It’s hard not to be jaded. It’s hard to see any light at the end of the tunnel. It’s hard not to think of our school board as a hapless bunch feeling around in the dark and this was made all the more apparent with their recent announcement of their plan to split our four schools in danger of closing into eight smaller schools that will occupy the same campuses. They say the cost for this rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic during these trying financial times is merely 2.7 million more dollars.
The district was given three options of what to do if the three high schools and one middle school didn’t improve. Fire the principals and staff, turn them over to private management companies to run or close them. Admittedly none of these options are very satisfactory. The school board however went off the menu and has proposed splitting the schools into two specialty schools each that would occupy the same campuses. My fist question is, if the kids are struggling with the regular education how are they supposed to miraculously be successful with the specialized curriculums?
Here is a possible solution they might not have thought of, how about stop promoting kids to high schools when they don’t have the skills to be successful in them? Barring that our only conceivable back up plan with even a chance of working should include fairy dust or a magic wand.
Sadly what everybody seems to be dancing around and what nobody wants to admit is the fact we have already failed most of the kids at these high schools. They are done; there is not much we can do for them. At worse they will have a life long menial existence and at best their development has been set back years. We have promoted them along without the skills they need and without a work ethic or any discipline. I don’t like it but that’s how it is. They are following thousands upon thousands of other kids we have sent out into society ill prepared for college or the work force. That’s where we currently find ourselves. It however doesn’t have to stay like that.
What we can do is say enough is enough, we’re not going to fail any kids any longer and the biggest way we can do that is by failing some of them. I know that sounds counter intuitive and it will hurt the sacred cow that graduation rates have become but we can’t continue to pass kids and hope they somehow catch up. A decade of doing so should have proven to us by now that it’s not going to work. Graduating kids on time shouldn’t be the number one goal of Duval County’s Public Schools. Graduating children prepared to be productive and civil citizens should be and we should be okay if that takes some regardless of color a little while longer to get there.
Then all the specialty programs like the school board is recommending implementing in the world will not make a difference if schools are places where kids can’t and don’t want to learn. The first thing we must do is take back our hallways and classrooms. Discipline has not improved, teachers tolerance to bad behavior has. Teachers have become masters at ignoring inappropriate behavior that steals education time because they know nothing will be done, well nothing but them having their classroom management questioned and their bonuses, evaluations and potentially their jobs put in jeopardy. Teachers often receive harsher consequences for writing kids up than the kids themselves do.
We must improve our learning environments, we don’t have to be harsh, strict and fair will suffice but if we want to have any chance of having a solution that doesn’t involve fairy dust or a magic wand then bringing discipline and meaningful consequences to our schools and classrooms is where we have to start. If this means we lose a few that won’t conform along the way, well that’s unfortunate but we’ll have addition through subtraction. We will save the ones we can, which I think is a better plan than keeping the ones that pull everybody around them down with them.
After that then we need to make our schools enjoyable. Kids who find school a chore are not going to excel, we need to make multiple and realistic curriculums that fit more of their needs and to do so we have to realize we don’t have the kids we wish we had, we have the kids we do and plan accordingly. Some might not like to hear it but that means that a fair amount of our kids aren’t going to go to college right after graduating high school either because of aptitude or desire. That however should be okay. Remember the goal of our public schools should be to prepare our children to be productive and civil citizens with whatever they choose to do, whether that is college or something else.
Kids in the lower grades need to play and be exposed to the arts, and then kids in the upper grades need to play a role in what their education consists of. Kids that want to drive trucks shouldn’t have to take algebra II. Kids that want to be artists or musicians should have those opportunities and kids that are more interested in earning a decent wage upon graduation rather than going to college should have the opportunity to learn a trade or a skill.
You want children to do well in school? Well make it both a place where learning can occur and a place where they want to be.
My next question is, what doesn’t the school board get?
The school board has been floundering around for a decade now, trying this and trying that to no avail. How many more chances are we going to give them? When are we going to say enough is enough? It’s hard not to be jaded. It’s hard to see any light at the end of the tunnel. It’s hard not to think of our school board as a hapless bunch feeling around in the dark. Split the schools up they say, it’s only 2.7 million more dollars they cry, lets ignore the real problems, a lack of discipline and kids hating school, for a little bit longer they ask.
We have a choice, we can continue on the same path or we can say enough is enough.
Showing posts with label skills. Show all posts
Showing posts with label skills. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Friday, January 21, 2011
We need carpenters, plumbers and mechanics too
I read an article recently that said 7 of the ten job sectors growing the quickest don't require a college degree. I believe schools should prepare kids to be productive and civil citizens whether that means they go to college or not. We don't always have the kids we wish we had and we need to start planning accordingly. -cpg
From the Shanker Blog
by Professor James R. Stone
The headline of the USA Today article reads: “Tense Time for Workers, As Career Paths Fade Away” (January 13, 2011). The article notes that while most key economic indicators have improved over the past two years, the unemployment rate has remained persistently high. This is a jobless recovery.
Is this a time for pessimism or a time for a reality check?
This is not the first jobless recovery. The recession of the early 1990s spawned books with titles such as The Jobless Future (1994), A Future of Lousy Jobs (1990), The End of Work (1995), The End of Affluence (1995), and When Work Disappears (1996). Any one of those, and many other, similarly-titled books and articles could speak to today’s labor market crisis. Were these authors prescient or is the creative destruction in the labor market wrought by our relatively unbridled free enterprise system’s speeding up the cycles? I’ll leave that for economists to argue.
What is new this time around is the effect of the recession on recent college graduates.
For the first time since such records have been kept, recent college grads are experiencing unemployment at rates that mirror national averages – or exceed them, by some reports. The Los Angeles Times recently reported 10.6 percent unemployment among college graduates, compared to the national average of nearly 9.8 percent. Although these rates are lower for the 16-24 year-old age group, one has to wonder if the $20,000 to $40,000 annual investment, over four years, will ever be recovered.
Another factor, while not new, is troublesome. Many policy leaders tout the importance of preparing more and more of our young people for “high-skill” and presumably high-wage jobs. What they fail to understand or recognize is that although highly skilled occupations – those requiring baccalaureate preparation or more – pay well, they are also highly exportable. A researcher at Cornell University documented the movement to India of high-skilled jobs in finance, data modeling, actuarial analysis, medical research, radiology, software research and development, and many other areas. Simply put, if the intellectual work is computer-based, it can be performed anywhere in the world. As Robert Reich pointed out in his book, The Work of Nations (1992), work will chase the lowest wage rate. What we once saw in manufacturing, we are now seeing in other kinds of industries.
So, what should educators conclude from these trends?
During the last several decades of education reform, “College for All” has emerged as the new raison d’être of high school. High school has, in effect, become the new middle school. The only presumed utility of high school is to prepare adolescents for another round of education. A driving force of this emergent philosophy is the presumed necessity of more education as necessary and required for future workforce success. This belief is open to challenge.
If not “College for All,” then what?
A recent variant of “College for All” is “College and Career Ready.” Although the phrase sounds promising, definitions currently being supplied by many public advocacy organizations – and, indeed, by many within the U.S. Department of Education—are definitions of academic skills that mirror those associated with the College for All movement (e.g., high standards and expectations as the means recommended to prepare college-ready graduates). The implicit assumption of these definitions is that career-readiness comes with the same requirements. The evidence contradicts the rhetoric, however. Paul Barton at ETS, Peter Cappelli at the Wharton School, and other labor market experts argue that being prepared for college is not the same as being prepared for a successful transition into the workforce.
Further, these definitions ignore completely the fact that preparation for gainful employment can be obtained through high-quality career and technical education (CTE) programs. This is one of the messages contained in a recent report published by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). The report, titled Learning for Jobs, makes a persuasive case that vocational education (the label for CTE used in most of the world) has been neglected, and that strong programs at the secondary level contribute to economic competitiveness. The OECD report concludes that the United States offers secondary-level opportunities for career exploration but very few for career specialization that could lead to immediate employment. Among its many recommendations, the report argues for more public investment in CTE that teaches immediate jobs skills as well as solid preparation in numeracy and literacy. The latter provides the academic grounding students will need to move directly into employer-based training, without the need for remediation, while they can also continue their education when appropriate for their career pathway. The report also argues for additional preparation in the broader “soft skills” that build a foundation for lifelong learning, responsible citizenship, and career success. Finally, it recommends a pedagogic opportunity largely absent in the United States: high quality work-based learning.
Couple this study with many other recent reports from industry describing the skill shortages in middle-skill occupations or the sub-baccalaureate labor market (see 300 Best Jobs Without a Four-Year Degree, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2009), and you have a persuasive argument for expanding high-quality CTE programs that provide specialized skills valued by employers, coupled with the strong literacy and numeracy skills necessary for successful transition to a productive adulthood.
http://shankerblog.org/?p=1675
From the Shanker Blog
by Professor James R. Stone
The headline of the USA Today article reads: “Tense Time for Workers, As Career Paths Fade Away” (January 13, 2011). The article notes that while most key economic indicators have improved over the past two years, the unemployment rate has remained persistently high. This is a jobless recovery.
Is this a time for pessimism or a time for a reality check?
This is not the first jobless recovery. The recession of the early 1990s spawned books with titles such as The Jobless Future (1994), A Future of Lousy Jobs (1990), The End of Work (1995), The End of Affluence (1995), and When Work Disappears (1996). Any one of those, and many other, similarly-titled books and articles could speak to today’s labor market crisis. Were these authors prescient or is the creative destruction in the labor market wrought by our relatively unbridled free enterprise system’s speeding up the cycles? I’ll leave that for economists to argue.
What is new this time around is the effect of the recession on recent college graduates.
For the first time since such records have been kept, recent college grads are experiencing unemployment at rates that mirror national averages – or exceed them, by some reports. The Los Angeles Times recently reported 10.6 percent unemployment among college graduates, compared to the national average of nearly 9.8 percent. Although these rates are lower for the 16-24 year-old age group, one has to wonder if the $20,000 to $40,000 annual investment, over four years, will ever be recovered.
Another factor, while not new, is troublesome. Many policy leaders tout the importance of preparing more and more of our young people for “high-skill” and presumably high-wage jobs. What they fail to understand or recognize is that although highly skilled occupations – those requiring baccalaureate preparation or more – pay well, they are also highly exportable. A researcher at Cornell University documented the movement to India of high-skilled jobs in finance, data modeling, actuarial analysis, medical research, radiology, software research and development, and many other areas. Simply put, if the intellectual work is computer-based, it can be performed anywhere in the world. As Robert Reich pointed out in his book, The Work of Nations (1992), work will chase the lowest wage rate. What we once saw in manufacturing, we are now seeing in other kinds of industries.
So, what should educators conclude from these trends?
During the last several decades of education reform, “College for All” has emerged as the new raison d’être of high school. High school has, in effect, become the new middle school. The only presumed utility of high school is to prepare adolescents for another round of education. A driving force of this emergent philosophy is the presumed necessity of more education as necessary and required for future workforce success. This belief is open to challenge.
If not “College for All,” then what?
A recent variant of “College for All” is “College and Career Ready.” Although the phrase sounds promising, definitions currently being supplied by many public advocacy organizations – and, indeed, by many within the U.S. Department of Education—are definitions of academic skills that mirror those associated with the College for All movement (e.g., high standards and expectations as the means recommended to prepare college-ready graduates). The implicit assumption of these definitions is that career-readiness comes with the same requirements. The evidence contradicts the rhetoric, however. Paul Barton at ETS, Peter Cappelli at the Wharton School, and other labor market experts argue that being prepared for college is not the same as being prepared for a successful transition into the workforce.
Further, these definitions ignore completely the fact that preparation for gainful employment can be obtained through high-quality career and technical education (CTE) programs. This is one of the messages contained in a recent report published by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). The report, titled Learning for Jobs, makes a persuasive case that vocational education (the label for CTE used in most of the world) has been neglected, and that strong programs at the secondary level contribute to economic competitiveness. The OECD report concludes that the United States offers secondary-level opportunities for career exploration but very few for career specialization that could lead to immediate employment. Among its many recommendations, the report argues for more public investment in CTE that teaches immediate jobs skills as well as solid preparation in numeracy and literacy. The latter provides the academic grounding students will need to move directly into employer-based training, without the need for remediation, while they can also continue their education when appropriate for their career pathway. The report also argues for additional preparation in the broader “soft skills” that build a foundation for lifelong learning, responsible citizenship, and career success. Finally, it recommends a pedagogic opportunity largely absent in the United States: high quality work-based learning.
Couple this study with many other recent reports from industry describing the skill shortages in middle-skill occupations or the sub-baccalaureate labor market (see 300 Best Jobs Without a Four-Year Degree, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2009), and you have a persuasive argument for expanding high-quality CTE programs that provide specialized skills valued by employers, coupled with the strong literacy and numeracy skills necessary for successful transition to a productive adulthood.
http://shankerblog.org/?p=1675
Sunday, January 9, 2011
My 19 year old sophomore says, Jail is Cool
My 19 year old sophomore returned to class today after a five week absence. I know for a good part of the time he was gone he had been in jail. I know this because he was arrested here at school. It happened when after a fight between him and another student was broke up he punched a security guard. Even though this is his first appearance in my class since then, I also know he came one other day, a day where he didn’t make it through his first period class before he had to be forcibly removed.
Yet there he was sitting in my class, with a cat eating grin on his face.
These were far from his first run-ins of the year. I myself had written him up several times for being defiant and disrespectful and I know other teachers have too. Also a few months back he went to a conduct review hearing for threatening to murder one of the deans. As an ESE student he is entitled to a conduct review to see if his behavior is a manifestation of his disability. What’s this young man’s disability, you ask; well he has a learning disability, he needs extra time to process information. How that manifests to him threatening and hitting school board employees, fighting with other children (and at nineteen he’s an adult, it’s the people he is fighting with that are children), being disrespectful and disruptive is beyond me but somehow the school district reasons it does as they stamped his and routinely stamp most conduct review visits “manifestation of disability”.
A master of the system he promised to enter the work program, but three weeks later and with no sign of employment in sight we realized that this had been a ruse and that we had been duped by him once again. Then a little less than two months ago I sat in a meeting where a district psychiatrist after interviewing him and reviewing his records said she was going to recommend he be sent to an alternative school so he could no longer “terrorize students… and teachers.” An interesting choice of words I thought at the time, but as long as he went away I was okay with it, yet there he was back in my class.
As I said, I had written him up a few times. After one time particularly nasty outburst in my room, he told me if I wrote him up I would be the one who got in trouble not him, and in a way he was right. If teachers write to many referrals, then their classroom management and skills as a teacher are questioned. Furthermore a lot of teachers don’t see the point of writing kids up just to see them returned to class with no real consequences for their actions. Often when they come back they are worse, not contrite as they should be but angry for the momentary time away from their friends. So teachers just endure or kick them out when they can’t endure anymore, but they aren’t the only ones that are forced to put up with their behavior, the other students in the class, your sons and daughters have to endure it as well.
Speaking of enduring, I had to endure my 19 year old sophomore talk about how jail was not so bad to his classmates. You got three squares a day and if you had money in your commissary you could get a packet of noodles for fifteen cents and a Little Debbie for a quarter, he told them. He continued, I said when they arrested me that I’m not scared of jail, and it was actually kind of fun sometimes, talking to the old timers. When a kid says jail is kind of fun, what do teachers have left, what can we do? The answer is not much.
I sometimes write about magnet schools and how I think they are unfair but in a way I am a hypocrite. You see if I had any high school aged children I would want them to go to a magnet school and it’s not because the teachers there are better, it’s because they are safer as your modern high school can be a dangerous place. Furthermore I wouldn’t want my children around kids who didn’t care about themselves or school and who thought that it was okay to disrupt class and be disrespectful to teachers. A colleague told me what he said to his class once. He said, “If you don’t care about school or you want to come to my class and just skate through you can, I don’t ask a whole lot, the class isn’t that tough and like most things in your life learning is up to you but if that’s what you want to do can you at least pretend to be decent human beings, while you do it.” I would want my children to be around decent human beings.
That’s not to say there are not a lot of good kids at my school; in fact I would say most of them are. Some of the kids in my classes who are just marginally, at best, interested in school are also some of my favorites. Sadly however there is a significant number of kids who don’t care, who only come to school because they are forced to or to see what trouble they can find or to take care of business. And what’s worse, is the fact a lot of these kids, like my 19 year old sophomore, who when he wants to be can be very charming, are role models. I don’t know when it happened but at some point looking up to teachers became not cool and looking up to kids who are disruptive and disrespectful to teachers did. It was so disheartening seeing several of my students hanging on my nineteen year old sophomores every word, especially his words, “jail is kind of fun.”
How do we turn these kids around? I would first suggest changing the schedule, ninety minutes in high school is way too long. When is the last time you got a 14 year old to focus that long on anything? Next have curriculums kids are interested in, bring back trades and skills, plus having more electives that can have an accompanying academic component couldn’t hurt either. Then we have to bring back discipline, when a child acts out they must get a meaningful consequence for their actions, if not all they have learned is it doesn’t matter what they do and that invariably means that their behavior will worsen.
So what’s going to happen to my nineteen year old sophomore? I am told he goes back for another conduct review later this month. Until then he is allowed to come to school, where I am sure he will let his classmates know, “jail is kind of fun.”
Yet there he was sitting in my class, with a cat eating grin on his face.
These were far from his first run-ins of the year. I myself had written him up several times for being defiant and disrespectful and I know other teachers have too. Also a few months back he went to a conduct review hearing for threatening to murder one of the deans. As an ESE student he is entitled to a conduct review to see if his behavior is a manifestation of his disability. What’s this young man’s disability, you ask; well he has a learning disability, he needs extra time to process information. How that manifests to him threatening and hitting school board employees, fighting with other children (and at nineteen he’s an adult, it’s the people he is fighting with that are children), being disrespectful and disruptive is beyond me but somehow the school district reasons it does as they stamped his and routinely stamp most conduct review visits “manifestation of disability”.
A master of the system he promised to enter the work program, but three weeks later and with no sign of employment in sight we realized that this had been a ruse and that we had been duped by him once again. Then a little less than two months ago I sat in a meeting where a district psychiatrist after interviewing him and reviewing his records said she was going to recommend he be sent to an alternative school so he could no longer “terrorize students… and teachers.” An interesting choice of words I thought at the time, but as long as he went away I was okay with it, yet there he was back in my class.
As I said, I had written him up a few times. After one time particularly nasty outburst in my room, he told me if I wrote him up I would be the one who got in trouble not him, and in a way he was right. If teachers write to many referrals, then their classroom management and skills as a teacher are questioned. Furthermore a lot of teachers don’t see the point of writing kids up just to see them returned to class with no real consequences for their actions. Often when they come back they are worse, not contrite as they should be but angry for the momentary time away from their friends. So teachers just endure or kick them out when they can’t endure anymore, but they aren’t the only ones that are forced to put up with their behavior, the other students in the class, your sons and daughters have to endure it as well.
Speaking of enduring, I had to endure my 19 year old sophomore talk about how jail was not so bad to his classmates. You got three squares a day and if you had money in your commissary you could get a packet of noodles for fifteen cents and a Little Debbie for a quarter, he told them. He continued, I said when they arrested me that I’m not scared of jail, and it was actually kind of fun sometimes, talking to the old timers. When a kid says jail is kind of fun, what do teachers have left, what can we do? The answer is not much.
I sometimes write about magnet schools and how I think they are unfair but in a way I am a hypocrite. You see if I had any high school aged children I would want them to go to a magnet school and it’s not because the teachers there are better, it’s because they are safer as your modern high school can be a dangerous place. Furthermore I wouldn’t want my children around kids who didn’t care about themselves or school and who thought that it was okay to disrupt class and be disrespectful to teachers. A colleague told me what he said to his class once. He said, “If you don’t care about school or you want to come to my class and just skate through you can, I don’t ask a whole lot, the class isn’t that tough and like most things in your life learning is up to you but if that’s what you want to do can you at least pretend to be decent human beings, while you do it.” I would want my children to be around decent human beings.
That’s not to say there are not a lot of good kids at my school; in fact I would say most of them are. Some of the kids in my classes who are just marginally, at best, interested in school are also some of my favorites. Sadly however there is a significant number of kids who don’t care, who only come to school because they are forced to or to see what trouble they can find or to take care of business. And what’s worse, is the fact a lot of these kids, like my 19 year old sophomore, who when he wants to be can be very charming, are role models. I don’t know when it happened but at some point looking up to teachers became not cool and looking up to kids who are disruptive and disrespectful to teachers did. It was so disheartening seeing several of my students hanging on my nineteen year old sophomores every word, especially his words, “jail is kind of fun.”
How do we turn these kids around? I would first suggest changing the schedule, ninety minutes in high school is way too long. When is the last time you got a 14 year old to focus that long on anything? Next have curriculums kids are interested in, bring back trades and skills, plus having more electives that can have an accompanying academic component couldn’t hurt either. Then we have to bring back discipline, when a child acts out they must get a meaningful consequence for their actions, if not all they have learned is it doesn’t matter what they do and that invariably means that their behavior will worsen.
So what’s going to happen to my nineteen year old sophomore? I am told he goes back for another conduct review later this month. Until then he is allowed to come to school, where I am sure he will let his classmates know, “jail is kind of fun.”
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Bring back shop class
By Marc Epstein
Marc Epstein is a history teacher at Jamaica High School in Queens, N.Y., for the past 15 years, and a former dean of students. His articles on school violence, curriculum, and testing, have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers and he blogs for the Huffington Post. He also contributed to A Consumer's Guide To High School History Textbooks, edited by Diane Ravitch. Epstein earned a PhD in Japanese - American Diplomatic history.
As student failures pile up, manual education might be poised for a comeback.
When I started teaching history at Jamaica High School in the mid-nineties, the shops in the basement had already been closed for nearly 10 years. Eventually the shops were converted into classrooms, at no small expense, and were reserved for double periods of English instruction for students with reading levels well below average.
No Child Left Behind required that these students be brought to proficiency. Manual education was not considered as an option for these students; it was only for dummies, the dominant thinking now went, or for those so disadvantaged that they could never hope to learn anything “real.”
It was not always thus.
“A century ago,” Charles Murray writes, “the parents of students in a typical high school worked at all sorts of trades, crafts, and professions.” And for generations afterward, their children learned manual skills in public schools. Knowing how to put a sheet on a bed and making “hospital corners,” sewing, washing, and rinsing dishes properly, and even planting and cultivating a vegetable garden, were part of my mother’s elementary school education at Brooklyn’s PS 16 in the 1920s.
For my part, I still remember embroidering a dishtowel that was to be a Mother’s Day gift in the fifth grade. There was even a fenced-off portion of our schoolyard at P.S. 139 where first-, second-, and third-grade students grew carrots, lettuce, radishes, and string beans. My friend Richie still has his gardening certificates.
The most memorable part of my two years at Halsey Junior High School were the shop classes, which all students, even those in the enriched and accelerated Special Progress programs, were required to take. My parents, who expected me to go to college, never questioned the efficacy of these classes. They felt it was important that I learn how to use my hands as well as my mind.
Back then, the value of manual education was broadly accepted and considered part of a liberal education in New York City schools. But today, caught in the maelstrom of political correctness and recklessly misguided educational philosophy, manual education has been tossed aside. As Murray writes, “upper-middle-class children can graduate from high school isolated from any contact with a world in which people make their livings by working their hands and without ever knowing the satisfactions that can come from non-academic forms of excellence.”
Attitudes toward manual education have come full circle over the last century and a half.
Our current distaste for the practice mirrors the disdain many 19th-century education reformers had for it. They believed that manual training had no place in the classroom because it didn’t promote intellectual inquiry.
But then John D. Runkle, president of MIT, initiated a revolution in American education that wedded manual to intellectual education. In 1876, Runkle visited the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and came upon a Russian exhibition by Victor Della Vos, director of the Moscow Imperial Technical School.
Della Vos had developed “instruction shops” for each trade in a pedagogical order that allowed students to progress from one level to the next while studying math, physics, and engineering. Runkle thought that Della Vos’s process of instruction should be part of liberal education in an industrial society. And, according to educational historian Lawrence Cremin, “American education was never the same thereafter.”
The transformation didn’t end there. Another educator, Calvin Woodward, believed that Americans should “put the whole boy in school” and give him what was called a well-rounded education, one that shouldn’t be reserved just for those destined for advanced learning.
He wanted the “toiling classes” educated in the same fashion. Woodward opposed separating those destined for “work” from those destined for “thinking,” and he believed that book learning by itself couldn’t teach students how to be productive in the world. On the contrary, he argued, the drudgery of a books-only curriculum encouraged more students to drop out after completing eighth grade. By 1890, schools in 36 cities had instituted shop classes for boys and girls.
From that point on until the last 20 years or so, manual education had a stronghold in public schools. But today’s students, regardless of academic ability, don’t have the opportunity to learn manual skills unless they take an elective art course or work on an extracurricular activity that calls for hands-on activity. Educators have encouraged students to take the academic route regardless of their prospects for completing a degree in higher education.
My school, Jamaica High in Queens, has taken steps at remedying this, with some success. We run a program that guides those who have made little academic progress by age 17 toward acquiring a technical skill. But we have to bus these students to Co-Op Tech, the only facility of its kind in Manhattan-and not until they’ve taken the academic courses that qualify them for the GED exam, and wasted three years of high school.
It’s possible that another shift in thinking about manual education is on the horizon. As student failures pile up, some politicians have begun calling for a return to technical education.
“College isn’t for everyone, but education is,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in 2008, announcing a new initiative focused on vocational education in high schools and community colleges. “Traditionally, such career and technical education has been seen as an educational dead end. We’re going to change that.”
New York currently operates about two dozen vocational high schools, but there is no concerted effort yet to restore manual education in regular public high schools, even with an annual public high school budget now totaling $22 billion.
I wonder how much time and money we might save if the old shops in the basement were reopened, and all students, regardless of their academic aptitude, were given a daily dose of shop class.
Re-instituting manual education just might lead to a renaissance of common sense in how we educate our children.
Taken from the Washington Post:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/bring-back-shop-class.html?wprss=answer-sheet
Marc Epstein is a history teacher at Jamaica High School in Queens, N.Y., for the past 15 years, and a former dean of students. His articles on school violence, curriculum, and testing, have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers and he blogs for the Huffington Post. He also contributed to A Consumer's Guide To High School History Textbooks, edited by Diane Ravitch. Epstein earned a PhD in Japanese - American Diplomatic history.
As student failures pile up, manual education might be poised for a comeback.
When I started teaching history at Jamaica High School in the mid-nineties, the shops in the basement had already been closed for nearly 10 years. Eventually the shops were converted into classrooms, at no small expense, and were reserved for double periods of English instruction for students with reading levels well below average.
No Child Left Behind required that these students be brought to proficiency. Manual education was not considered as an option for these students; it was only for dummies, the dominant thinking now went, or for those so disadvantaged that they could never hope to learn anything “real.”
It was not always thus.
“A century ago,” Charles Murray writes, “the parents of students in a typical high school worked at all sorts of trades, crafts, and professions.” And for generations afterward, their children learned manual skills in public schools. Knowing how to put a sheet on a bed and making “hospital corners,” sewing, washing, and rinsing dishes properly, and even planting and cultivating a vegetable garden, were part of my mother’s elementary school education at Brooklyn’s PS 16 in the 1920s.
For my part, I still remember embroidering a dishtowel that was to be a Mother’s Day gift in the fifth grade. There was even a fenced-off portion of our schoolyard at P.S. 139 where first-, second-, and third-grade students grew carrots, lettuce, radishes, and string beans. My friend Richie still has his gardening certificates.
The most memorable part of my two years at Halsey Junior High School were the shop classes, which all students, even those in the enriched and accelerated Special Progress programs, were required to take. My parents, who expected me to go to college, never questioned the efficacy of these classes. They felt it was important that I learn how to use my hands as well as my mind.
Back then, the value of manual education was broadly accepted and considered part of a liberal education in New York City schools. But today, caught in the maelstrom of political correctness and recklessly misguided educational philosophy, manual education has been tossed aside. As Murray writes, “upper-middle-class children can graduate from high school isolated from any contact with a world in which people make their livings by working their hands and without ever knowing the satisfactions that can come from non-academic forms of excellence.”
Attitudes toward manual education have come full circle over the last century and a half.
Our current distaste for the practice mirrors the disdain many 19th-century education reformers had for it. They believed that manual training had no place in the classroom because it didn’t promote intellectual inquiry.
But then John D. Runkle, president of MIT, initiated a revolution in American education that wedded manual to intellectual education. In 1876, Runkle visited the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and came upon a Russian exhibition by Victor Della Vos, director of the Moscow Imperial Technical School.
Della Vos had developed “instruction shops” for each trade in a pedagogical order that allowed students to progress from one level to the next while studying math, physics, and engineering. Runkle thought that Della Vos’s process of instruction should be part of liberal education in an industrial society. And, according to educational historian Lawrence Cremin, “American education was never the same thereafter.”
The transformation didn’t end there. Another educator, Calvin Woodward, believed that Americans should “put the whole boy in school” and give him what was called a well-rounded education, one that shouldn’t be reserved just for those destined for advanced learning.
He wanted the “toiling classes” educated in the same fashion. Woodward opposed separating those destined for “work” from those destined for “thinking,” and he believed that book learning by itself couldn’t teach students how to be productive in the world. On the contrary, he argued, the drudgery of a books-only curriculum encouraged more students to drop out after completing eighth grade. By 1890, schools in 36 cities had instituted shop classes for boys and girls.
From that point on until the last 20 years or so, manual education had a stronghold in public schools. But today’s students, regardless of academic ability, don’t have the opportunity to learn manual skills unless they take an elective art course or work on an extracurricular activity that calls for hands-on activity. Educators have encouraged students to take the academic route regardless of their prospects for completing a degree in higher education.
My school, Jamaica High in Queens, has taken steps at remedying this, with some success. We run a program that guides those who have made little academic progress by age 17 toward acquiring a technical skill. But we have to bus these students to Co-Op Tech, the only facility of its kind in Manhattan-and not until they’ve taken the academic courses that qualify them for the GED exam, and wasted three years of high school.
It’s possible that another shift in thinking about manual education is on the horizon. As student failures pile up, some politicians have begun calling for a return to technical education.
“College isn’t for everyone, but education is,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in 2008, announcing a new initiative focused on vocational education in high schools and community colleges. “Traditionally, such career and technical education has been seen as an educational dead end. We’re going to change that.”
New York currently operates about two dozen vocational high schools, but there is no concerted effort yet to restore manual education in regular public high schools, even with an annual public high school budget now totaling $22 billion.
I wonder how much time and money we might save if the old shops in the basement were reopened, and all students, regardless of their academic aptitude, were given a daily dose of shop class.
Re-instituting manual education just might lead to a renaissance of common sense in how we educate our children.
Taken from the Washington Post:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/bring-back-shop-class.html?wprss=answer-sheet
Monday, November 22, 2010
Even in failure the St. Johns County school district gets it right
Even in failure the St. Johns County public school system got it right.
The Florida Times Union recently ran a story about St. Johns County’s lone failing school, St. Johns technical high school. This is a big deal for several different reasons. First because St. Johns County is the highest achieving district in the state and any news of failure is big news and second because even in failure the St. Johns County school district has gotten it right.
The vast majority of the kids that go to St. Johns vocational high school are unlike the kids in the rest of the county, they aren't going to go to college and quite frankly they have struggled throughout their academic carrers. “Most since the first day of kindergarten” the piece mentions, and perhaps the main reason for this is because many of the kids have disabilities. At this school however instead of just struggling as they would at a typical high school, they can also earn a certificate in a variety fields such as cosmetology, landscaping or culinary arts. They learn a skill that prepares them or life that far more than learning the quadratic formula and how to conjugate verbs does. This is how St. Johns County got it right.
Capable disabled students in Duval County have no such option and very little in the way of opportunity. Despite their disabilities we are in the process of shoving them into the same one size fits all, everybody is going to go to college curriculum that the district has deemed is appropriate for everybody. What’s the difference in curriculum between a highly motivated student at Stanton with an IQ of 120 who wants to be an engineer and a learning disabled student at Ed White who has an IQ of 80 and who wants to drive a truck? The answer is, there is none.
Also since we are doing away with special diploma options, I believe partly because kids that earn them will begin to count against a schools grade, we are forcing kids who after ten years of school and who can’t do their times tables into algebra classes where they will either fail or receive the “gentlemen’s C” that dominates so many teachers grade books. Also, you ever wonder why kids act out in class? Well one of the biggest reasons is the material is too much for them and it leads to frustration which leads to bad behavior. Many of our disabled children act out the most. See a correlation?
I get that the powers that be think that some of these students haven’t been given the proper opportunities to test their academic mettle and that they hope when put in these advanced for them academic settings they will be able to be successful. What they don’t get however is that if wishes were real we would all be riding rocket powered unicorns. Instead of blowing the system up, why don’t we here in Duval County do something realistic and put the kids in situations they can not only potentially be successful in but will also give them a tangible benefit like earning a certificate. Why don’t we do something like St. John’s County does? Though I guess there is a reason why they are considered one of the best school districts in Florida and Duval County is considered something different.
I am a special education teacher and it does my heart good to see one of my kids succeed in the regular education setting but likewise it breaks my heart to see kids thrust into those situations who have no real chance at being successful and it frustrates me to know end that we are teaching these kids things they most likely will never get and if by some miracle they did would never use. We should not just be okay with these kids learning a technical skill but we should encourage it and celebrate it when they earn them. However once again we have designed our schools around the kids we wish we had preparing them for the jobs we want them to do and in the process almost assured that the kids we do have won’t be successful post school.
Many of Duval Counties disabled kids will graduate ill prpared to continue their education and unlike their counterparts in St. Johns county without a skill. Well what do you think is going to happen to them? The best and brightest will get menial dead end jobs and the others will continue on the dole of society either recieving public assistance or for some who when faced with few options make bad choices a period of enforced residency at the behest of the state.
Perhaps what’s most frustrating in all this is it wasn’t that long ago that Duval County got it right. We had award winning skill centers that kids would go to half a day where they could learn the trades and skills that they and their parents thought would better suit them and the other half of the day they would be at their home schools where they would learn their academics. The skill centers have now sadly gone away replaced with academic magnets that many of our regular and most of our special education students cannot be successful in. Every year kids trickle away from Frank Peterson because they couldn’t cut the mustard, heading back to their neighborhood schools where they often continue to languish.
We desperately need an option or our disabled kids and our kids that either don’t have the aptitude or interest in going to college. Our one size it’s all curriculum, where we have devalued the teaching of the trades, skills and arts has led directly many of the districts problems. Furthermore I know we want every kid to go to college and that’s a laudable goal, sadly it’s also an unrealistic goal. Instead of having a school system for the kids we wish we had, I think it would do us, them and the district well to have a school system appropriate for the ones we do. Even though they knew it would be hard and extra work in St. Johns County, even though they realized they might not be successful when it was factored into the states cookie cutter system that rarely takes the concerns of the children into consideration, they did it anyways. They made a place for all their students, why can’t we.
In the end, even in "failure" because they made their special needs children a priority St. Johns County got it right.
Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher
The Florida Times Union recently ran a story about St. Johns County’s lone failing school, St. Johns technical high school. This is a big deal for several different reasons. First because St. Johns County is the highest achieving district in the state and any news of failure is big news and second because even in failure the St. Johns County school district has gotten it right.
The vast majority of the kids that go to St. Johns vocational high school are unlike the kids in the rest of the county, they aren't going to go to college and quite frankly they have struggled throughout their academic carrers. “Most since the first day of kindergarten” the piece mentions, and perhaps the main reason for this is because many of the kids have disabilities. At this school however instead of just struggling as they would at a typical high school, they can also earn a certificate in a variety fields such as cosmetology, landscaping or culinary arts. They learn a skill that prepares them or life that far more than learning the quadratic formula and how to conjugate verbs does. This is how St. Johns County got it right.
Capable disabled students in Duval County have no such option and very little in the way of opportunity. Despite their disabilities we are in the process of shoving them into the same one size fits all, everybody is going to go to college curriculum that the district has deemed is appropriate for everybody. What’s the difference in curriculum between a highly motivated student at Stanton with an IQ of 120 who wants to be an engineer and a learning disabled student at Ed White who has an IQ of 80 and who wants to drive a truck? The answer is, there is none.
Also since we are doing away with special diploma options, I believe partly because kids that earn them will begin to count against a schools grade, we are forcing kids who after ten years of school and who can’t do their times tables into algebra classes where they will either fail or receive the “gentlemen’s C” that dominates so many teachers grade books. Also, you ever wonder why kids act out in class? Well one of the biggest reasons is the material is too much for them and it leads to frustration which leads to bad behavior. Many of our disabled children act out the most. See a correlation?
I get that the powers that be think that some of these students haven’t been given the proper opportunities to test their academic mettle and that they hope when put in these advanced for them academic settings they will be able to be successful. What they don’t get however is that if wishes were real we would all be riding rocket powered unicorns. Instead of blowing the system up, why don’t we here in Duval County do something realistic and put the kids in situations they can not only potentially be successful in but will also give them a tangible benefit like earning a certificate. Why don’t we do something like St. John’s County does? Though I guess there is a reason why they are considered one of the best school districts in Florida and Duval County is considered something different.
I am a special education teacher and it does my heart good to see one of my kids succeed in the regular education setting but likewise it breaks my heart to see kids thrust into those situations who have no real chance at being successful and it frustrates me to know end that we are teaching these kids things they most likely will never get and if by some miracle they did would never use. We should not just be okay with these kids learning a technical skill but we should encourage it and celebrate it when they earn them. However once again we have designed our schools around the kids we wish we had preparing them for the jobs we want them to do and in the process almost assured that the kids we do have won’t be successful post school.
Many of Duval Counties disabled kids will graduate ill prpared to continue their education and unlike their counterparts in St. Johns county without a skill. Well what do you think is going to happen to them? The best and brightest will get menial dead end jobs and the others will continue on the dole of society either recieving public assistance or for some who when faced with few options make bad choices a period of enforced residency at the behest of the state.
Perhaps what’s most frustrating in all this is it wasn’t that long ago that Duval County got it right. We had award winning skill centers that kids would go to half a day where they could learn the trades and skills that they and their parents thought would better suit them and the other half of the day they would be at their home schools where they would learn their academics. The skill centers have now sadly gone away replaced with academic magnets that many of our regular and most of our special education students cannot be successful in. Every year kids trickle away from Frank Peterson because they couldn’t cut the mustard, heading back to their neighborhood schools where they often continue to languish.
We desperately need an option or our disabled kids and our kids that either don’t have the aptitude or interest in going to college. Our one size it’s all curriculum, where we have devalued the teaching of the trades, skills and arts has led directly many of the districts problems. Furthermore I know we want every kid to go to college and that’s a laudable goal, sadly it’s also an unrealistic goal. Instead of having a school system for the kids we wish we had, I think it would do us, them and the district well to have a school system appropriate for the ones we do. Even though they knew it would be hard and extra work in St. Johns County, even though they realized they might not be successful when it was factored into the states cookie cutter system that rarely takes the concerns of the children into consideration, they did it anyways. They made a place for all their students, why can’t we.
In the end, even in "failure" because they made their special needs children a priority St. Johns County got it right.
Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher
Thursday, July 15, 2010
School Board Questions
An editor for the Times Union told me they plan to interview the candidates for the school board next week and asked if I had any questions I would like to see them answer. This is what I came up with and then for fun I answered them.
Do you think principals evaluations should be tied to how many suspensions they give out? Definitely not. It takes a tool out of their toolbox and hurts discipline in general.
Do you think severely disabled students should be taught access points or learn life and employability skills? No access points are watered down academics that they will never get or use. We should be teaching them things that would be beneficial to them.
What do you think about reintroducing the teaching of skills, trades and the arts on a district wide level? I think this should be a priority.
What do you think about school board employees making in excess of a hundred thousand dollars? No school board employee should make more than a hundred thousand dollars. The argument that we have to pay to attract top talent for me doesn’t hold water especially since so many teachers are paycheck to paycheck.
Do you think students who can’t read at grade level or read several grades below grade level should be promoted? After school and summer school should not be optional for these students. If a student is more than a grade level or two behind it is going to greatly diminish the chances of them being legitimately successful.
The district currently has a one size fits all curriculum, a kid that has an I.Q. of 130 who loves school and wants to be an engineer has to take and pass algebra II just like a kid with a ninety I.Q. that doesn’t care for school and who wants to drive trucks. Do you think this one size fits all curriculum benefits all students. No it hurts many of them and leads to many of the problems we are having. We need to develop alternate curriculums.
How would you have teachers evaluated? I would have them evaluated by teams of peers from other schools, they will no what should be happening and have little concern for office politics.
Would you support making grade recovery just for students who had legitimate reasons for missing class or for students who came, participated and tried but still failed, instead of the anybody can take it for any reason system we have now? Only kids that legitimately missed class or tried should be allowed to use grade recovery.
Diploma option 2 conveys none of the same benefits as a regular diploma, kids who graduate with one cannot go to college or join the military do you think having them take GED classes instead would be more or less beneficial? GED classes should be worked into their curriculums.
How do you think enforcement of the code of conduct should be handled? It should be vigorously enforced. Kids need consequences for inappropriate behavior.
Many teachers work dozens of hours of unpaid over time a week to complete all the tasks assigned to them. What do you think about paying them overtime or prioritizing the tasks they need to complete so they don’t have to work so much unpaid over-time? Either works for me but regardless teachers should not be working dozens of hours of unpaid overtime.
Do you think being in a classroom makes one more or less prepared to be a member of the school board? More prepared by far.
Would you be willing to substitute one day a week in the schools you represent? Yes
In order, whom do you think you will represent the most too least: the administration, parents, stakeholders, students, and teachers? Students and teachers would be 1 and 1A, then parents and stakeholders with union and administration concerns coming in last.
Do you think students who are classified a level one, two or three should be allowed to take advanced placement classes as they are now? No, they are not prepared.
Superintendent Pratt-Dannals said, we are a good community away from having a good school system. Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Why? I vigorously disagree where I think the both play a role on each other, schools have a bare minimum they should be doing, such as instilling discipline and ending social promotions and until we are doing that we are exacerbating societies problems.
What’s your big idea to turn things around? Getting back to the basics. Discipline, multiple curriculums and ending social promotions.
Do you think principals evaluations should be tied to how many suspensions they give out? Definitely not. It takes a tool out of their toolbox and hurts discipline in general.
Do you think severely disabled students should be taught access points or learn life and employability skills? No access points are watered down academics that they will never get or use. We should be teaching them things that would be beneficial to them.
What do you think about reintroducing the teaching of skills, trades and the arts on a district wide level? I think this should be a priority.
What do you think about school board employees making in excess of a hundred thousand dollars? No school board employee should make more than a hundred thousand dollars. The argument that we have to pay to attract top talent for me doesn’t hold water especially since so many teachers are paycheck to paycheck.
Do you think students who can’t read at grade level or read several grades below grade level should be promoted? After school and summer school should not be optional for these students. If a student is more than a grade level or two behind it is going to greatly diminish the chances of them being legitimately successful.
The district currently has a one size fits all curriculum, a kid that has an I.Q. of 130 who loves school and wants to be an engineer has to take and pass algebra II just like a kid with a ninety I.Q. that doesn’t care for school and who wants to drive trucks. Do you think this one size fits all curriculum benefits all students. No it hurts many of them and leads to many of the problems we are having. We need to develop alternate curriculums.
How would you have teachers evaluated? I would have them evaluated by teams of peers from other schools, they will no what should be happening and have little concern for office politics.
Would you support making grade recovery just for students who had legitimate reasons for missing class or for students who came, participated and tried but still failed, instead of the anybody can take it for any reason system we have now? Only kids that legitimately missed class or tried should be allowed to use grade recovery.
Diploma option 2 conveys none of the same benefits as a regular diploma, kids who graduate with one cannot go to college or join the military do you think having them take GED classes instead would be more or less beneficial? GED classes should be worked into their curriculums.
How do you think enforcement of the code of conduct should be handled? It should be vigorously enforced. Kids need consequences for inappropriate behavior.
Many teachers work dozens of hours of unpaid over time a week to complete all the tasks assigned to them. What do you think about paying them overtime or prioritizing the tasks they need to complete so they don’t have to work so much unpaid over-time? Either works for me but regardless teachers should not be working dozens of hours of unpaid overtime.
Do you think being in a classroom makes one more or less prepared to be a member of the school board? More prepared by far.
Would you be willing to substitute one day a week in the schools you represent? Yes
In order, whom do you think you will represent the most too least: the administration, parents, stakeholders, students, and teachers? Students and teachers would be 1 and 1A, then parents and stakeholders with union and administration concerns coming in last.
Do you think students who are classified a level one, two or three should be allowed to take advanced placement classes as they are now? No, they are not prepared.
Superintendent Pratt-Dannals said, we are a good community away from having a good school system. Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Why? I vigorously disagree where I think the both play a role on each other, schools have a bare minimum they should be doing, such as instilling discipline and ending social promotions and until we are doing that we are exacerbating societies problems.
What’s your big idea to turn things around? Getting back to the basics. Discipline, multiple curriculums and ending social promotions.
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