.

How could this happen? Anderson is an unusual school, as the students are often several years ahead of their nominal grade level. The material covered on the state eighth-grade math exam is taught in the fifth or sixth grade at Anderson. “I don’t teach the curriculum they’re being tested on,” Abbott explained. “It feels like I’m being graded on somebody else’s work.”

The math that she teaches is more advanced, culminating in high-school level algebra and a different and more challenging test, New York State’s Regents exam in Integrated Algebra. To receive a high school diploma in the state of New York, students must demonstrate mastery of the New York State learning standards in mathematics by receiving a score of 65 or higher on the Regents exam. In 2010-11, nearly 300,000 students across the state of New York took the Integrated Algebra Regents exam; most of the 73 percent who passed the exam with a score of 65 or higher were tenth-graders.

Because student performance on the state ELA and math tests is used to calculate scores on the Teacher Data Reports, the tests are high-stakes for teachers; and because New York City uses a similar statistical strategy to rank schools, they are high-stakes for schools as well. But the tests are not high-stakes for the eighth-graders at Anderson.

By the time they take the eighth-grade tests in the spring of the year, they already know which high school they will be attending, and their scores on the test have no consequences. “The eighth-graders don’t care; they rush through the exam, and they don’t check their work,” Abbott said. “The test has no effect on them. I can’t make an argument that it counts for kids. The seventh-graders, they care a bit more.”

The state tests, she believes, are poorly equipped to assess real mathematical knowledge, especially for high-performing students. “They’re so basic; they ask you to explain things that are obvious if you’re three years ahead,” she says. The Anderson students “understand it at a different level. They want to explain with equations, not words.” But the scoring of the free-response items on the tests emphasizes a formulaic response, with the scoring instructions often looking for a single keyword in a response to garner credit.

“They’re not accepting answers that are mathematically correct,” Abbott notes, “and accepting answers that aren’t mathematically correct.” And the multiple-choice questions?  “Multiple-choice questions don’t test thinking,” she declares. Knowing how to answer them is “just an art.”

Ms. Abbott?  Oh, yes.  She is ranked the worst math teacher in New York City.

Read more of this fascinating, troubling case* at Aaron Palas’s blog at the Hechinger Report.

_____________

* Working hard to avoid using the term “colossal cluster f***.”

Related articles

• The Worst 8th Grade Math Teacher in NYC? (dianeravitch.net)
• Cram. Memorize. Regurgitate. Forget. (everydaysociologyblog.com)
• In New York Teacher Ratings, Good Test Scores Aren’t Always Good Enough (nytimes.com)

One more time: Recognizing bogus history

2012 is an election year, a time when we make history together as a nation.  Potential turning points in history often get tarred with false interpretations of history to sway an election, or worse, a completely false recounting of history.  Especially in campaigns, we need to beware false claims of history, lest we be like the ignorants George Santayana warned about, doomed to repeat errors of history they do not know or understand.  How to tell that a purported piece of history is bogus?  This is mostly a repeat of a post that first appeared at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub six years ago.

Recognizing bogus history, 1

Robert Park provides a short e-mail newsletter every Friday, covering news in the world of physics. It’s called “What’s New.” Park makes an art of smoking out bogus science and frauds people try to perpetrate in the name of science, or for money. He wrote an opinion column for the Chronicle of Higher Education [now from Quack Watch; CHE put it behind a paywall] published January 31, 2003, in which he listed the “7 warning signs of bogus science.”

Please go read Park’s entire essay, it’s good.

And it got me thinking about whether there are similar warning signs for bogus history? Are there clues that a biography of Howard Hughes is false that should pop out at any disinterested observer? Are there clues that the claimed quote from James Madison saying the U.S. government is founded on the Ten Commandments is pure buncombe? Should Oliver Stone have been able to to more readily separate fact from fantasy about the Kennedy assassination (assuming he wasn’t just going for the dramatic elements)? Can we generalize for such hoaxes, to inoculate ourselves and our history texts against error?

Perhaps some of the detection methods Park suggests would work for history. He wrote his opinion piece after the Supreme Court’s decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., in which the Court laid out some rules lower courts should use to smoke out and eliminate false science. As Park described it, “The case involved Bendectin, the only morning-sickness medication ever approved by the Food and Drug Administration. It had been used by millions of women, and more than 30 published studies had found no evidence that it caused birth defects. Yet eight so-called experts were willing to testify, in exchange for a fee from the Daubert family, that Bendectin might indeed cause birth defects.” The Court said lower courts must act as gatekeepers against science buncombe — a difficult task for some judges who, in their training as attorneys, often spent little time studying science.

Some of the Daubert reasoning surfaced in another case recently, the opinion in Pennsylvania district federal court in which Federal District Judge John Jones struck down a school board’s order that intelligent design be introduced to high school biology students, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District.

Can we generalize to history, too? I’m going to try, below the fold.

Here are Park’s seven warning signs, boiled down:

Park wrote:

Justice Stephen G. Breyer encouraged trial judges to appoint independent experts to help them. He noted that courts can turn to scientific organizations, like the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to identify neutral experts who could preview questionable scientific testimony and advise a judge on whether a jury should be exposed to it. Judges are still concerned about meeting their responsibilities under the Daubert decision, and a group of them asked me how to recognize questionable scientific claims. What are the warning signs?

I have identified seven indicators that a scientific claim lies well outside the bounds of rational scientific discourse. Of course, they are only warning signs — even a claim with several of the signs could be legitimate. [I have cut out the explanations. — E.D.]

1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.
2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.
3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.
4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal.
5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries.
6. The discoverer has worked in isolation.
7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.

Voodoo history

Here, with thanks to Robert Park, is what I propose for the warning signs for bogus history, for voodoo history:

1. The author pitches the claim directly to the media or to organizations of non-historians, sometimes for pay.
2. The author says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.  Bogus history relies more on invective than investigation; anyone with an opposing view is an “idiot,” or evil.
   
3. The sources that verify the new interpretation of history are obscure, or unavailable; if they involve a famous person, the sources are not those usually relied on by historians.
4. Evidence for the history is anecdotal.
5. The author says a belief is credible because it has endured for some time, or because many people believe it to be true.
6. The author has worked in isolation, and fails to incorporate or explain other, mainstream versions of the history of the incident, and especially the author fails to explain why they are in error.
   
7. The author must propose a new interpretation of history to explain an observation.

Any history account that shows one or more of those warning signs should be viewed skeptically.

In another post, I’ll flesh out the reasoning behind why they are warning signs.

Infographics creation by students, as a tool of learning

Infographic-a-Day describes this TEDx video (I added the links):

Perhaps one of the bigest and most listened to advocates of using infographics and data vis in the classroom is Diana Laufinberg, from The Science Leadership Academy. Diana, a History teacher, is a long time user of geographic information systems (GIS). She has recently, however, started helping her students to create their own infographics from complex issues that are part of her course of study and/or part of current events.

Here is a video of Diana’s talk at a recent TEDx…

Tip of the old scrub brush to David Warlick at 2¢ Worth.

Related articles

• Especially see this article at the New York Times‘ Learning Network, about the work of Diana Laufinberg, aimed at teachers with a nod to how to do it
• Easily Create Infographics with Easel.ly (freetech4teachers.com)
• An Interesting Infographic on Prohibition (freetech4teachers.com)
• Infographics- Visual Displays of Information (showmemotech.wordpress.com)
• Best Practices for Infographics (text100.com)
• Infographics (ccdc12.wordpress.com)
• India at a Glance : My First Infographics (shantitda.wordpress.com)
• The Pinterest (P)infographic (edelman.com.au)

Now I Understand Why Bill Gates Didn't Want The Value-Added Data Made Public

Reblogged from GFBrandenburg's Blog:

It all makes sense now.

At first I was a bit surprised that Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee were opposed to publicizing the value-added data from New York City and other cities.

Could they be experiencing twinges of a bad conscience?

No way.

That’s not it. Nor do these educational Deformers think that value-added mysticism is nonsense. They think it’s wonderful and that teachers’ ability to retain their jobs and earn bonuses or warnings should largely depend on it.

Read more… 338 more words

You wanted evidence that Michelle Rhee's plans in Washington, D.C., were not coming to fruition, that the entire scheme was just one more exercise in "the daily flogging of teachers will continue until morale improves?" G. F. Brandenburg ran the numbers. It isn't pretty. Click the top line, which should be highlighted in your browser, to see the original post; or click here. See more, next post.

Duncanville district brags on its teachers

Take a look at this:

Oh, there are complaints, but most of the teachers I know in Duncanville Independent School District (ISD) like the district and are happy to be there. I know a lot of them, since our two boys both attended Duncanville schools kindergarten to graduation, and we live in the district.

Teachers, does your district put you or your colleagues front and center, like Duncanville did with Angela Banks?  Would it improve morale if they did?

Administrators, does your district put teachers front and center like Duncanville ISD did with Angela Banks?  Do you wonder why you have morale issues?

Tip of the old scrub brush to Caressa Harvey Roberts, another great teacher in Duncanville.

Bored in class? Do some math, for fun.

This is a good video that all math teachers ought to see (heck, I can figure out how to use it as a bell ringer in social studies, I think).

I had to mention it, just because of Michael Tobis’s wonderful headline at Planet 3.0:  “Bored in class?  Do some math instead.”

I confess to being caught doing math instead, in English, in history — and in art we often made mathematical games to create patterns.  From the stuff I see on walls in schools, that’s still popular.

Some time ago I ordered a poster from Max Temkin, the brilliant poster propagandist/artist.  It says that the universe is easy to understand if you speak its language, and that language is mathematics.  True.

Also true that in most of the disciplines that work into classes we call social studies, we do not have the ability to discern the cool patterns like Fibonacci numbers in pine cones, pineapples and sunflower blossoms.  People look for those pattersn in history anyway, and that poses a key problem to policy makers.  People want to see a pattern, expect to see a pattern, and historians cannot meet that expectation, other than quoting Santayana.

Maybe one of my students will be the one who discerns a key pattern.  It’ll be one of the slackers, if it happens.

“John Brown’s Body” becoming “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”: Managing expectations of a nation during a civil war

Our textbooks and curriculum guides too often fail to make clear the links between the bloody conflicts in the Kansas Territory and the Civil War, between the conflicts engaged in by men like John Brown in Kansas, and later at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, and the conflicts of the Civil War.

We might make the history more vivid and clear with the use of Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” an epic war song based closely on a folk tune favored by Union troops of the time, conscripted specifically because of that affinity by Howe to serve the greater action of repurposing the war from merely saving the Union to freeing people from bondage.  It’s a study in propaganda earlier than we usually think of it.

Prof. R. Blakeslee Gilpin’s essay explaining those links, and exposing the substantial and usually hidden role Julia Ward Howe’s husband played in Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, appears in the New York Times’s coverage of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.  As identified at the NYT website, Gilpin is a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of South Carolina, and the author of a book on the issue, John Brown Still Lives!: America’s Long Reckoning With Violence, Equality, and Change.

An early lyric sheet for "Battle Hymn of the Republic," by Julia Ward Howe, Library of Congress via New York Times

Most of my students claim not to know the song, “John Brown’s Body,” and an astonishing number of the students say they don’t know “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”  It’s a chance to bore them — or instruct them, if the planets and stars align — using a bit of music (a teacher should be able to find a copy of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s version of the “The Battle Hymn” with little difficulty; it appears in the hymnals of most Protestant sects, so you can get a copy of the lyrics; you’ll have to do a search to find a good copy of  “John Brown’s Body,” though; I’ve not found one I like to use in class).

It might be a short lesson, an adjunct to a lesson, or a project for a student with some choir training.

Gilpin wrote:

Even if Howe’s song spoke to a different understanding of the war, her efforts to transform “John Brown’s Body” into a national patriotic text meant that, much like Brown’s afterlife, people would end up using and abusing “Battle Hymn” as they saw fit. What Howe observed in that Union camp outside of Washington in 1861 was just the beginning of a war of clashing agendas and endlessly obscured meanings. To be sure, those north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line knew that the developing war was being fought over slavery – its brutal realities, its political volatility and especially its uncertain future – but even in its opening months, commentary about the war was already cloaked in the bland language of preserving the Union or defending states’ rights. Assessing the war itself, Howe later wrote that “its cruel fangs fastened upon the very heart of Boston and took from us our best and bravest.”

For Howe and generations of Americans, the cruelty of war demanded a providential overseer. Despite her urge to celebrate noble-hearted men like Brown, “Battle Hymn” helped to take responsibility for the Civil War out of the brutal and clumsy hands of ordinary mortals. To be sure, Brown his death would help to make his nation holy and especially to make all men free, but his radical extremism was frightening to most Americans. Soon enough, the Civil War would be transformed by songs like Howe’s into a conflict of necessity and destiny – a providential trial by fire. That narrative, of a harrowing but essential national adolescence, would eventually be at the expense of those Brown had died for, and whose fate the war was being fought to settle.

More links and a couple of original documents can be found at the NYT site — I would encourage all U.S. history teachers to subscribe to the paper’s coverage of the sesquicentennial of the war.

Daily Floggings of Teachers Dept.: Utah

Sign on the door of the mishipmen’s mess:  “The daily floggings will continue until morale improves.”

In an effort to raise teacher morale to a level at least as high as that of the British Navy back in the day when everyday brought “flog and grog” — though, admittedly, we work in education today without the grog — policy makers continue in their efforts to blame teachers for every problem of education, and they pledge to “hold teachers accountable” regardless the issue.

In November 16th’s Deseret News from Salt Lake City:

Utah senator says teacher morale is low and lawmakers need to address teacher perceptions

SALT LAKE CITY — A freshman state senator, who held a series of tell-all meetings with Utah school teachers, relayed to his colleagues Wednesday a common theme among public educators: Teacher morale is low.

“They are discouraging new teachers from entering the profession. … They feel classroom size is an issue. … They feel that they don’t have the professional development support they need,” said Sen. Aaron Osmond, R-South Jordan, at an Education Interim Committee meeting. “That’s what they feel. I’m not validating it or invalidating it. I’m communicating it to this group.

Osmond went to teachers to get feedback on his controversial proposal that would make it easier to fire teachers. His legislation would dismantle current state orderly termination laws that require districts to have a specific, documented cause when firing teachers and allow teachers a chance for recourse. The proposal would also give more control to local districts so they can develop termination policies based on what works for them and institute one- to five-year contracts at the end of which schools could let teachers go without cause.

Osmond held four meetings where public school educators could give him a piece of their mind. Hundreds of teachers attended.

“Our public employees feel that there is a major morale problem in education,” he said.

No kidding?

Teach for America: Savior of Dallas schools?

Lead editorial in today’s Dallas Morning News (page 14A):

Retaining Teachers

DISD should redouble efforts to support Teach for America recruits

In 2009, the Dallas Independent School District welcomed 80 Teach for America teachers to its campuses. These newly minted teachers were part of a competitive program that sends top college graduates to work in urban and rural public schools.

Two years later, only 45 teachers from that inaugural class remain in the district.

Where did the others go? DISD can’t say for sure.

Teach for America teachers make a two-year commitment. So, after fulfilling that obligation, they’re free to pursue other teaching opportunities, graduate school or entirely different careers.

Losing 43 percent of the first TFA class is somewhat troubling — particularly because that’s higher than the program’s national attrition rate in high-poverty schools. But that fact alone doesn’t mean that DISD and Teach for America aren’t a good fit.

One number doesn’t tell the whole story, and DISD would benefit from additional data as subsequent TFA classes complete their two-year stints. It would be useful for the district and Teach for America to know more about why these teachers are leaving and whether they are seeking out teaching jobs in other districts.

Still, the attrition rate raises important questions about what more DISD can do to support these young teachers — and encourage them to stay.

TFA is supplying the Dallas school district with teachers who were high achievers and leaders on their college campuses. And while they’re new to teaching, many are distinguishing themselves quickly. In 2010, DISD reported that the district’s TFA teachers were outperforming their peers in educating students in reading and math.

Even Teach for America’s critics, who often complain that TFA corps members don’t stay long enough to make a difference, would agree that these teachers will become even more effective with additional years of experience.

With all this in mind, DISD should refocus its efforts to ensure that TFA teachers who spend two years at a Dallas public school consider extending their stay. While this is still a relatively new program in DISD, the early numbers suggest that the district has not been a particularly welcoming place.

DISD should bolster its mentoring efforts and consider what other strategies could be employed to help TFA teachers succeed — and feel motivated to continue teaching.

There’s no doubt that some TFA corps members enter the program planning to teach only two years before embarking on another career. But Teach for America’s hope is that some will be inspired to continue in education.

Other districts with similar challenges have had more success retaining TFA corps members.

DISD should seize this opportunity to mentor and develop a unique group of teachers — instead of simply watching them walk out the door.

I work alongside several Teach for America people — to a person, great colleagues.  Some of them faced the same barriers to entry I did — Dallas was unhappy with my recommendations, for example, and held out my hiring for a few weeks because they didn’t want to take the recommendation of the chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee which deals with education policy, for whom I worked for a decade, but instead insisted I get a teacher  or someone from a local education establishment to write the letter (I got a person who assigned substitutes in a local district to comment — we knew each other on the phone).  Why they wouldn’t take the word of someone who knows me over someone in education, I don’t know — but there is a moral in that morass, somewhere.

Dallas ISD is generally not a teacher-friendly place these days.  After two rounds of layoffs, we have all been informed clearly that we are all on the maybe-needs-firing line.  TFA teachers can stay above that only partly — the poisonous atmosphere infects all faculty meetings and department tete-a-tetes.

There is a big difference between TFA teachers and others:  TFA is tough (sometimes stupidly too tough), but they let every one of their people know that each one is valuable, and expected to do great things.

Dallas ISD tried to do that once.  We had a kid give a great motivational speech at the fall welcome-back-teachers ball.

Then the district announced it had goofed, and a few hundred teachers would have to go.  Then word got out that the mother of the kid who gave the speech — a teacher — was on the chopping block.  Then word got out that the whole program the kid was in, was on the chopping block. Yeah, we believe in you, kid — we just don’t believe in education any more.

Is TFA the answer to Dallas’s woes?  What’s your view?  I’m still thinking about an appropriate, and informative response.

Also see this at the Dallas Morning News site:

Sidebar:

What is Teach for America?

Teach for America is an organization that works to recruit high-achieving college graduates for two-year teaching stints in urban and rural public schools. The hope is that many will continue to work in the field of education or an area that impacts student achievement.

The selection process is competitive — only 11 percent of this year’s 48,000 applicants were accepted.

The chart shows the number of Teach for America teachers in DISD, broken down by the school year they arrived. Many of those who started in 2009-10, the inaugural year in DISD, left after serving their two-year commitment.

School year	TFA members received	In DISD as of Sept. 26
2009-10	80	45
2010-11	107	102
2011-12	45	45
Total	232	192

SOURCES: Dallas ISD; Dallas Morning News research

CNN special on “fixing” education in the U.S.

I get press releases in e-mail:

FIXING EDUCATION is Focus of New “Restoring the American Dream” FAREED ZAKARIA GPS Primetime Special

Restoring the American Dream – FIXING EDUCATION Debuts Sunday at 8:00pm ET and PT

TIME Magazine Companion Story “When Will We Learn?” Hits Newsstands Friday

American primary and secondary education were once envied by much of the world, but over the last few decades U.S. students have fallen behind – while students in other countries have benefitted from improvements to their educational systems.  CNN and TIME magazine’s Fareed Zakaria interviews innovative and creative leaders working on solutions to fix what ails American education in his November primetime special, Restoring the American Dream – FIXING EDUCATION, on Sunday, Nov. 6 at 8:00pm & 11:00pm ET & PT, and for a companion TIME magazine cover article, “When Will We Learn?” that hits newsstands Friday.

Time Magazine cover for November 4, 2011, featuring Fareed Zakaria's story on education reform

PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, ranks 15-year-olds for basic skills achievement in 65 industrialized nations.  In the latest PISA rankings, the U.S. ranks 15th in reading, 23rd in math, and 31st in science.  Zakaria guides viewers through tours of what is working in education in countries with high rankings – to South Korea where students have more classroom time; and Finland , where professionalization of the teacher workforce has improved educators – in order to mine ideas for what could put U.S. education back on the right track.

Featured in the special are:

• ·Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates, whose foundation has donated $5 billion dollars to schools, libraries, and scholarships tells Zakaria that the single most important determinant in the quality of a student’s education is the teacher.  The Gates Foundation is the leading source of private money for education in the U.S. .
• ·Salman Khan,< founder of the Khan Academy , an educational organization that provides free, self-paced tutorials and student assessments online.  Khan’s famous podcasts have delivered more than 83 million free lessons in math, science and other topics, and he tells Zakaria that customizing education can improve learning through leveraging how students learn differently.  He thinks it would not be that difficult to teach all American students this way.
  • NYU Professor, former Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education, and author (The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, 2010) Diane Ravitch has spent a lifetime in education policy analysis and has seen education reforms come and go – and harm students.  Ravitch supports a rigorous national curriculum and tells Zakaria that standardized testing, charter schools, and modeling public education after business models have politicized American education and degraded schools for a generation.
  • ·Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of D.C. Public Schools, in Washington, now leads StudentsFirst, a nonprofit aimed at education reform through, among other measures, ending teacher tenure and supporting charter school alternatives to traditional public schools.

A FAREED ZAKARIA GPS Special:Restoring the American Dream – FIXING EDUCATION – debuts Sunday, Nov. 6 at 8:00p.m. and 11:00p.m. ET/PT on CNN/U.S.  It will replay on Saturday, Nov. 12 at 8:00p.m. and 11:00p.m. ET/PT on CNN/U.S.  Preview available here: Fareed Zakaria and Brooke Baldwin discuss what makes a great teacher.

Fareed Zakaria’s TIME magazine cover story, When Will We Learn? hits newsstands Friday, Nov. 4.

So the Time story is already out (home delivery has already occurred in many cases).

If you’re interested in this special, you may want to record it yourself — CNN tells me no DVD will be available.

I have AT&T cable, so we don’t get CNN, which is reserved for the high-cost, not-teachers-salary package.  Somebody tell me how it goes.

Zakaria thinks solidly and well on a number of topics, especially where comparison with foreign nations is made.  Ravitch was struck with an epiphany on testing and the No Child Left Behind Act over a year ago, as described in the press release.  She came to see that testing sucks rigor out of classrooms, instead of instilling rigor as we discussed 30 years ago in the education reform movement.

What in the world can Michelle Rhee add to this discussion?  From the press release it looks a lot like the “balance” fallacy makes the show suffer:  Journalists think they need a contrasting view, so when Euclid tells a writer that 2+2=4, the journalist seeks out others who have different opinions, and prints those opinions no matter how stupid, insipid, or dangerous they may be.

Let us keep hope alive.

See also at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub:

• “Ravitch calls the issue:  Will public education survive?

2nd day of school in Dallas: Student asks, “Do you believe in me?”

It’s the second day of classes here in the Dallas Independent School District (Dallas ISD, or DISD).  Already we experience great trials from the loss of funding across the board in Texas education, as Gov. Rick Perry encouraged the state legislature to cut more than $4 billion from schools.  Cuts will be larger next fall.

At Molina High School we have about 25% more students, with 10% fewer teachers.  Classes strain the seams of the school — classrooms are crowded, desks and chairs are in short supply.  Computers promised for teachers, supposed to be delivered eight months ago, still are not delivered.  Printers, printing supplies, and paper, stand in conservation mode.  There are so few technical support people that those few new computers delivered often are not set up to operate yet.

Teachers need encouragement.  Here’s a bit of it.

What follows is mostly encore post, from 2008.

_____________

Taylor Mali is one of my usual suspects for inspiring teachers. He does a great job, with just a tinge of profanity (appropriately placed, many teachers argue – if they ask for it, you have to give it to them).

This year’s inspiration for Dallas teachers comes from Dalton Sherman, a fifth grader at Charles Rice Learning Center. Here’s a YouTube video of the presentation about 20,000 of us watched last Wednesday, a small point that redeemed the annual “convocation” exercise, for 2008:

Sherman’s presentation rescued what had been shaping up as another day of rah-rah imprecations to teachers who badly wanted, and in my case needed, to be spending time putting classrooms together.

(By the way, at the start of his presentation, you can see several people leap to their feet in the first row — Mom, Dad, and older brother. Nice built-in cheering section.)

Staff at DISD headquarters put the speech together for Dalton to memorize, and he worked over the summer to get it down. This background is wonderfully encouraging.

First, it makes a statement that DISD officials learn from mistakes. Last year the keynote was given by a speaker out of central casting’s “classic motivational speaker” reserves. As one teacher described it to me before the fete last Wednesday, “It was a real beating.”

Second, DISD’s planning ahead to pull this off suggests someone is looking a little bit down the road. This was a four or five month exercise for a less-than-10 minute presentation. It’s nice to know someone’s looking ahead at all.

Third, the cynical teachers gave Dalton Sherman a warm standing ovation. That it was delivered by a 10-year-old kids from DISD made a strong symbol. But the content was what hooked the teachers. Superintendent Michael Hinojosa provided a death-by-PowerPoint presentation leading up to the speech, one that was probably not designed solely as contrasting lead in. In other words, Dalton Sherman’s speech demonstrated as nothing else the district has done lately that someone downtown understands that the teachers count, the foot soldiers in our war on ignorance and jihad for progress.

The kids came back Monday, bless ‘em. School’s in session, to anyone paying attention.

Resources:

• Dallas Morning News story on Sherman and his methods
• Dallas Morning News version of the video (not squashed – better quality on some computers)
• Full text, as provided in an opposite-editorial page piece in the Dallas Morning News

Quote of the moment: Matt Damon, teachers don’t teach just for the money

Matt Damon is now the heartthrob of teachers everywhere — at the Save Our Schools Rally in Washington, a misguided self-described libertarian asked Damon why we shouldn’t fire more teachers  . . .

Friends of science and evolution: Testify next week in the Texas textbook process?

I get important e-mail from the Texas Freedom Network; they’re asking for help next week to fight creationism and other forms of buncombe popular in Texas:

Science and the SBOE: One Week to Go

Next week, the Texas State Board of Education will take a critical vote on science in our public schools. We need people like you to make sure the vote is in favor of sound, well-established science.

Up for board consideration are science instructional materials submitted by a number of publishers and vendors who want their product used in Texas classrooms. Even before the board meets, far-right groups have been hard at work trying to ensure materials approved by the board attack and diminish evolutionary science and include the junk science of “intelligent design”/creationism.

The attacks include one from a little-know firm out of New Mexico, International Databases, which submitted instructional materials rife with creationist propaganda.

It gets worse. Far-right SBOE members last month appointed creationists with questionable scientific credentials to teams tasked with reviewing the materials and making recommendations to the board.

And new board chair Barbara Cargill upped the stakes when in a speech just last week she framed the debate over science as a “spiritual battle.”

The board will hold just ONE public hearing on the science materials. Your participation is crucial.

It is critical that you act now by clicking here to express your interest in testifying before the board on July 21.

Please note: The deadline to sign up to testify is 5 p.m. Monday.

We must insist that the SBOE keep junk science – including “intelligent design”/creationism – out of our children’s classrooms. The board must approve only instructional materials that are accurate, that are in line with sound and well-established science, and that will prepare Texas children to succeed in college and the jobs of the 21st century.

Texas Freedom Network advances a mainstream agenda of religious freedom and individual liberties to counter the radical right. www.tfn.org | www.tfninsider.org | General: tfn@tfn.org

Tell a friend to subscribe to TFN News Clips, Alerts or Rapid Response Teams. Subscribers may choose the issue areas that interest them. To change your TFN subscription preferences – or to unsubscribe – click here.

Copyright 2010, Texas Freedom Network

Trying to carve out time here.  Can you help?

Hearings will be most interesting.  Support for the Texas State Board of Education actually comes, often, from the Texas Education Agency (TEA).  TEA this week laid off just under 200 workers, to deal with the 36% budget chopping done to the agency by the Texas Lege.  Word comes this week that curriculum directors at TEA were let go, including the director of science curriculum.

It’s rather like the first 20 weeks of World War II in the Pacific, with the aggressors advancing on almost all fronts against science.  When is our Battle of Midway?

Information, resources: 

• Texas Citizens for Science; TCS on Facebook
• Teach Them Science
• National Center for Science Education (NCSE)
• National Science Foundation (NSF)
• National Association of Biology Teachers