2021 Medley #7 – Playing catch up

Teacher shortage, Punishing schools, Privatization, Facts, Rationality

Apparently, retirement is needed so there’s enough time to go to all the doctor appointments you’re going to need as you age.

Things have been quiet on this blog lately…for a variety of reasons. Now that things are a bit better I have a backlog of unposted Medley entries. To make it a bit easier, I’ll limit my own comments to one, or sometimes two, sentences max (Warning…prepare yourself for compound and run-on sentences)…

THE TEACHER SHORTAGE HASN’T GONE AWAY

‘Perfect storm’ of events causing teacher shortage crisis in Michigan

Who would have guessed that demonizing, overworking, reducing job security, and underpaying an entire profession of people would make that profession unattractive…leading to a shortage of teachers nationwide. Legislatures in large part caused the problem, and are now scrambling to fill classrooms with anyone, even those who are unqualified.

Carol Baaki-Diglio, Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources Oak Park Schools, says districts across the state are seeing an increase in retirements. She says it is part of a trend schools have seen for the past decade, that has been made worse by the pandemic creating more work, stress, and health fears.

“Our staff has also experienced loss. Loss of parents. Loss of colleagues,” said Baaki-Diglio.

She says we are seeing the perfect storm for a crisis.

“The perfect storm being far fewer people are choosing education, so we have fewer coming in, and then we have a mass exodus going out,” she said.

PUNISHING SCHOOLS FOR THE FAILURES OF SOCIETY

In Camden, School Closures Revealed How Unequal the System Can Be

Public schools are name-called as “failing” while legislatures, unable or unwilling to solve problems of unemployment and poverty, ignore their own impact on student achievement. It’s much easier to blame public schools than to accept one’s own responsibility.

During the Obama Administration, thousands of public schools were closed due to being deemed “low performing” because of their students’ test scores [Blogger’s Note: This is also true for the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind plan]. This was part of Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, and it resulted in school closures in cities across the United States—including Chicago, Cleveland, New York City, and Philadelphia—in a misguided attempt to improve the education of Black and brown children.

In 2012, Race to the Top caught on in New Jersey, where state officials determined that twenty-three of Camden’s twenty-six traditional public schools were “failing.” After taking over the Camden school district in 2013, state lawmakers made school closures their go-to strategy to remedy poor academic performance or budget shortfalls, despite the negative consequences school closures often led to.

Closing schools continues to be a popular “school improvement” strategy well into this new decade. But based on results in Camden, it’s clearly failed.

Education “ratings” are inherently biased against schools serving racially minoritized and economically marginalized students.

I heard a quote recently (forgot where and from whom) that goes something like, “The way to get rid of high poverty schools is to get rid of high poverty schools.” Legislatures insist on “rating” schools without doing anything to ease the problems of economic and racial segregation. In Indiana, the legislature passed a law that will end the punishment of “F” schools. Now it’s just a tool for shaming them. (I know…more than two sentences. Further down is one with no comment, so we’re even.)

The correlation between the percentage of “at-risk” students and standardized test score “proficiency” (high school) is 0.8

That’s…massive. That’s like the correlation between rain and rainclouds.
Meanwhile…

The correlation between the % of at-risk students in a school and that school’s GROWTH RATE on standardized test scores is…like…zero.

Wow.
OK not wow. Because…well…that’s exactly the point of growth scores. They are designed to take into account the uneven distribution of students across schools.
Schools serving privileged kids are not “better” just because they have higher test scores. Those students would score roughly the same no matter where they went to school.

We can’t say, just by looking at proficiency rates, what the quality of a school is. Because…demography.

CONSERVATIVE PRIVATIZATION AT THE UNIVERSITY LEVEL

Why Conservatives Want to Cancel the 1619 Project

Conservatives claim that America’s public universities are hotbeds of liberal (or socialist) subversion, and UNC is willing to do what they can to “suppress ideas they consider dangerous.”

The prevailing conservative view is that America’s racial and economic inequalities are driven by differences in effort and ability. The work of Hannah-Jones and others suggests instead that present-day inequalities have been shaped by deliberate political and policy choices. What appears to be an argument about reexamining history is also an argument about ideology—a defense of the legitimacy of the existing social order against an account of its historical origins that suggests different policy choices could produce a more equitable society.

Campus Cancel Culture Freakouts Obscure the Power of University Boards

One only needs to look at the billions of dollars of influence the Koch brothers have had on public schools and especially on college campuses to see how the fringe right-wing, now the base of the Republican Party, has had an impact on education in America.

…the right is not underrepresented in higher education; in fact, the opposite is true: The modern American university is a right-wing institution. The right’s dominance of academia and its reign over universities is destroying higher education, and the only way to save the American university is for students and professors to take back control of campuses.

Judge: Betsy DeVos Cannot “Quash” Deposition About Her Actions Re: Defrauded Corinthian College Students

Koch supporter, and billionaire anti-public school advocate, Betsy DeVos is stymied by a federal judge.

Former US ed sec Betsy DeVos did not want to give a formal, in-person account of her decision to side with defunct, for-profit, California-based Corinthian Colleges by not granting monetary relief to hundreds of thousand of students defrauded by this federal-aid-sucking monster.

However, on May 19, 2021, US District Judge William Alsup refreshingly denied DeVos’ “motion to quash a subpoena for her deposition.”

FACTS HAVE A WELL-KNOWN LIBERAL BIAS

Opinion: The Trumpy right is violating everything our children are taught

…only a quarter of U.S. students are proficient in civics, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And apparently, the right wants to keep it that way.

A bipartisan bill in Congress sponsored by Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas and Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma (Disclosure: My wife’s stepmother, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, is one of the bill’s Democratic sponsors), would authorize $1 billion a year in grants to pay for more civics and history programs that teach children “to understand American Government and engage in American democratic practices as citizens and residents of the United States.” It’s as American — and as anodyne — as apple pie.

But, as The Post’s Laura Meckler reported over the weekend, “Conservative media and activists are pelting the Republicans who support the bill to abandon it. They call the grant program a ‘Trojan horse’ that would allow the Biden administration to push a liberal agenda.”

Fossil Fuel Interests Caught Peddling Propaganda to Schoolchildren

Science teachers, who work to help students understand climate change, are undercut by propaganda from the fossil fuel industry — funneled through the Heartland Institute — denying science.

Fossil fuel companies and climate denial groups have long sought to shape how the next generation perceives climate change, turning the classroom into a battleground for what the country’s future ideology will be. In 2012, leaked documents revealed that the oil and gas-funded Heartland Institute, a conservative and libertarian public policy think tank that promotes climate denialism, planned to spend $200,000 over two years to sow doubts about the scientific consensus on climate change in K-12 classrooms. Years later, the think tank mailed 350,000 booklets titled, “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming” to students across the country.

The Heartland campaign is an overt example of fossil fuel interests attempting to influence children’s understanding of climate change, but groups also employ more subtle methods to paint a favorable picture of the fossil fuel industry.

The Age Of Misinformation

Will teachers be able to leave their own tribal biases behind and help students become critical thinkers? If not, will we ever live in a nation with a shared fact base again?

In one particularly troubling analysis, researchers found that when a fact-check revealed that information in a post was wrong, the response of partisans wasn’t to revise their thinking or get upset with the purveyor of the lie.

Instead, it was to attack the fact checkers.

TIME FOR SOME RATIONAL THINKING

19 Rules for Life (2021 Edition)

Read all 19 of Peter Greene’s rules for a refreshing taste of rational thinking.

1. Don’t be a dick.

There is no excuse for being mean on purpose. Life will provide ample occasions on which you will hurt other people, either through ignorance or just because sometimes life puts us on collision courses with others and people get hurt. There is enough hurt and trouble and disappointment and rejection naturally occurring in the world; there is no reason to
deliberately go out of your way to add more. This is doubly true in a time like the present, when everyone is already feeling the stress.

🚌🚌🚌

2021 Medley #6 – We Slide into Superstition and Darkness

Mask misinformation, Climate change misinformation, Vaccine misinformation, Legislative ignorance

MASK MISINFORMATION

N.J. school nurse fails science, experts say, in comments about face masks.

Sadly, this nurse at the center of this article has failed to keep up with the science she (should have) learned in nursing school.

One of the arguments Nurse Pein gives for being against masks is that it causes damage to the mental health of children. More first-graders are suffering from anxiety and depression, she claims. She blames the masks but fails science in at least two ways.

Science lesson #1

First, her conclusion is based on a small sample size, just one school. Any good scientist will tell you that a large enough sample size is necessary before concluding that a hypothesis is correct. Small samples increase the margin of error and reduce the confidence level. Are the first-graders in her school representative of all the first-graders in the state…the country…the world? Obviously not. Perhaps there’s something happening in her community that is causing stress among the population of young children — something like a pandemic, for example. Blaming it on the masks alone is just plain ignorant.

Science lesson #2

Failure number two — correlation does not imply causation. Nurse Pein blames the masks for the distress of the children in her school, but did she explore anything else that might be causing the problems? Are all the children who wear masks to school feeling anxious or depressed? Perhaps her attendance area has a large number of COVID cases and the students are worried about their family members or classmates. Perhaps the children have heard adults spout misinformation about the dangers of wearing masks! Whatever the cause, the conclusion that the masks are causing the negative feelings of the children is a conclusion without a basis.

Finally, it must be noted that she hasn’t kept up with the changes to the science of the pandemic as we learn more about the virus. Early on we were told that masks weren’t effective against the virus and were needed for medical professionals. However, as we have learned more about how the virus is spread the science has changed. We’ve learned more. We know more than we did in February and March of 2020. Now we know that masks are effective in preventing the spread of the virus. Similarly, we now know that children are more susceptible to coronavirus variants than they were a year ago (Northeast Indiana readers, see also here).

Science is not an unchanging truth. Science conclusions can and do change when we learn more.

Other objections Pein has for mask-wearing are debunked in the article.

After refusing to wear a mask herself, Erin Pein said she was suspended from her job in the Stafford Township school district.

Now her supporters are planning a rally and her cause has become an issue in the upcoming Republican primary for Hirsh Singh, who arranged and posted a widely shared video interview with her and argues that no one should be forced to wear masks — calling it “a matter of personal freedom.”

But epidemiologists say such claims are little more than “inflammatory rhetoric” and at odds with the science that has repeatedly shown that face masks are highly effective in reducing the spread of the coronavirus. At the same time, they said as new variants of the virus develop, the wearing of masks has become more important than ever.

CLIMATE CHANGE MISINFORMATION

Making the Grade? How State Public School Science Standards Address Climate Change

Are you surprised that Indiana didn’t get an F in its state standards addressing climate change? The fact that there’s some hope raised the grade to a D.

The state standards for science in Indiana, according to the report by the National Center for Science Education and the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund, don’t even acknowledge that the changing climate is a problem. Students graduating from K-12 schools in Indiana will hear pundits on TV raging about the dangers of climate change and will assume that it’s not a problem we need to worry about. Graduates from Indiana will be unlikely to contribute to advances in climate science and other related fields. The right-wing myth that climate change is a hoax will continue to find a home in Indiana.

Indiana
Overall grade: D

Indiana earned a D, just barely escaping and overall failing grade. The state’s approach to the reality and severity of climate change as well as the human responsibility for causing it is abysmal. One reviewer: “I must say [the standards do] not meet the needs of Indiana students in the process of learning their foundational understanding of the world they are inheriting and the promising careers and opportunities available to them; this is a disservice to them.” Saving the state from an F were somewhat better — but still poor — marks for addressing the possibility of solutions to the problem, which is odd since the standards failed to make clear that the problem exists. One reviewer summed up thus: “These standards do a relatively poor job in meeting the four rubrics. They do not have a coherent learning progression or explicit information. Interestingly, there is a good deal of focus on science and engineering solution-oriented perspectives, and this is why I scored the ‘there’s hope’ section higher. This…focus could be very effective if it was used to address and ideate climate adaptation and mitigation solutions.” Not surprisingly, the state got failing grades for preparing students for studying climate change in higher education and for responsible participation in civic deliberation on the issue.

VACCINE MISINFORMATION

Why mRNA vaccines can’t change your genome: a lesson from Elmer Elevator
My last blog post, Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket, focused on science literacy, and the lack of it in American culture. I suggested that teachers connect to organizations to help bring science literacy to their students. One of those groups was the National Center for Science Education. In this post, Executive Director of NCSE, Ann Reid, debunks the conspiracy that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines alter a person’s DNA. Hint: You should read the book My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett, a 1949 Newbery Honor Book. Hint #1: mRNA vaccines won’t alter your DNA.

Over the course of Elmer’s adventure, he uses each of these objects. For example, the toothbrush and toothpaste serve to distract a hostile rhinoceros that threatens to drown Elmer in the pool he weeps in because his horn (the book says “tusk,” but rhino horns aren’t teeth) has grown grey and ugly. Only the jackknife, which Elmer eventually uses to saw through the ropes holding the dragon, makes any sense in advance. But every object is used, and every one is essential; without each and every one of them, Elmer would never have reached and rescued the baby dragon.

All right, I can hear you saying: “What in the Sam Hill does this have to do with mRNA vaccines?”

Well, this. For an mRNA vaccine to alter your DNA, it would have to overcome a series of challenges, each of which requires specialized cellular components that would have to be in the right place at the right time. Just like Elmer Elevator, the mRNA can’t just show up in your cell and expect to get past all the wild animals between it and the baby dragon, as it were.

SCIENCE IGNORANCE CAN BE HARMFUL TO YOUR PUBLIC SCHOOL

A state legislator is howling indoctrination because my 7th graders are learning the ocean is polluted

A North Carolina representative wants to make sure that students aren’t taught about climate change which he says is “indoctrination.”

This is what happens when science is misunderstood, misrepresented, and then politicized.

What also scares me about this bill is that it would require teachers to spend an insane amount of time every day posting lesson plans online.

A member of the North Carolina House of Representatives held up my teaching as an example of harmful indoctrination of children this week as state legislators met to discuss a new bill which would require teachers to post their lesson plans online for public review.

The K-12 Education Committee approved HB 755, also known as “An Act to Ensure Academic Transparency.” It passed the House by a vote of 66-50 and now moves on to the Senate.

The legislation mandates that all lesson plans, including information about any supporting instructional materials as well as procedures for how an in-person review of lesson materials may be requested, be “prominently displayed” on school websites.

Iredell County Republican Representative Jeffrey McNeely gave the bill two enthusiastic thumbs up, pointing to my teaching as an example of the hidden indoctrination that will be exposed if the bill is passed into law

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Carl Sagan’s 1995 book, The Demon-Haunted World, is prescient in its description of the world 26 years into its future — superstition, lack of critical thinking, the inability to question, the inability to distinguish between truth and falsehood…

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

🚌🚌🚌

Listen to this – 2020 #4

 

THE NEED FOR SCIENCE

Children Are Born Scientists. What If School Encouraged That? (Kristina Rizga)

Standardized tests are generally a waste of time and money, but they do show what states require schools to emphasize in daily instruction. It’s no surprise that there’s been an “overall decline” in the time spent teaching science…which is not tested to the extent that reading and math are.

In Indiana, for example, all children in grades three through eight are tested every year in English/Language Arts and Math. Science is tested only in grades four and six, and then not again until subject area tests in high school (Social Studies is tested only in grade five before high school). Students in grade three have an additional reading test tied to a grade-level promotion.

There are standards for science in every grade, of course, and teachers are required to teach those standards every year, but the fact that they’re not tested tells the teachers and the students that they are “not important” and are often relegated to the position of “fillers” and taught “when there’s time” during the school week.

Kindergartens, which have transitioned from developmentally appropriate activities to the “new first grade”, rarely allow students time to study science through free play at water tables, sand tables, building blocks, and other natural explorations.

Our students should start preparing for a science and technology-based society. Carl Sagan reminded us in 1990 that we live in a society dependent upon science and technology, yet too few of us understand science and technology.

From Kristina Rizga

Studies that have looked at time dedicated to science in elementary grades since the mid-’90s, have found variation between states, but generally show an overall decline, especially in schools serving high numbers of low-income children. Meanwhile, jobs in the STEM-related fields are now projected to be among the fastest growing in America, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Political storms: Emergent partisan skepticism of hurricane risks

From Elisa F. Long, M. Keith Chen, and Ryne Rohla

That Americans don’t understand or trust science is reason enough that we need to teach it. As a nation, we are ignorant of science-based problems like climate change, toxic and radioactive wastes, and ozone depletion. When someone raises an alarm about a looming scientific crisis there is widespread denial that it’s happening.

A significant number of our citizens distrust scientists and science, and sadly, science distrust and denial are tied to one of our political parties. Proof of that can be seen in the study below, where people from the science-denying political party were more likely to ignore warnings about dangerous hurricane forecasts.

Exposing students to good science beginning in early childhood is a way to make sure that they grow up to be science-literate citizens.

Mistrust of scientific evidence and government-issued guidelines is increasingly correlated with political affiliation…Combining GPS data for 2.7 million smartphone users in Florida and Texas with 2016 U.S. presidential election precinct-level results, we examine how conservative-media dismissals of hurricane advisories in 2017 influenced evacuation decisions. Likely Trump-voting Florida residents were 10 to 11 percentage points less likely to evacuate Hurricane Irma than Clinton voters (34% versus 45%)…The rapid surge in media-led suspicion of hurricane forecasts—and the resulting divide in self-protective measures illustrates a large behavioral consequence of science denialism.

 

LET THE SCHOOLS FIX IT

‘The failures of everyone else get passed to the schools’

America’s public schools have been charged with fixing societal problems for decades. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the problem in 1967 remarking that

…we are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished.

There are still those who think that “fixing” the schools will fix society despite the fact that it has never worked. Politicians, pundits, and policymakers have, for years, passed the buck to the schools. Maybe it’s time for them to accept some of the responsibility. Schools can help, of course, but can’t do it alone.

From Middle school teacher, Braden Bell

Whenever society has a problem and those in charge can’t resolve it, the problem gets punted to the schools, which simply must deal with it as best they can.

Hunger. Lack of reliable child care. Gun violence. Pregnancies and STDs. Students who are abused or vulnerable in any number of ways…In all these cases, society is conflicted or at an impasse. As politicians and ideologues argue, schools have to address the problems encountered by the students who show up each day. Schools can’t punt. And because this exceeds what schools were designed for, they are often not well equipped to take on these challenges.

INFINITE DIVERSITY IN INFINITE COMBINATIONS: LIVING TOGETHER IN A COMMUNITY

Gene Roddenberry Quotes That Inspire a Great Future

No matter how hard the current occupant of the White House and his followers try to deny and prevent it, the US is a diverse country. That diversity is a net positive for our growth as a nation.

From Gene Roddenberry

Diversity contains as many treasures as those waiting for us on other worlds. We will find it impossible to fear diversity and to enter the future at the same time.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg says this is the secret to living a meaningful life

From Ruth Bader Ginsburg

The myth of the American “rugged individual” has been taken to the extreme. We have become a tribal nation focused on getting benefits for ourselves only. Unfortunately, we live in a community of people…and a community of nations. We need to understand that “we all do better when we all do better.” The late Justice Ginsburg understood that.

…to make life a little better for people less fortunate than you. That’s what I think a meaningful life is. One lives not just for oneself, but for one’s community.

Reimagine Schools after Covid-19? Bring Children Together!

Thurgood Marshall said,

…unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together and understand each other

From Nancy Bailey

Public schools can bring us together. When children learn to care for each other with tolerance and understanding, they will grow to respect one other as adults…

Vouchers and charters divide. Private schools and charter schools segregate. Remote learning, or learning at home or anyplace anytime, does little to bring students together.

This country needs strong public schools that unite students and families.

 

 

🔬📚🔭

2020 Medley #9: Hunkered Down at Home Edition

Dumping the tests, Some things don’t matter, Social Distancing, Focusing on students,
Beating Coronavirus Capitalism, Disasters

DUMPING THE TESTS IS A GREAT IDEA

Why Scrapping School Testing This Year Is a Good Idea

Before I retired, I had the difficult task of serving as one of my school’s co-test coordinators. It was my job to count, secure, distribute, secure, package up, secure, and prepare our state’s Big Standardized Test (h/t Curmudgucation) for shipping. Sadly, I have been trained in tests and measurements so I understood why, for so many years, the Big Standardized Tests were being overused and misused.

Now that the overuse and misuse of testing pendulum is, hopefully, swinging the other way, my fervent hope is that perhaps we can limit the damage done by the tests.

In the meantime, this year’s Big Standardized Tests are being canceled. Jersey Jazzman explains why that’s a good idea and in the process, also explains why the tests aren’t so good for students anyway. They are extremely accurate in assessing the economic status of students, but that’s about all.

Start with the obvious: a “standardized” test has to be administered in a standard way. If some students receive the test in different platforms, or in different environments, the test is no longer standardized. Of course, there were already huge differences between students in these factors… but Covid-19 has made things far worse. There’s just no way to even come close to standardizing the conditions for testing in the current environment. Will the students be at home, in school but “social distancing,” in regular school, somewhere else… we just can’t say.

Next, we have always had big differences in students’ opportunity to learn — but now the differences are greater than ever. Again, there are huge variations among students in their access to qualified educators, high-quality facilities, adequate instructional materials, well-designed curricula, and so on. The best use of test results was to make the case that the variation in these things was creating unequal educational opportunities, and that public policy should focus on getting resources where they were needed the most.

But in a quarantine, we now have to add all sorts of other inequalities into the mix: access to broadband, parents who have the ability to oversee students’ instruction, schools’ ability to implement distance learning, etc. Why implement these tests when inequities within the same classroom — let alone between schools — have grown so large?

PUTTING THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE

Dear Teachers: There Are Many Things That No Longer Matter

A pandemic puts things in perspective. The health and safety of our students, and their families, are more important than the tests.

If you are attempting virtual learning with your students, now is the time to teach what you have always recognized are the crucial topics in your curriculum. Throw out the state requirements and embrace your professional decision-making skills. The state requirements do not matter. There will be no formal observations. No one will give you some annual professional performance review (APPR). We have known all along that those measures are bullshit. I am continuing to cover the most important content, but I am also asking my students to act as historians through recording a daily diary of this extraordinary time. This time will shape them forever, and we are their guardians.

TOP 10 THINGS TO DO WHILE SOCIAL DISTANCING

Top 10 Things I Want My Students to do During the Coronavirus Quarantine

Steven Singer, who blogs at Gadfly on the Wall Blog, lets his students know that there are things to do during “social distancing.” The first is to read a book. For those without access to books, there are the library apps Libby and Hoopla to get digital books.

He wisely includes writing, immediately after reading. Reading and writing are reciprocal. “Reading is the inhale; writing is the exhale.”

2) Read a Book

I ask all of my students to have a self-selected book handy for sustained silent reading in class. Hopefully, you brought it home. If not, take a look around the house. Maybe you’ve got a dusty tome hanging out in some corner. Or – hey – if you have Internet access, you probably have the ability to get an ebook.

Read something – anything you want.

It will while away the hours, relax you and maybe get your mind to thinking about things above and beyond how much mac and cheese you’ve got stored in the cupboard.

3) Keep a Journal

Do you realize you’re living through a moment of history? People will look back on this and wonder how people got through it. You could fill in the blanks for some future researcher. Just a description of your everyday activities, what you’re thinking and feeling, your hopes and dreams – all of it has historical value. Plus, you’ll get some practice expressing yourself in writing. And just think – a simple story about how you survived the great toilet paper shortage of 2020 could end up being taught in the classrooms of the future!

Make it a good one!

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE STUDENTS

Our Students Need Us Now More Than Ever

Are you keeping in touch with your students during this extended coronviracation? You should.

If anything, we teachers and support personnel are needed now more than ever.

Close a school for a while and the community instantly feels the effects. Shut them down across the state and everybody has to adjust.

Our students look to us for guidance, direction, assistance, validation, answers, and the ability to use voice. Nothing has changed in that respect.

Educators advocate for students and schools. Nothing has changed in that respect.

We collaborate with each other and remove obstacles for our students. Nothing has changed in that respect.

We will adapt. We will overcome this obstacle. No one adapts to situations and change like we do.

Because it’s all about the students.

BEATING CORONAVIRUS CAPITALISM

Coronavirus Capitalism — and How to Beat It

Last week, in my post, Public Education, Disaster Capitalism, and COVID-19 (expanded into an op-ed in our local paper here), I discussed how “edupreneurs” will be likely to swoop in and take advantage of public education to further their dreams of privatization. I quoted author Naomi Klein from her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Today, I saw this post by Ms. Klein talking about the exact same thing.

The COVID-19 disaster is exactly the sort of disaster that disaster capitalists exploit. Klein wrote…

This crisis — like earlier ones — could well be the catalyst to shower aid on the wealthiest interests in society, including those most responsible for our current vulnerabilities, while offering next to nothing to the most workers, wiping out small family savings and shuttering small businesses. But as this video shows, many are already pushing back — and that story hasn’t been written yet.

DISASTER UPON DISASTER

Midwest Girds for Floods While under Corona Lockdown

While we’re worrying about COVID-19, we can’t forget that the Earth is still reacting to human-induced climate change.

As an upsurge in coronavirus infections stretches thin the capacity of health care workers and emergency managers nationwide, the Midwest is bracing for another battle: a potentially devastating flood season.

😷🚑🩺

2020 Medley #3: Are we planning for the future?

Our Message to the Future,
Privatization: Church-State and Charters,
Literacy development,
The Opportunity Gap and Poverty

WHAT MESSAGE ARE WE SENDING THE FUTURE?

U.S. appeals court tosses children’s climate lawsuit

I won’t be here to see the next century when today’s infants will be “the elderly.” It’s my responsibility, however, to do what I can to help keep the Earth habitable for my children, and for their children.

…and for their children…and for their children.

Currently, the world’s adults have been unable to let go of fossil fuels and the political and social control that billions of dollars of oil and gas money provide.

Some of our children have become aware of this, so they are trying to take control of the fight against fossil fuels in a quest to save the Earth’s life-friendly climate. It was disappointing, then, to read the ruling that children — who will live on the Earth long after the Koch brothers and the current administration are gone — could not show “standing” to sue to protect their own future.

The term, “standing,” in its legal sense, is “the ability of a party to demonstrate to the court sufficient connection to and harm from the law or action challenged to support that party’s participation in the case.”

I’m not a legal scholar, but if anyone should have “standing” in a suit about the livability of the Earth in the future, it should be our children.

Judges for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals “reluctantly” ruled in favor of the government in the kids’ climate case today, thwarting the young people’s historic legal fight while acknowledging the “increasingly rapid pace” of climate change.

The arguments presented by the 21 young people in Juliana v. United States proved too heavy a lift for Circuit Judges Mary Murguia and Andrew Hurwitz, who found that the kids failed to establish standing to sue.

“The central issue before us is whether, even assuming such a broad constitutional right exists, an Article III court can provide the plaintiffs the redress they seek—an order requiring the government to develop a plan to ‘phase out fossil fuel emissions and draw down excess atmospheric CO2,'” Hurwitz, an Obama appointee, wrote in an opinion issued this morning.

PRIVATIZATION: CHURCH-STATE

Do you want your tax dollars to fund religious education? You shouldn’t.

Here is some food for thought while the Supreme Court ponders the fate of public education dollars going to private schools…

No taxpayer should be forced to fund religious education. This bedrock principle alone should convince you — and the court — to leave Montana’s constitution undisturbed. But if that’s not enough, consider the fact that a ruling in favor of the voucher program would also compel taxpayers to fund discrimination, religious and otherwise.

Private religious schools don’t adhere to the same nondiscrimination laws that public schools do. As a result, we have seen them turn students away because their families don’t share the school’s religious beliefs. They have barred admission because a student or parent is LGBTQ or a student has a disability. They have expelled students who engage in sex outside marriage. And some have fired teachers for being pregnant and unmarried, for undergoing in vitro fertilization or for advocating for the right to terminate a pregnancy. While not all private religious schools conduct themselves in this way, too many do, and taxpayers should not have to underwrite such discrimination.

PRIVATIZATION: CHARTERS

Charter Schools Have No Valid Claim to Public Property

Charter schools run by private companies have no right to claim public property as their own…even if they pay $1 for it.

Communities invest in their future by building and staffing schools for their children. The state shouldn’t have the right to give that property away to a private entity for nothing…or nearly nothing.

Charter school owners-operators have never stopped piously demanding that public school facilities worth millions of dollars be freely and automatically handed over to them. They righteously declare that they have an inherent right to public facilities produced by the working class. The consequences, of course, are disastrous for public schools and the public interest. For example, a new report shows that in 2018 more than $100 million was spent by New York City alone on charter school facilities.1 This is wealth and property that no longer belongs to the public that produced it; it is now in private hands, essentially for free. Even worse, existing institutions and arrangements provide the public with no recourse for effective redress.

LITERACY DEVELOPMENT

I decided to become a teacher in the early 1970s after listening to and observing my eldest child learn to communicate. The process of language development fascinated me.

I’m retired, but it’s still a fascinating subject.

Reconsidering the Evidence That Systematic Phonics Is More Effective Than Alternative Methods of Reading Instruction

Note the qualifying sentence in this research report: “The conclusion should not be that we should be satisfied with either systematic phonics or whole language, but rather teachers and researchers should consider alternative methods of reading instruction.”

After teaching language skills to children for more than 4 decades, I have learned that one size does not fit all. A mixed approach to literacy skills is important. All children learn differently.

Despite the widespread support for systematic phonics within the research literature, there is little or no evidence that this approach is more effective than many of the most common alternative methods used in school, including whole language. This does not mean that learning grapheme-phoneme correspondences is unimportant, but it does mean that there is little or no empirical evidence that systematic phonics leads to better reading outcomes. The “reading wars” that pitted systematic phonics against whole language is best characterized as a draw. The conclusion should not be that we should be satisfied with either systematic phonics or whole language, but rather teachers and researchers should consider alternative methods of reading instruction.

The Power of Using Writing to Enhance Reading

When you read, you convert symbols to meaning. When you write, you convert meaning to symbols. The two processes should be used together to improve a learner’s skill in both.

Currently, many educators take the stance that the biggest impact on literacy can be made by teaching reading and writing simultaneously.

Literacy researcher, Marie Clay, defines reading as a “message-getting, problem-solving activity,” and writing as a “message-sending, problem-solving activity (p. 5).” Essentially, reading and writing are two different avenues to help students learn the same items and processes. When working with struggling readers, taking advantage of the reciprocity of reading and writing can drastically speed up their progress. Teachers can use the strength in one of these areas to help build up the other.

Since reading and writing share much of the same “mental processes” and “cognitive knowledge,” students who partake in copious amounts of reading experiences have shown increased gains in writing achievement and students who write extensively demonstrate improved reading comprehension (Lee & Schallert, p. 145). When researching the impact of reading on writing achievement and writing on reading achievement, Graham and Herbert found, “the evidence is clear: writing can be a vehicle for improving reading. In particular, having students write about a text they are reading enhances how well they comprehend it. The same result occurs when students write about a text from different content areas, such as science and social studies (p. 6).”

THE OPPORTUNITY GAP

In an early 2008 blog post, I put up the following video (note: the organization which produced the video is no longer around).

A few years later, I found this interview with the late Carl Sagan originally done in 1989. This quote comes from approximately 5:10 and following in the video.

…we have permitted the amount of poverty in children to increase. Before the end of this century, more than half the kids in America may be below the poverty line.

What kind of a future do we build for the country if we raise all these kids as disadvantaged, as unable to cope with the society, as resentful for the injustice served up to them? This is stupid.

Will 2020 Be the Year of acknowledging opportunity gaps?

How long will we neglect the issues of poverty and racism before we learn that we will only succeed as a society if we all succeed?

It might be ubiquitous, but it’s still a loaded term. When educators, policymakers, and parents emphasize the “achievement gap,” they’re focusing on results like disparate dropout rates and test scores, without specifying the causes. They are, often unintentionally, placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of the children themselves. Listeners adopt the toxic presumption that root causes lie with the children and their families. In truth, outcome gaps are driven by input gaps – opportunity gaps – that are linked to our societal neglect of poverty, concentrated poverty, and racism.

Yet placing blame on children and families is pervasive. A 2019 EdWeek survey of more than 1,300 teachers found that more than 60 percent of educators say that student motivation has a major influence on differences in Black and White educational outcomes. The survey also found that student motivation and parenting were cited about three times more often than discrimination as major influences on disparate outcomes of Hispanic versus White students.

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