From the Hill.com
by Dennis Van Roekel
Many Americans, including President Obama, weren’t even born when the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into outer space in October 1957. Yet everyone knew exactly what the President meant when he said during his State of the Union address, “This is our Sputnik moment.” Today the U.S. faces economic and innovative competition around the world. If we want to win the future in the same way that we won the Space Race, we must do what we did then – invest in education.
The President shined a spotlight on the importance of a long-term investment in education and recognized the critical role that teachers play in student success, calling for more respect for the teaching profession. His strong message of support for education and his call to fix No Child Left Behind is sorely welcome. However, as with many good things, the devil is in the details.
Global competition is a fact of life, but competition in education funding can have negative consequences. That’s why we have expressed concerns with funding models, like the Race to the Top program, that create winners and losers among our students. The federal government has a vital role to play in advancing the quality of education and ensuring equity and opportunity for all students.
The track record with Race to the Top calls into question this program’s ability to meet this critical objective. To date, 39 states were non-participants or losers in the Race to the Top competition. And according to the Schott Foundation for Public Education, after two years of implementation and close to $4 billion dollars, many underserved communities – Black, Hispanic, Asian and American Indian students, ELL students and poor rural states – have been poorly represented in Race to the Top’s distribution of resources.
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was intended to provide a level playing field and equal opportunity, but the competitive nature of Race to the Top has pitted students against their peers, and educators against their colleagues. The expanded use of competitive grant policies has the potential to dangerously undermine public education, and for this reason we believe this formula must not be a part of ESEA reauthorization.
In the push to renew ESEA, we must change the punitive approach of No Child Left Behind, especially the fanatical focus on standardized tests and the unrealistic AYP requirements that brand thriving schools as failures. We should focus on schools that are in the most desperate need of transformation. That’s exactly what NEA is doing in our Priority Schools Campaign, which is engaging our members in districts across the country and identifying more and new ways to help students succeed.
In short, we need to redefine the federal role in education: moving beyond testing, labeling and punishing, and partnering with states to transform public education for all students.
Dennis Van Roekel is the president of the National Education Association (NEA).
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/education/141537-competition-in-education-funding-hurts-students?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4d48ae85d44f30e5%2C0
Showing posts with label failure is not an option. Show all posts
Showing posts with label failure is not an option. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Waiting for Superman deservedly snubbed
From the Washington Posts Answer Sheet
by Valerie Stauss
The documentarians who select the films for Academy Award nominations in the feature documentary category got it right: “Waiting for Superman” was not good/accurate enough to be selected.
The snub to Davis Guggenheim’s tendentious film was well-deserved, given that classic documentaries are factual and straightforward, and don’t, as did "Superman," fake scenes for emotional impact.
Academy Award nominations are heavily political, yet this film didn’t make the cut even though President Obama called it “powerful” and welcomed to the White House the five charming students who starred in the film.
Advertising campaigns have been known to vault films into Academy contention, but not even a $2 million grant provided by the Gates Foundation to market “Superman” worked.
Though "Superman" was on the shortlist for an Academy Award in the feature documentary category, apparently the people who vote on the nominations -- people who actually make documentaries -- saw too many problems with “Waiting for Superman.”
And there are many, large and small.
Guggenheim edited the film to make it seem as if charter schools are a systemic answer to the ills afflicting many traditional public schools, even though they can’t be, by their very design. He unfairly demonized Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and gave undeserved hero status to reformer and former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. Guggenheim compared schools in Finland and the United States without mentioning that Finland has a 3 percent child poverty rate and the United States has a 22 percent rate.
One scene showed a mother touring a charter school -- and saying things such as, “I don’t care if we have to wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning in order to get there at 7:45, then that’s what we will do” -- that turned out to be staged; she already knew her son didn’t get in, according to The New York Times.
Then there was the case of one of the five students featured in the film, Emily Jones, who lives on the suburban San Francisco Peninsula and who, according to "Superman," was desperate to escape her traditional public high school, Woodside High, where she would be doomed to mediocrity.
Except that it wasn’t true. In an interview with John Fensterwald of the Silicon Valley Education Foundation, she said that Woodside “is a great school” that she really liked; she just liked Summit Prep Charter School better.
Late last year, in a piece on Movie Line’s Web site, editor S.T. VanAirsdale asked whether education historian Diane Ravitch’s scathing review of Superman in The New York Review of Books would derail the movie’s chances of nabbing an Oscar.
Just maybe it did.
And maybe this will help persuade those who believed that "Superman" unflinchingly showed reality that, in fact, it didn't, and that it is time to take a new look at public education that doesn't demonize teachers and traditional public schools.
(For the record, the films that did get nominations in the feature documentary category are: Exit through the Gift Shop,Gasland, Inside Job, Restrepo and Waste Land.)
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/school-turnaroundsreform/why-oscar-snubbed-superman---.html?wprss=answer-sheet
by Valerie Stauss
The documentarians who select the films for Academy Award nominations in the feature documentary category got it right: “Waiting for Superman” was not good/accurate enough to be selected.
The snub to Davis Guggenheim’s tendentious film was well-deserved, given that classic documentaries are factual and straightforward, and don’t, as did "Superman," fake scenes for emotional impact.
Academy Award nominations are heavily political, yet this film didn’t make the cut even though President Obama called it “powerful” and welcomed to the White House the five charming students who starred in the film.
Advertising campaigns have been known to vault films into Academy contention, but not even a $2 million grant provided by the Gates Foundation to market “Superman” worked.
Though "Superman" was on the shortlist for an Academy Award in the feature documentary category, apparently the people who vote on the nominations -- people who actually make documentaries -- saw too many problems with “Waiting for Superman.”
And there are many, large and small.
Guggenheim edited the film to make it seem as if charter schools are a systemic answer to the ills afflicting many traditional public schools, even though they can’t be, by their very design. He unfairly demonized Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and gave undeserved hero status to reformer and former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. Guggenheim compared schools in Finland and the United States without mentioning that Finland has a 3 percent child poverty rate and the United States has a 22 percent rate.
One scene showed a mother touring a charter school -- and saying things such as, “I don’t care if we have to wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning in order to get there at 7:45, then that’s what we will do” -- that turned out to be staged; she already knew her son didn’t get in, according to The New York Times.
Then there was the case of one of the five students featured in the film, Emily Jones, who lives on the suburban San Francisco Peninsula and who, according to "Superman," was desperate to escape her traditional public high school, Woodside High, where she would be doomed to mediocrity.
Except that it wasn’t true. In an interview with John Fensterwald of the Silicon Valley Education Foundation, she said that Woodside “is a great school” that she really liked; she just liked Summit Prep Charter School better.
Late last year, in a piece on Movie Line’s Web site, editor S.T. VanAirsdale asked whether education historian Diane Ravitch’s scathing review of Superman in The New York Review of Books would derail the movie’s chances of nabbing an Oscar.
Just maybe it did.
And maybe this will help persuade those who believed that "Superman" unflinchingly showed reality that, in fact, it didn't, and that it is time to take a new look at public education that doesn't demonize teachers and traditional public schools.
(For the record, the films that did get nominations in the feature documentary category are: Exit through the Gift Shop,Gasland, Inside Job, Restrepo and Waste Land.)
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/school-turnaroundsreform/why-oscar-snubbed-superman---.html?wprss=answer-sheet
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
A teacher's translation guide for policymakers
From the Washington Posts Answer Sheet
By Roxanna Elden, author and teacher
It often seems that edu-decision makers and teachers have trouble communicating. Maybe it’s because sometimes we really do speak different languages. At the very least, there are a few phrases in the policymaker-reformer-researcher dialect whose meanings change when filtered through everyday teaching reality. Those hoping for educator buy-in on the next big idea should first consult the translation guide below, which explains some catchphrases and buzzwords that set off warning bells for teachers.
"Failure is not an option"
Actually, failure IS an option. Ironically enough, it tends to be an especially popular option at schools with giant "Failure is not an option!" posters in front of the main office.
Research-based
Teachers are all for research. In fact, our jobs include an ongoing struggle to get students to do more (and plagiarize less) research.
Outside the classroom, however, "research based" roughly translates to, "You aren’t allowed to point out obvious flaws with this new mandate."
For example, teachers are inundated with research-based instructions about how to group students for learning and what activities address different learning styles. Students, unfortunately, have not read this research. When faced with a choice of assessments, they tend toward the "I want to do the easiest project" learning style. Similarly, when offered the chance to choose their own learning partners, they often group themselves homogeneously by loudness, or heterogeneously by such factors as "desire to copy work from one another." Teachers must account for these tendencies before we can use peer-reviewed studies to our students’ advantage.
Rigor
If you sit through one of the new district-mandated trainings on the importance of rigor--and I don’t recommend it--you may notice that the concept would be better described as "not sucking at teaching." Most teachers are on board with this. In fact, some of us have been complaining for years that pressure to replace real teaching with drill-and-kill test prep gets in the way of rigorous instruction.
Imagine our excitement when rigor is introduced as a brand-spankin’ new idea in professional development sessions with names like, "Unlock the Sunshine! Shedding Light on the Opportunities Created by State Assessment 2.0." Usually, these sessions use PowerPoint presentations to explain rigor as something like "teaching interesting things and expecting students to know stuff." In this context, telling teachers that rigor is important suggests we’ve spent most of the year training our students to make different colored Play-Doh balls. Good thing we had this presentation.
Status Quo
This phrase is generally used when accusing someone of defending it, and those are fighting words. ("Boo status quo! Hooray (your reform idea here)!") Meanwhile, the number one piece of inherited wisdom in teaching is the need to be consistent. Imagine, then, the chaos that erupts when class rosters are shuffled three weeks before test day or rival gangs are squeezed into the same high school cafeteria while a school is closed for restructuring. Even potentially positive changes, such as the introduction of a new reading program, have an adjustment period in which the school spends extra money, and teachers spend extra time (and sometimes money) to make the program work as advertised. Most teachers are open to growth and change, but we have also experienced changes so poorly planned, last minute, and disruptive that the status quo doesn’t seem like such a bad alternative.
Paradigm Shift
This term originally referred to discoveries so mind-boggling that they threw science’s fundamental beliefs into sharp new perspective. Here are some moments in history that might be appropriately described as paradigm shifts:
• "Lo and behold, Copernicus, you might just be right about the whole ’Earth orbiting the sun’ thing. Sorry I called you a heretic. No hard, feelings, right?"
• "So, diseases are caused by tiny organisms we can’t even see and that can be killed by antibiotics? Then what am I doing with these leeches on my skin?"• "You win, Columbus, we didn’t fall off the edge of the Earth after all."
Now, the term paradigm shift is used to suggest the groundbreaking importance of statements such as this:
• "As you can see, we’ve rephrased box number sixteen of this evaluation rubric to include the phrases rigor and research-based. Plus, we added a graphic of a smiling apple waving a flag that says, ’The status quo has got to go! Failure is not an option!’"
As a result, the term "paradigm shift" has undergone a shift of its own. It has become a code word in any presentation that means, "You can stop listening now."
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/5-terms-that-show-the-differen.html
By Roxanna Elden, author and teacher
It often seems that edu-decision makers and teachers have trouble communicating. Maybe it’s because sometimes we really do speak different languages. At the very least, there are a few phrases in the policymaker-reformer-researcher dialect whose meanings change when filtered through everyday teaching reality. Those hoping for educator buy-in on the next big idea should first consult the translation guide below, which explains some catchphrases and buzzwords that set off warning bells for teachers.
"Failure is not an option"
Actually, failure IS an option. Ironically enough, it tends to be an especially popular option at schools with giant "Failure is not an option!" posters in front of the main office.
Research-based
Teachers are all for research. In fact, our jobs include an ongoing struggle to get students to do more (and plagiarize less) research.
Outside the classroom, however, "research based" roughly translates to, "You aren’t allowed to point out obvious flaws with this new mandate."
For example, teachers are inundated with research-based instructions about how to group students for learning and what activities address different learning styles. Students, unfortunately, have not read this research. When faced with a choice of assessments, they tend toward the "I want to do the easiest project" learning style. Similarly, when offered the chance to choose their own learning partners, they often group themselves homogeneously by loudness, or heterogeneously by such factors as "desire to copy work from one another." Teachers must account for these tendencies before we can use peer-reviewed studies to our students’ advantage.
Rigor
If you sit through one of the new district-mandated trainings on the importance of rigor--and I don’t recommend it--you may notice that the concept would be better described as "not sucking at teaching." Most teachers are on board with this. In fact, some of us have been complaining for years that pressure to replace real teaching with drill-and-kill test prep gets in the way of rigorous instruction.
Imagine our excitement when rigor is introduced as a brand-spankin’ new idea in professional development sessions with names like, "Unlock the Sunshine! Shedding Light on the Opportunities Created by State Assessment 2.0." Usually, these sessions use PowerPoint presentations to explain rigor as something like "teaching interesting things and expecting students to know stuff." In this context, telling teachers that rigor is important suggests we’ve spent most of the year training our students to make different colored Play-Doh balls. Good thing we had this presentation.
Status Quo
This phrase is generally used when accusing someone of defending it, and those are fighting words. ("Boo status quo! Hooray (your reform idea here)!") Meanwhile, the number one piece of inherited wisdom in teaching is the need to be consistent. Imagine, then, the chaos that erupts when class rosters are shuffled three weeks before test day or rival gangs are squeezed into the same high school cafeteria while a school is closed for restructuring. Even potentially positive changes, such as the introduction of a new reading program, have an adjustment period in which the school spends extra money, and teachers spend extra time (and sometimes money) to make the program work as advertised. Most teachers are open to growth and change, but we have also experienced changes so poorly planned, last minute, and disruptive that the status quo doesn’t seem like such a bad alternative.
Paradigm Shift
This term originally referred to discoveries so mind-boggling that they threw science’s fundamental beliefs into sharp new perspective. Here are some moments in history that might be appropriately described as paradigm shifts:
• "Lo and behold, Copernicus, you might just be right about the whole ’Earth orbiting the sun’ thing. Sorry I called you a heretic. No hard, feelings, right?"
• "So, diseases are caused by tiny organisms we can’t even see and that can be killed by antibiotics? Then what am I doing with these leeches on my skin?"• "You win, Columbus, we didn’t fall off the edge of the Earth after all."
Now, the term paradigm shift is used to suggest the groundbreaking importance of statements such as this:
• "As you can see, we’ve rephrased box number sixteen of this evaluation rubric to include the phrases rigor and research-based. Plus, we added a graphic of a smiling apple waving a flag that says, ’The status quo has got to go! Failure is not an option!’"
As a result, the term "paradigm shift" has undergone a shift of its own. It has become a code word in any presentation that means, "You can stop listening now."
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/5-terms-that-show-the-differen.html
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