And What A Healthy Thing That Is!

"The values we care about the deepest, and the movements within society that support those values, command our love. When those things that we care about so deeply become endangered, we become enraged. And what a healthy thing that is! Without it, we would never stand up and speak out for what we believe." ~Mister Rogers

Earlier this week, we learned that Seattle's Nathan Hale High School Senate, a body made up of students, parents, teachers, and administrators, voted almost unanimously to refuse to administer the new Common Core test to 11th graders. As Jesse Hagopian writes over on his blog I Am An Educator (click through for the Senate's full written statement): 

In taking this action, Nathan Hale has become the latest focal point of what has now become the largest ongoing revolt against high-stakes testing in U.S. history and an important new escalation in the national resistance to common core testing.

Last year it was Seattle's Garfield High School community that rose up against standardized testing, refusing to take or administer a particularly worthless standardized test. High schoolers in Santa Fe have walked out, with the support of parents teachers. Teachers and parents at a Chicago elementary school are refusing to subject their children to a high stakes test. 

And there have been other protests, but as far as I know, this Nathan Hale action is the first time students, parents, teachers and administrators have come together and flat-out refused to administer a test required by the Common Core national curriculum. This is a courageous act, one that likely will put funding in jeopardy and risk other punitive consequences, but this is the winning coalition: students, parents, teachers, and now administrators. Just as the Garfield walkout spurred a wave of justifiable action across the country, I expect this will as well.

When things we care about deeply are endangered, we become enraged. And what a healthy thing that is! 

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The Sound And The Fury

Earlier this year, our school was collecting new and gently used books to donate for a fundraiser. Someone brought in a couple of bags of books the day after the deadline and so they've been stashed in our mud room for a few weeks. Recently, a friend of our school asked if we could help her collect children's books that emphasized diversity, so I thought I'd go through those leftover bags with the kids to see if there were any there that fit the criteria. I thought we might be able to re-visit some of the conversations we'd had about skin color from earlier in the year.

It became quickly apparent, however, once we got beneath the surface layer of board books, the bulk of what we had was adult literary fiction. A handful of 4-5 year olds had gathered around to help, so I began reading the titles to them, and if I was familiar with the book, told them a little bit about it. When I came to William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, I said, "Oh, this is a good one. It's really the same story told four times by four different people. One of the characters is a guy named Benjy. He has a grown-up body, but his brain is still three-years-old. You'll probably read this in high school."

Silas said, "I think we should read it now."

"It's a grown-up book. It's pretty complicated."

Calvin said, "We should read it."

"Okay . . . 

"Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting." I stopped there and looked around at the kids.

"Who is hitting?"

"I don't know."

"Read more."

"They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree." 

I stopped and said, "Benjy's the guy telling the story, but I wonder who Luster is."

"I think he's a dog."

"Maybe so. Dog's like to hunt in the grass." 

I went back to reading, "They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit." 

I paused again, "There sure is a lot of hitting in this book."

"I think they're having a fight."

Back to the text: "Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass." 

I tried to summarize, "So somebody is hitting and there's a dog named Luster and there's a fence and a flower tree and a flag they took out and put back in."

No one responded. We were outdoors. I didn't want to keep them from their play. I said, "How about I put a book mark at this place and we read a little more later?"

"No, keep reading."

"Okay . . . 

""Here caddie." He hit. They went away across the pasture. I held to the fence and watched them going away . . . "Listen at you, now," Luster said." 

I stopped to point out, "Luster can talk. Maybe he's not a dog."

"I think Luster's his friend."

"Hey, I know! A caddy is in golf. Maybe they're golfing! They're not fighting, they're hitting golf balls!"

"Yeah, and there's a flag they take in and out like mini-golf!"

I nodded, "That makes sense." 

I went back to reading, ""Ain't you something, thirty-three years old, going on that way. After I done went all the way to town to buy you that cake. Hush up that moaning. Ain't you going to help me find that quarter so I can go to the show tonight." 

I said, "He wants to go to a show."

"I think it's a music show."

"Or maybe he just wants to go to a movie."

"Those are both shows," I said. "Luster wants a quarter so he can go to a music show or a movie." 

I went back to reading, "They were hitting little, across the pasture. I went back along the fence to where the flag was. It flapped on the bright grass and trees."

"Definitely golfing." There were four of us still listening and we all nodded our agreement.

I tried again to set the children free, but they wanted to keep reading. When we came to "the N-word" I read it as "N-word." They interrupted me to ask what it meant. Having grown up in the deep south in the 1960's I've known what that word meant my whole life. I guess that's at least proof of a little progress. I said it was an old fashioned bad word which satisfied them.

We talked about what it meant when Faulkner wrote about birds "slanting and tilting." We discussed the propriety of telling someone to "Shut up!" and the silliness of Luster threatening to eat Benjy's cake and candles. When Benjy noted that his shadow was bigger than Luster's we figured out that it meant Benjy was bigger than Luster. I thought they would get completely lost, as I did as a teenager, when the narrative begins to jump around in time, but it didn't seem to faze them. We just stopped and tried to figure out who the new characters were. We weren't always "correct" in our surmises: we've determined, for instance, that "toddy" refers to the hot beef inside a burrito, but that's fine. We aren't the first to make mistakes about this book. I didn't correct them, but rather let them correct themselves as they had when figuring out all that hitting was just golf, not fighting.

We thought some of the grown-ups were kind of mean to Benjy, but some of them were nice. 

We agreed with Benjy when he thought the pigs were "sorry because one of them got killed today."

We had been reading The Sound and the Fury for a good 20 minutes, just the four of us, and it was time to go inside. The boys weren't ready to be finished, so I marked the page and promised we would get back to it later. Later, as we wrapped up for the day, they begged me to read it to the whole class instead of the usual picture book.

Yesterday, we took the novel outdoors again, but this time we were a larger group of 8-10, all choosing to listen to me read Faulkner instead of digging in the sand or swinging on the swings. We had a long discussion about the smell of trees, when Benjy described someone as "smelling like trees." We even smelt leaves, some of which did have a fragrance. We talked about words like "rasped" and "stooped" and "jouncing" and "snagged." Calvin showed us a few places where his coat was torn from having snagged on things.

I kept trying to stop, telling them I could just mark the page where we left off so they could play, but they were not having it. They wanted to keep reading The Sound and the Fury, so I guess we will.

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The Godlike Works Of A Creator

Last Spring, we were messing around with pipe cleaners and tissue paper circles. It's a craft-ish project in that most of the kids know, because I showed them, that you can make nifty little flowers by sliding the thin disks of paper onto their bendy stems one at a time, giving each one a gentle "crush" as you go. I don't have any pictures of them, but it's a common enough preschool activity that I'm sure most of my readers know what I'm talking about. (But if you want a look, here's a version from my friend Deborah of Teach Preschool fame using squares instead of circles.)

Some of the kids do their own thing with the materials available, creating "space ships" and "spiders" and "decorations," but there are always a handful who really, really want to master the flowers. Logan, I thought, was one of those kids. She plunked herself down at the art table and got to work, brow furrowed, her authoritative chatter letting us know she was on top of things. Since I'd already demonstrated my own technique, I moved on to other things, leaving the art station in the capable hands of a parent-teacher.

Later, while outdoors, I chatted with the parent-teacher, saying something like, "That art project was pretty popular today. Logan seemed to really like it."

She answered, "It was, but you know, she didn't make a single flower. She couldn't figure out how to get the tissue paper on the stem without tearing it." A huge bouquet of flowers had been created at that table and Logan had sat there, hands busy for a good half hour. How could it be possible that she hadn't produced a single flower?

"Nope, not one," was the answer, "But she worked really hard. Every time she tried to crush the tissue like you showed them, the paper came off."

I'd not been watching Logan's production, but only, occasionally, her face and body language. Not once had I seen a sign of frustration or failure. No, the girl I'd seen was hard at work, concentrating, narrating her activities, deeply involved in what I assumed was a manufacturing process like that of the other kids around the table who were making one for "mom," one for "dad," one for "grandma," one for "my pet cat Simon . . ."

"I tried to help her, but she didn't want help. She told me she was already an expert flower maker."

I said, "I guess that means we'd better keep making flowers tomorrow."

"Yes."

The following day, I made the same materials available, not on the art table this time, but on another table, a place where there would be no dedicated parent-teacher. Logan didn't go there right away, instead choosing a housekeeping game, but before long she was drawn in, taking up a spot, alone with the materials. I sat with her, taking up my own stem, not saying anything. I watched her slide a tissue paper circle onto her pipe cleaner, tearing a huge hole in it during the process. And as had happened the day before, when she crushed it, it came off the stem. This didn't seem to bother her at all as she tossed the wad of paper aside and reached for another. This time she worked more slowly, nudging it along carefully, still ripping the paper too much, but when she crushed it, it stayed, almost balanced in place. Gingerly, she added a second disk of paper, halfway up the stem, then a third. 

From an artistic perspective it was a pretty pathetic looking flower. She held it up, no extra pride in her expression, no sign that there was anything amiss, "That's just so beautiful," then stuck in in the glass vase where we were displaying our finished pieces. She then got to work on another.

I put a piece of tissue paper on my stem and in my best imitation of the way she had done it, tore the hole a little too big, then crushing it to keep it precariously fixed in place. Logan watched me from the corner of her eyes. "No, that's not the way," she said. "You have to do it more gently. Like this," then she showed me on her own flower.

I tried imitating her as best I could. "Good," she said, "You're getting it. Now, do another one." I followed her instructions.

She made a second flower as pathetic as the first and called it good. Before starting on a third, she watched me for a moment, growing frustrated with my attempts, although I was doing my best to imitate her. She snatched it from me, her voice infused with a false cheerfulness, "Here, let me just do that for you." In her rush, she caused all the tentatively fixed tissue to drop from my stem. "See?" she said, "That's what's supposed to happen. Now you can start over."

I did not like the feeling of failure the exchange gave me, even as I knew I'd not failed. I knew that because I'm an adult and I had practically invented this damn process, yet here I was with the tables turned. This is why I'm not a big fan of crafts in preschool: I worry that we put too many children in this situation. I said, reflexively, "I don't want to start over."

She sighed, "Okay, but you'll never figure it out if you give up."

"That's true." I got back to work, this time making a flower the way I'd initially shown the kids two days before, quickly pulling together a nice, tidy white carnation. Logan watched me work without comment, then got back to her own stem. When she was finished with yet another pathetic flower, she said, "I think we should plant these in the garden."

I answered, "They would be pretty," then joking, "But, you know, they're not real flowers."

"I know that."

"I think the wind and rain would destroy them."

"Yes, but real flowers always fall off, too," and even as she said it, one of her tissue paper wads fell from the stem she held. "Like that."

It was then that I understood Logan's flowers. She was not making the perfect little imitation flowers the rest of us were making, but "real" flowers, the kind that bloom, live, then fall away when the Spring winds blow. And in that flash, I was no longer in the presence of the pathetic attempts of a child, but rather what I saw before me were the godlike works of a creator.

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"A Great Teacher Is A Great Artist": Part Two

I've come to believe that a great teacher is great artist and there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit. ~John Steinbeck

Most of my writing on this blog takes place during an early morning hour before I head off to school. I've gotten pretty good at banging out my paragraphs while writing on that deadline, but yesterday, I was called to duty before I was finished with what I wanted to say, so this post will have to stand as part two.

I've always approached teaching as an artist, even when I didn't know it. The way I teach has been shaped as much by the media with which I work -- individual children and families and environments -- than by any specific educational theory or philosophy or technique. My highest goal as a teacher, always, is to create a relationship with each child who walks through our door, what I sometimes refer to in verbal shorthand as "getting us on the same bandwagon." The process of doing this is different for each child. Some arrive already pulling a bandwagon, so I just jump onto it and let them drive. Others look to me to offer a spot on my bandwagon. Many need time to warm up to the idea of a bandwagon. Everyone of the hundreds of relationships I've had with children has been unique because each of the children, in mind and spirit, are, like great art, the first and only one of their kind to ever exist. And while experience helps, the moment I begin to approach children as products to manufacture rather than people I want to get to know, is the moment I should retire.

When we start with relationships, we don't need a pre-packaged curriculum because the children are the curriculum. Each of them brings their own interests, passions, and abilities to the table. I don't need to force specific knowledge on them on a schedule, but rather create a space, a canvas, a relationship in which we can, together, explore and answer their own questions.

And this is what stands at the bottom of my visceral reaction to efforts to standardize education. It's why standardized testing and text books and anything that is pre-pacakaged and sold by education corporations strikes me as not only anti-education, but at a deeper level, anti-child. Children are not predictable, programmable widgets that need to be told what to learn and by when. They are fully formed human beings with their own minds and spirits. You can't manufacture education: it is something that is created through our relationships.

Yesterday, I suggested that this child-lead approach should continue beyond preschool, all the way through high school. A reader asked how this would work, for instance, in high school math. Of course, I'm not a high school teacher, but as a preschool teacher, I can tell you that math is something young children do for pleasure, spontaneously exploring patterns, sequencing, and sorting. However, democratic free schools, like the Sudbury Valley School or the Albany Free School represent models for what a child-lead approach looks like for older kids. Researcher and author Peter Gray, in his book Free to Learn, writes that American children report that they come to dislike school, and math in particular, more and more with each passing year, starting in about sixth grade. Children in democratic free schools report the opposite, saying that they like school in general, and math in particular, more and more with each passing year because what they are doing is directly applicable to their lives, their interests, and their passions, which is so much more motivating than ciphering on paper and memorizing formulas.

Indeed, math and literacy, the shining stars of the corporate education reform movement, do not belong at the center of education. Reading and ciphering are tools to help us with our real education, perhaps equal to, but certainly not superior to the arts, physical education, dance, social studies, economics, political science, wood shop, history, home ec, car maintenance, or anything else for that matter. The way we do it now, making math and literacy the core around which everything else revolves, is like spending 13 years learning how to use a hammer without ever actually building anything.

And this is the greatest strength of a child-lead approach to education. It taps directly into the most powerful educational tool known to mankind: motivation. When we are motivated, learning is easy; indeed, it's a joy. Standardization sucks the inherent joy right out of learning and no amount of gold stars or threats of losing recess will inject true motivation back into the process. When we start with the child, when we start with our relationships, when we understand that we are working with a mind and spirit unlike any that have ever existed, then we begin to create masterpieces.

Of course, corporate education "reformers," aren't concerned with any of this because their stated goal is to get all the kids "career and college ready," and all of this child-lead motivation doesn't necessarily feed the school-to-cubicle pipeline they imagine to be the future. Setting aside the fact that these guys are most assuredly wrong about the future as most soothsayers are, the future is not theirs to create: the future belongs to those who must live it. I will not be part of robbing children of that fundamental human right. Just because these guys think they'll need a certain number of worker bees in the future doesn't mean that's what they'll get. If the next generation decides they all want to be dancers, well then, we'll just have to build our little money making enterprises around dance rather than crass consumerism.

People accuse me of being an idealist. I see myself as a realist. We are designed by nature or God to learn through play, through our own curiosities, and to be motivated to answer our own questions. This is what education is, even when the majority of our society see it as something else. The goal is not jobs or math skills or any other kind of success. The goal is a meaningful life and I cannot tell anyone what that is. It's a question only we can answer for ourselves. I can, however, pick up my paint brush and help you get there.

Try not to be a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value. ~Einstein

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"A Great Teacher Is A Great Artist"

After last week's post on some of the corporations and individuals lining up to make a fast buck (or a fast billion) off the labor of our children in school, a couple people I respect, both online and in person, told me they agreed that while "unleashing powerful market forces" on our children is a bad idea, they actually supported the Common Core standards. One parent who is a public school teacher and whose daughter is currently in public school kindergarten, told me that she had read the kindergarten standards and found them an improvement over what was there in the past.

I've never read any of the Common Core standards for any grade. My criticisms of this federal curriculum is the secretive, un-democratic manner in which they were developed; that professional educators were largely excluded from the process of their development with no early childhood professionals input at all; that none of the standards were field tested in any way before being foisted upon our children; the intentional injection of greed and private profit as the driving force; the inextricable marriage between Common Core and standardized testing and the use of these tests to make high stakes decisions about funding and individual teachers' careers; and the galling fact that no matter how good or bad the standards are, no matter how developmentally appropriate or inappropriate, and no matter what professional educators discover and learn in the process of using them, there is absolutely no mechanism for feedback, changes, alterations, or re-writing. 

That is, the only avenue for input available for teachers, parents, and students is protest and civil disobedience, such as opting out, walking out on tests, and rallying in the streets, which is what we're doing.

My friend agreed with most of my criticisms, but felt that if the standards could be separated from the all the crap, they were better than what came before them. This is a common theme among supporters, they want to separate the "standards" themselves from the rest, but that's not possible in the real world, or at least not so far.

And it might be true that the Common Core standards, magically separated from all the negatives that go with them, are better than what came before them. In fact, I'll stipulate to that. I told my friend as much as she left, adding, however, that I'm opposed to any educational standards in which adults tell children what to learn and by when. She replied, "You're an idealist."

I suppose I am an idealist, at least in the sense of thinking we can change our societal view of children and education so dramatically that we might one day offer a child-lead, emergent, play-based, democratic curriculum in all of our K-12 schools. But this is where the research points us. In fact, the adult-lead, top-down, learning-on-a-schedule approach that has come to define schools around the world is one of the most difficult ways for anyone to learn anything. This is what independent research tells us. Oh sure, those who support adult-lead education can point to their own research, but everything they cite to support their position are studies on how children learn in schools. It's like claiming to understand tigers by studying them in the zoo; it's like studying orca whales at Seaworld.

If it is idealism to follow science, then I'll confess to idealism. Research that is focused on how children learn the most and the best, those that look at the tigers and orcas outside of captivity, always points to a child-lead, emergent, play-based, democratic curriculum. And that is what this blog has been about since the very beginning. For those who need to see the research for themselves, I will simply point you to the endnotes of researcher Peter Gray's book Free to Learn.

"I've come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit." ~John Steinbeck

Teaching is an art and a science, yet we continue to try to turn it into a job along an assembly line. Indeed, this is always the end result when you put one group of humans (in this case adults) in charge of determining when, what, and how another group of humans (children) are going to learn.

The purpose of public education in a democracy isn't vocational training as so many insist; it isn't so that we can "beat the Chinese." The purpose is to create good citizens. Beyond that, however, there is a higher purpose for education and that is to assure that each child has the opportunity to become a masterpiece of his own creation, an individual who is inspired, motivated, and passionate about life. This is the rational approach to education because it is the surest path to each of us reaching our potential.

(I have more to write about this, but I'm out of time this morning. I plan to get back to this tomorrow.)

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

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Before It's Too Late

Ninety percent of life is showing up. ~Woody Allen

Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. ~Goethe

Experience is the name we give our mistakes. ~Oscar Wilde

Today I'm 53. I think that permits me the indulgence to offer a piece of unsolicited advice.

That's a long time to have lived, don't you think? Fifty-three years? I've seen over half a century. I've lived in historic times. I should by now know most of what I'm ever going to know about life. I've still got my health. I love my work. This should be my time, baby!

Here's one thing I know: Goethe was right, there is magic in boldness. If 90 percent of life is just showing up, then I'd say another 9 percent is boldness.

Of course boldness must be formed from something; otherwise it's just brashness or, worse, its even more embarrassing cousin, braggadocio. I've found you do need at least a little genuine, deep-down confidence to pull off boldness, and that can only come from experience or out-of-this-world innate talent. Since I never discovered my world class talent, I'm left to rely on experience. 

I'd then estimate that 90 percent of boldness comes from that confidence.

And 90 percent of that confidence comes from experience.

And experience is the name we give our mistakes.

So, you know, show up and make some mistakes before it's too late.

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Smart And Happy Kids

If you really want a smart and happy kid, watch him. Just hang out while she's doing whatever it is she's doing. 

Try to not ask questions unless you're genuinely curious. Try to not praise unless you're genuinely impressed. Try to not boss him around. When your agenda conflicts with hers, try to understand when she behaves as if there is a conflict.

Try to not even talk unless you have something urgent or informative or heartfelt or very funny to say.

If you don't know the answer, be brave enough to say, "I don't know." If you don't want to answer, say, "I need to think about that," because that's what you're going to be doing right up until you inevitably do answer.

Touch him a lot. Pick her up when she needs it, but otherwise let her stand on her own feet.

When he gets hurt, you'll know what to do; that's the easy part of parenting. The hardest part is letting her just be smart and happy.

This is all good practice for a lifetime as a parent, especially when they're all grown up. The best of it is to love them, to watch them, and to be there because they still need you even if you're not doing anything at all.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

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Common Core's Pustule Encrusted Underbelly

For the past two days I've written about high stakes standardized testing in our public schools. In Monday's post I discussed it within the context of current Congressional efforts to re-authorize the No Child Left Behind act which ushered in this current era of high stakes testing, suggesting that this is an opportunity for us to make a difference in the lives of children since the key players all seem to be backing away from the regime of high stakes tests. Yesterday, I riffed on the blatantly anti-democratic aspects of high stakes testing, evoking Noam Chomsky to support me. Today, I want to take a look at the pustule encrusted underbelly of the test-driven Common Core national public school curriculum that, even though it is clearly destined to fail dramatically, is threatening to rob a generation of children of a quality education.

Specifically, I want to write about the millions of dollars individuals and corporations have made so far off the labor of young children and the billions more over which they are greedily rubbing their greasy hands.

I'm going to begin with Pearson "Education." I use the quotation marks because what they do has very little to do with actual education other than to sell tests and pre-tests and test-compliant materials to schools and school districts, raking in billions in a process that includes breaking federal laws. They're involved with other education-ish stuff, I know, because a public school teacher once gave me a bunch of left-over pre-packaged "science kits" that included a few pennies worth of dried beans and plastic cups. My understanding was that these kits had cost the school district upwards of $20 each. I'm going to tell myself that they cost so much because Pearson pays a terrific living wage to the poor people hired to assemble them. (Ha, ha, ha! I hope I've done enough now to establish a vein of satire. Pearson is notoriously prickly and vindictive, so I want to protect myself.) Already sucking billions out of our nation's education budgets, Pearson stands to earn a minimum of $138 million off Common Core this year.

Another of the ways Pearson plans to accelerate their looting of our schools is that they've gone into business with Microsoft to develop more Common Core "products." Now neither of these companies roll out of bed for chump change, so I'm sure they see the market for these products to be quite massive. Last year, Bill Gates, Microsoft's founder, the world's wealthiest man, and the guy who privately funded much of the development of the Common Core, famously bristled when a Washington Post reporter suggested that he was involved in public education for monetary gain. He aggressively sputtered, "Are you suggesting I'm in this for the money!" and "This is philanthropy!" Maybe he actually has no idea about what Microsoft and Pearson are planning, an absentee leadership would explain why the company he founded has foundered for the past decade and more, but I find it hard to swallow that the world's leading venture philanthropist wouldn't know what's going on. In fact, it was in that same interview that he discussed "unleashing powerful market forces" on our children and compared the Common Core to standardizing electrical outlets so businesses could more easily plug their products into our schools.

I'm sorry, but the Common Core national curriculum, at it's core, is all about making money. It's not an accident Pearson and Gates are involved, just like it's not an accident that hedge fund managers and other Wall Street types are heavily invested in "education." They don't roll out of bed for chump change either.

And where you find bathtubs of money, you also find cronyism, conveniently hidden conflicts of interest and other kinds of dirt-baggery. 

Recently, NPR ran a piece on a man named Jason Zimba, a former professor who wrote the math portion of the Common Core. In the piece, he reveals that even though his own children attend a school that uses his work, he still tutors them at home. Why? Well, he blames professional educators for doing it wrong, which is sort of what everyone involved in the Common Core is now doing: pointing the finger at teachers for being bad at teaching the load of crap they've foisted on American children. Not only does Zimba come off as quite arrogant about his vastly superior intellect, but a little scratching beneath the surface reveals that he continues to make hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, off Common Core, even as it is failing our nation's children.

My cap is off to Joy Pullman, managing editor at The Federalist, who last month published a excellent piece entitled "Ten Common Core Promoters Laughing All the Way to the Bank," with Zimba standing at the top of her list. He left his professorship to found a Common Core non-profit from which he earns over $330,000 in salary. On top of that he makes additional thousands by traveling the country teaching us idiot teachers how to do Common Core the Jason Zimba way. Pullman's list is limited to just 10 individuals who are sleazily and cynically gorging at the Common Core trough. Assuredly, there are thousands more who, like Bill Gates, are attempting to deny their vested interests, while making money off the make-work labor of our children.

Common Core is doomed to fail. Indeed, I would say it has already failed, but that hasn't dampened the greed that always lies at the heart of "powerful market forces." Even as Common Core crumbles, corporations and individuals continue to rake in the dough and they are doing it on the bent backs of our children.

If you're feeling a little sick right now, you can't say I didn't warn you that it is a pustule encrusted underbelly. Tomorrow I hope I can go back to writing about things happening in our preschool where we take a play-based, evidence-based, truly non-profit approach to education.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

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"It's Turning Us Into Individuals That Devote Our Lives To Achieving A Rank"

When I write about the scourge of high stakes standardized testing in our public schools, I usually do so from the perspective of pedagogy, research, and the socio-emotional impact on the young children who are subjected to a testing regime. In yesterday's post, I also touched upon the impact corporate education "reforms" are having on our children as citizens in a democracy. I pointed out that our political leaders, of both parties, continue to promote the notion that the sole purpose of public education is job training, rather than, as is actually the case, to educate children so that they will be able to handle the rights and responsibilities of self-governance.

I've never heard a politician talk about public education without evoking those mythical "jobs of tomorrow." What incredible hubris. No one knows what those jobs will be five years from now, let alone two decades into the future when the young children we are teaching seek to take their place in the economy. They tell us "the Chinese are beating us," they say "we are falling behind," they crow, as the president did in his most recent Weekly Address that we are "competing against the world." It's as if they view education as a kind of competition, like a cock fight or something, in which we're tossing our kids to a winner-take-all arena that will turn them into lean mean economic machines.

This is emphatically not why we have public education in a democratic society. Certainly, it is important that citizens are able to contribute economically, but narrow economic self-interest cannot stand as the be-all end-all of citizenship. A good citizen contributes socially, artistically, politically, spiritually, as a neighbor, and as a member of a family. A good citizen is someone up to the challenge of self-governance, is someone who thinks critically, and who thinks for himself. A good citizen is someone who knows when and how to stand up for her own beliefs even when those around her disagree. A good citizen questions authority and is wary of those who insist upon obedience. A good citizen is someone who has a well-rounded education that includes not just literacy and numeracy, but also a working knowledge of science, the humanities, the arts, as well as the fundamental tenants of physical and emotional health. Not only that, but a good citizen is a life-long learner, someone who is motivated by the ongoing search for wisdom and truth.

I will point out that most of the traits that make for a good citizen will, if exercised in the workplace, get you fired. That's because the skills and habits of citizenship stand opposed to the dictatorship of the traditional corporate pyramid where those at the top do the thinking and everyone else obeys. When we turn our schools over the vocational training, we emphasize traits that are contrary to those necessary for a functioning democracy.

There are those who argue that this is the overt goal of corporate education "reformers," to prepare our children for compliance and obedience. I'm not sure it's intentional so much as that those with their hands on the levers power are, in their hubris, blind to anything else. Either way, the results are the same: schools designed to place our children at the service of the economy rather than the other way around.

Yesterday, a reader pointed me to this excellent video of the great Noam Chomsky discussing the impact of our high stakes standardized testing regime on our youngest citizens. "It's turning us into individuals that devote our lives to achieving a rank," which is, after all the highest good in a corporation, but the lowest in a democracy.

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It's Time To Stop The Crazy

In a very real sense, the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was the beginning of our nation's cruel, misguided experiments in high stakes, high stress standardized testing of our children, a trend that has only become more vicious over the course of the past 15 years, under the relentless pressure from corporate education "reformers" to privatize public schools through the Trojan Horse of charters and the de-professionalization of teaching, the introduction of the so-called Race to the Top policies of the Obama administration, and now the Common Core national curriculum with it's emphasis on rote learning and it's own slew of high stakes tests.

Congress is currently attempting to re-authorize the No Child Left Behind law. My position is that it should be scraped entirely and I've communicated this to my representatives. In those emails and phone calls I quoted author and progressive education advocate Alfie Kohn who said, "(NCLB)'s main effect has been to sentence poor children to an endless regimen of test-preparation drills." I would only amend that by pointing out that it is not just poor children, but all children, who are having their love of learning destroyed by this relentless toil in these test score coal mines. 

In President Obama's most recent weekly address on the topic, he demonstrates an ignorance about public education that is apparently universal among the political class, only speaking of it in economic terms, asserting that the purpose of public schools is to prepare children for the "new economy" and for "competing against the world." It's as if he believes that our children are here to serve the economy rather than the other way around. There was, as usual, and this is true of politicians of both parties, no mention of citizenship, which is, after all, the central reason we the people take on the task of education in the first place. Without an educated population self-governance is impossible. 

But amidst all of the president's boilerplate ignorance, something jumped out at me:

This year, I want to work with both parties in Congress to replace No Child Left Behind with a smarter law that addresses the overuse of standardized tests, makes a real investment in preschool, and gives every kid a fair shot in the new economy.

You had to listen carefully, because seconds later he pivoted back to vocational training, but he actually said "address the overuse of standardized tests." Now, I don't know if he really means this: these corporate reform guys are brilliant at marketing and they've clearly identified standardized tests as one of the weak points in their messaging. It may just be in there to pacify parents and teachers who oppose corporate education "reform," but it is yet another sign that we are, if not winning, at least starting to have an effect. In recent months both the Gates Foundation (the leading private sector advocate for high stakes testing) and Education Secretary Arne Duncan (the leading public section advocate for high stakes testing) have both attempted to back themselves away from high stakes testing.

Maybe it's because many of our best teachers are walking away from the profession in droves, most citing these tests and Common Core on their way out the door.

(Award-winning teacher) Stacie Starr said Ohio's rigorous learning standards, the fast pace at which the curriculum is moving, and the assessments are forcing teachers to become presenters of material . . . "In doing so we've lost touch with the kids personally," she said. "There's a lot of them that have some emotional needs and I don't know that we're meeting all those social and emotional needs first."

Or as 25-year veteran teacher Dawn Neely Randall wrote last year in her resignation letter that was published in the Washington Post:  

I can no longer be a teacher who tries to build these 10-year-olds up on on hand, but then throws them to the testing wolves with the other.

Currently, about half of all teachers are leaving the profession within five years, a trend that is increasing over time. If any other profession was seeing that kind of attrition, we would consider it a national emergency. It's not just high stakes testing that's driving teachers out of the profession, but it has definitely accelerated things.

Maybe Obama, Gates, Duncan and the rest of the high stakes testing crowd are responding to parents who are increasingly choosing to opt their children out of these tests, with a few schools now reporting that over half of their students refusing the tests. Yes, these tests are "mandatory," but only in the sense that schools must administer them: they cannot force children to take them. School superintendents and principals, of course, are upset about this because the federal funding is attached to kids taking these tests. Some have even, hilariously, given up on arguing that these tests have anything to do with education, instead complaining that when children opt out, they gain an unfair advantage over their peers:

Some superintendents have argued that putting the (opt out) students in classrooms would give them more instruction hours and an unfair advantage . . . Let's analyze that Onion-worthy exercise in self-satire. More instruction time, the superintendents warn, would mean more education for the opt outers, which would give them an academic advantage over kids who wasted the opportunity to further their educations by taking the tests. In other words, a school year filled with pretesting, re-pretesting and the actual state testing deprives students of hours and hours of useful instruction. By saying the non-testers can get an "unfair advantage" from the "more instruction hours," the principals are making a forceful argument against our obsession with yearly, high stakes testing.

And maybe these standardized testing work bosses are starting to listen to actual statisticians and researchers who are telling them that these tests, created not by educators but by giant for-profit testing corporations like the evil empire of Pearson "Education" (I put that word in quotes because I simply can't, in good conscience, allow that lie to stand there unadorned), are complete bunk. They simply do not measure learning: at best these tests measure test taking ability and socio-economic status. We are "using a bathroom scale to measure a student's height."

On Valentine's Day, the Washington Post reported that over 500 researchers have signed an open letter to Congress urging them to stop test-focused reforms such as those included in No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Common Core. There is a photo at the top of the story of one of my own senators listening to testimony, so she can't say she doesn't know this. In the past two days, more than 300 more have signed on to the letter, which you can find right here.

We are researchers and professors in colleges, universities, and other research institutions throughout the United States with scholarly and practical expertise in public education, including education policy, school reform, teaching and learning, assessment, and educational equity. As Congress revises and reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, we strongly urge departing from test-focused reforms that not only have been discredited for high-stakes decisions, but also have shown to widen, not close, gaps and inequities. The current reauthorization provides an historic opportunity to leverage federal resources to address the deeper and more systemic problems with strategies that research has compellingly demonstrated to be far more effective in improving the educational opportunities and success of all students, particularly those in highest need. Specifically, we write to endorse the concerns, analyses, and recommendations in the recently released policy memo from the National Education Policy Center, "Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act: Time to Move Beyond Test-focused Policies" . . .

From that policy memo:

Today's 21-year-olds were in third grade in 2002, when the No Child Left Behind Act became law. For them and their younger siblings and neighbors, test-driven accountability policies are all they've known. The federal government entrusted their education to an unproven but ambitious belief that if we test children and hold educators responsible for improving test scores, we would have almost everyone scoring as "proficient" by 2014. Thus, we would achieve "equality." This approach has not worked . . . (W)e argue that as a nation we must engage in a serious, responsible conversation about evidence-based approaches that have the potential to meaningfully improve student opportunities and school outcomes.

This is what we are asking for: evidence-based education policies. What we have now is based upon nothing more that conjecture and business jargon paid for by deep-pocket dilettantes. It's time to stop the crazy.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

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