Monthly Archives: January 2017

A Renewed Effort to Revitalize the Teaching of Civic Engagement in Our Schools

1/2/17 The Crucial Importance of Teaching  Civic Engagement in Our Schools

In response to the question from a woman after the Constitutional Convention asked Ben Franklin, Well Doctor what have we got, a republic or a monarchy? To which Franklin replied,  A republic, if you can keep it.

The survival of our democracy has always depended on a broad acceptance of democratic ideals and practices. That attachment is declining precipitously in Western democracies. In the United States a survey showed that 75% of those born in 1930 agreed that it was essential to live in a democracy. That number dropped to a shocking 30% for those born in 1980.   On a number of measures of democratic allegiance, Western democracies have fallen to a level similar to Venezuela and Poland before they succumbed to authoritarianism.

These findings are reported in a scary article in the New York Times by Amanda Taub entitled How Stable Are Democracies? “The Warning Signs are Flashing Red which reviews the research of Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa showing a marked decline in democratic attachments especially among millennials. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/world/americas/western-liberal-democracy.html?_r=0

According to Taub, Mounk and Foa use three dimensions to measure democratic attachment.

  • How important do citizens think it is for the country to remain democratic.
  • Public openness to non-democratic forms of government such as military rule:
  • Whether “antisystem parties and movements” — political parties and other major players whose core message is that the current system is illegitimate — were gaining support.

All these measures have declined substantially in our country.

Our founders were well aware that democracies were fragile and that each new generation needs to become attached to democratic ideals and behaviors. Public schools were created as one of the main methods of instilling  democratic engagement. That crucial mission has been shortchanged in the recent singular emphasis on job preparation.

Fortunately, there has been a growing effort in the country to re-establish the educational goal of teaching our children the essence of democratic ideas and practices. For example a California task force issued a report last year Re-Vitalizing K-12 Civic Learning in California; a Blueprint for Action. http://www.cde.ca.gov/eo/in/documents/cltffinalreport.pdf  Other states have also raised the priority of civic learning.

California has also just adopted a History/Social Science framework which incorporates much of what the California task force recommended. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/hs/cf/sbedrafthssfw.asp

California’s New History/Social Science/Civics framework

The California State Board of Education recently adopted the K-12 framework for History/Social Science. This document should provide a useful tool for the revitalization of the teaching of history, civics, geography, and economics in California’s schools. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/hs/cf/sbedrafthssfw.asp

During the past decade especially at the elementary grades history/social science/civics has been neglected in many districts. As the country’s founders and the original advocates for public education were well aware, the survival of our democracy depends in large part on developing attachment to our democratic ideals and practices as well as a historical perspective in each new generation. Since, for several years we as country and state have fallen short of our obligations to pass on these beliefs and supporting knowledge, the framework comes at a crucial time.

The framework contains several major shifts from previous documents. The document:

  • Envisions a much more active classroom. Instruction in each grade poses engaging questions to encourage deeper learning for students.
  • Places much greater emphasis on understanding our democracy and civic engagement throughout the grade levels—the knowledge of the basic principles of our democratic ideals, the struggles to honor those beliefs, the effort to incorporate democratic habits of discussion and debate into the classroom and school, and the involvement of students in projects such as Model UN and learning opportunities for civic participation.
  • Reflects the growing diversity of California’s students and the effort in this country to broaden the social, economic, and political inclusion all Americans.
  • Follows our California History/Social Science standards and is organized chronologically to cover US and California history, world history, and incorporates civic, economic, geographic, and environmental ideas and history in each grade.
  • Stresses the analytic skills of how to examine and evaluate primary and secondary sources, distinguish fact from fiction, conduct credible discussions, write essays, or undertake projects on pertinent topics, and perceive the historical connection to current events.
  • Stresses engagement of students through stories and exciting narrative, historical literature and biography, and engaging activities.

The framework is not a curriculum but is meant as specifications for courses of study for teachers, districts, parents and publishers. Instructional materials based on the framework will be reviewed this summer and available next fall. The hope is that these initiatives will support the effort to re-emphasize the teaching of history and civics and engage our students in these vital disciplines.

Revitalizing Civics Teaching

A couple of recent articles on civic engagement.

Arthur Cummins describes the woeful state of civic education. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arthur-camins/us-schools-dont-fail-at-test-performance_b_8570608.html

Also see the article in Education Week by Web Hutchins, Civics in the Common Core. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/08/07/37hutchins_ep.h32.html?qs=%22civics+in+the+core%22&intc=es

Heaven’s to Betsy (for those of you who remember to old-timey expression denoting shock)

1/2/17

A spate of articles criticizing Trump’s choice of Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education as hostile to public schools, a champion of ineffective and damaging market-based nostrums ,  an advocate of unlimited charter school expansion as the only hope way to improve education but a foe of charter school accountability,  and a supporter of vouchers including religious schools.

Jane Mayer author of Dark Money wrote a devastating short bio for the New Yorker, Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Big Donor Education Secretary    http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/betsy-devos-trumps-big-donor-education-secretary

The indomitable Jeff Bryant raises alarming questions stemming from DeVos’s track record in Michigan. http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/principles-to-guide-the-vetting-of-betsy-devos/

The New York Times posted an article, Free Market in Education; Economists Generally Don’t Buy It which rebuts DeVos’s strong devotion to market-based policies for public schools. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/upshot/free-market-for-education-economists-generally-dont-buy-it.html

Graham Vyse writing in The New Republic argues that to successfully resist Betsy DeVos’’s scary anti-public school policies  Democrats have to admit that the last eight years of Obama’s high-stakes, test-driven “reforms” have not worked and have caused considerable collateral damage as www.buildingbetterschools.com has been advocating. https://newrepublic.com/article/139071/can-democrats-save-public-schools-trump-devos

An editorial in the Salt Lake City Tribune debunks the market-based philosophy that Devos espouses http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/4756009-155/op-ed-trump-nominee-would-dismantle-American

An article by the respected Arthur Camins, Individual Choice Is No Substitute for Democracy http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arthur-camins/individual-choice-is-no-s_b_12084020.html?  To quote Camins:The problem with publicly-funded charter schools goes far beyond the lack of oversight, transparency, and accountability. Most fundamentally, they are an assault on democracy. Individual choice is no substitute for democratic governance. In addition, they drain limited resources from remaining public schools, exacerbate racial and socio-economic isolation, and undermine public investment in socially responsible solutions for all in favor of “saving” a select few.

Lindsay Wagner, an educational reporter, describes the devastation of public education in North Carolina from five years of conservative Republic rule (which many Trumpians want to replicate in the nation). She wrote three articles, Starving the Schools, Losing Its Luster: the Teaching Profession is Battered from All Sides, and Paving the Way to Privatization; Lawmakers Embrace Charters and Vouchers but Not Accountability. http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/NC-Policy-Watch-Altered-State-How-5-years-of-conservative-rule-have-redefined-north-carolina-december-2015.pdf  Betsy Devos lead the charge for similar destructive policies in Michigan.

In the same vein, Jeff Bryant blows the whistle on the damage caused to North Carolina public schools by out-of-state charter school management companies ripping off funds from public education. http://www.alternet.org/education/north-carolinas-charter-school-industry-slowly-gutting-public-education 

Mercedes Schneider reviews Truthout: The Great Unwinding of Public Education: Devos and Detroit by  Joseph Natoli which exposes the self-dealing and low-performance in Detroit’s charter schools. https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2016/12/25/truthout-the-great-unwinding-of-public-education-devos-and-detroit/

An article in Politico by Emma, Wermund, and Heflig,  DeVos’s Michigan School Experiment Gets Poor Grades http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/betsy-devos-michigan-school-experiment-232399 raises troubling questions about her educational record and philosophy.

A news report by Allie Gross, Out of Options: School Choice Gutted Detroit’s Public Schools. The Rest of the Country Is Next. https://news.vice.com/story/school-choice-detroit-betsy-devos

Mitchell Robinson penned Privatize, Monetize, Weaponize: How the DeVos Family Devoured Michigan’s Schools. http://linkis.com/www.eclectablog.com/ax03r

Julian Heilig, Five Questions You Should Ask About Secretary of Education Nominee Betsy DeVos https://cloakinginequity.com/2016/12/06/five-questions-you-should-ask-about-secretary-of-education-nominee-betsy-devos/

John Thompson, a teacher and blogger from Oklahoma warns of the dangers of Devos-like policies had on that state. Comparable efforts to those enacted in Michigan (as well as Indiana and Louisiana) caused considerable harm. https://dianeravitch.net/2016/12/11/john-thompson-we-cant-let-betsy-devos-destroy-our-public-schools/

Robert Mann writing in New-Orleans Times-Picayune warns of the damage caused by Gov. Jindal’s policies which are the same as those DeVos advocates.  His article is entitled, Thanks to Bobby Jindal, we know how disastrous Trump’s education policies could be. http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2016/12/thanks_to_bobby_jindal_we_know.html

Jennifer Berkshire in Culture Warrior Princess exposes DeVos’s long history with rabid anti-homosexual causes and fringes of the Christian right. http://edushyster.com/culture-warrior-princess/

Finally, a summary of the conservative voices opposing her nomination as a big-money lobbyist indifferent to popular sentiment. http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-conservative-argument-against-devos.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FORjvzd+%28CURMUDGUCATION%29

The Importance of a Systematic Build-Up of Discipline Knowledge in Improving Reading Comprehension

 1/2/17 The Importance of a Systematic Build-Up of Discipline Knowledge in Improving Reading Comprehension

A recent spate of research reports and a new book by E.D. Hirsch, Why Knowledge Matters underscore the key role of knowledge in reading comprehension and deeper understanding.

Hirsch says after decoding and fluency are learned, a steady buildup of content knowledge through reading, writing and discussion is the main element in improving reading comprehension. He also argues that teaching  skills such as problem solving, and creativity in the abstract are not generalizable and only work within each discipline. Teaching main idea, inferencing, and close reading don’t pay off after their introduction and Hirsch argues that teaching them should be minimized. Tests of these skills actually are testing how much knowledge is brought to the  task (assuming fluency). He recommends two week spurts of content subjects in literature, history, science, and the humanities which he calls domain immersion. The California Language Arts framework and adopted textbooks incorporated most of these ideas. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/rl/cf/

 

Catherine Snow is one of the leading reading researchers and is leading some of this extensive research on teaching literacy through active engagement with the disciplines. She reports:

The demands of literacy tasks change appreciably after students have mastered the basics of reading words accurately and with reasonable automaticity. At about age 10 reading becomes a tool for acquiring information, understanding a variety of points of view, critiquing positions, and reasoning. The results of international and US assessments show that many students who succeed at early reading tasks struggle with these new developmental challenges, focusing attention on the instructional needs of adolescent readers.  Commonly used approaches to comprehension instruction in the post-primary grades, such as teaching reading comprehension strategies, do not adequately respond to the multiple challenges adolescents face. One such challenge is the need to acquire discipline-specific ways of reading, writing, and thinking, often from teachers who are themselves insufficiently aware of how reading literature differs from reading science or history. We argue that appropriate attention in instruction to discipline-specific literacy practices, to maintaining an authentic purpose for assigned literacy tasks, and to the role of focused discussion as a central element in teaching comprehension would improve reading outcomes and would revolutionize current theories about the nature of reading comprehension. Goldman, S., and Snow, C.E. (in press). Adolescent Literacy: Development and Instruction. In A. Pollatsek and R. Treiman (Eds.), Handbook on Reading. Oxford University Press.

Politics and Policies–Good and Bad

 1/2/17

Build and Support Measures (and Resisting Test and Punish and Market-based Solutions) Propelled Massachusetts Public Schools to World-Class Status

Marc Tucker delineates how Massachusetts became a top performer by avoiding the specious “reform” package and concentrating on funding, improving the teacher force, strong curriculum, and community support. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2016/12/how_massachusetts_built_a_world-class_school_system.html?r=1502902393&utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=top_performers  This has been the argument throughout www.buildingbetterschools.com and specifically in http://www.buildingbetterschools.com/exemplary-models/

What Makes a Good Teacher

A study by Kraft and Blazar supports a multi-dimensional view of teacher proficiency. The best teachers in Math impart high levels of math performance, but also produce a well-behaved and happy class, and students who persevere. Unfortunately, according to the author’s research, even most of our successful teachers only excel on some of these dimensions. http://hechingerreport.org/new-study-shows-variety-in-teachers-influences-on-kids-futures-and-how-poorly-we-measure-that/

The Failure of State Takeovers

An informative graphic demonstrating the failure of state takeovers. http://www.reclaimourschools.org/sites/default/files/statetakeoversinfographic.pdf

Bad Testing Policy

Marc Tucker points out that no high-performing country or province tests all students every year. https://dianeravitch.net/2016/11/22/no-high-performing-nation-in-the-world-tests-every-student-every-year/

Bad Politics and Policies

Lindsay Wagner, an educational reporter, describes the devastation of public education in North Carolina from five years of conservative Republic rule (which many Trumpians want to replicate in the nation). She wrote three articles, Starving the Schools, Losing Its Luster: the Teaching Profession is Battered from All Sides, and Paving the Way to Privatization; Lawmakers Embrace Charters and Vouchers but Not Accountability. http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/NC-Policy-Watch-Altered-State-How-5-years-of-conservative-rule-have-redefined-north-carolina-december-2015.pdf  Betsy Devos lead the charge for similar destructive policies in Michigan.

In the same vein, Jeff Bryant blows the whistle on the damage caused to North Carolina public schools by out-of-state charter school management companies ripping off funds from public education. http://www.alternet.org/education/north-carolinas-charter-school-industry-slowly-gutting-public-education

Graham Vyse writing in The New Republic argues that to successfully resist Betsy DeVos’’s scary anti-public school policies  Democrats have to admit that the last eight years of Obama’s high-stakes, test-driven “reforms” have not worked and have caused considerable collateral damage as www.buildingbetterschools.com has been advocating. https://newrepublic.com/article/139071/can-democrats-save-public-schools-trump-devos

Latest international test results from PISA show our students made no progress after a decade of high-stakes test-driven reforms. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/12/03/14pisa.h33.html These findings support the argument made in this website that the conventional “reform” effort has not worked but has caused considerable collateral damage to our public schools and the teaching profession. http://www.buildingbetterschools.com/have-high-stakes-testing-and-privatization-been-effective-2/

Questions on the Efficacy of EdTech

According to Pasi Sahlberg, one of the driving forces behind the Finnish educational miracle, a growing body of research is starting to show detrimental effects of over-reliance on technology in schools. http://lit.blogg.gu.se/2016/12/05/big-tobacco-moment/

 

Public School Investment Outperforms Market-Based Strategies

A new report Privatization or Public Investment in Education authored by Frank Adamson and published by the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policies in Education (SCOPE) found investment in public schools significantly outperformed market-based strategies such as extensive charter schools and vouchers. schools. https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/publications/pubs/1456

This research supports claims made in this website. The report was offered further evidence reinforcing the SCOPE book published in April: Global Education Reform: How Privatization and Public Investment Influence Education Outcomes. To quote: [The book] contains a set of supporting infographics, videos, and research briefs, provides hard evidence supporting investment in public schools. Researchers thoroughly investigated the results of experiments with education in Chile, Sweden, and the U.S. and compared their educational outcomes with those of nearby countries with similar economic and social conditions: Cuba, Finland, and Canada (Ontario). At the national levels in Sweden, the U.S., and Chile, market, charter, or voucher systems are associated with greater disparities and lower student outcomes on international tests. https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/GlobalEdReform

Latest Charter School and Voucher Findings

1/2/17 Latest Charter School and Voucher Findings

Moody’s upgrades Massachusetts bond ratings after voters defeated a charter school expansion initiative. http://www.masslive.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/11/moodys_no_vote_on_charter_scho.html

Ten Reasons Why School Choice is No Choice in the Gadflyonthewallblog. https://gadflyonthewallblog.wordpress.com/2016/01/27/top-10-reasons-school-choice-is-no-choice/

An article by the respected Arthur Camins, Individual Choice Is No Substitute for Democracy http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arthur-camins/individual-choice-is-no-s_b_12084020.html?  To quote Camins: The problem with publicly-funded charter schools goes far beyond the lack of oversight, transparency, and accountability. Most fundamentally, they are an assault on democracy. Individual choice is no substitute for democratic governance. In addition, they drain limited resources from remaining public schools, exacerbate racial and socio-economic isolation, and undermine public investment in socially responsible solutions for all in favor of “saving” a select few.

 

Ed Doerr chronicles the history of voucher advocacy The Great School Voucher Fraud. Every time voucher measures have been placed on the ballot they have been defeated.  Most recently a measure sponsored by Betsy DeVos, Trump’s nominee for Education Secretary, in Michigan was handily defeated. https://dianeravitch.net/2016/12/03/edd-doerr-the-great-school-voucher-fraud/

Bruce Baker offers a report on the effects of charter expansion in urban districts and finds devastating fiscal effects in districts with large scale charter expansion and heavy declining enrollments. http://www.epi.org/publication/exploring-the-consequences-of-charter-school-expansion-in-u-s-cities/?mc_cid=c22114ad64&mc_eid=c2e5bac0f3

Privitization Tribulations

 1/2/17 Privatization Tribulations

Larry Cuban recounts the sad history of for-profit business ventures contracting with public schools to improve instruction. https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2016/11/16/doing-well-by-doing-good-for-profit-schools/

Diane Ravitch reviews two new books on the dangers of privatization: Sam Abrams new book Education and the Commercial Mindset which also shows the failure of privatization efforts and Mercedes K Schneider’s book Educational Choice: the End of Public Education? which warns of the dangers of wholesale charter expansion. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/08/when-public-goes-private-as-trump-wants-what-happens/

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