“Surely there is enough for everyone within this country. It is a tragedy that these good things are not more widely shared. All our children ought to be allowed a stake in the enormous richness of America.”
Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (1991)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
Astute readers of Jane Jacobs‘ classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities recognize from its first page that Ms. Jacobs was an extremely subtle observer of the phenomena that interested her–the street life of New York City, and more specifically, the activities of her neighbors on her lovely block along Hudson Street in Greenwich Village. Ms. Jacobs was able to recognize patterns in the day-to-day activities of the residents of New York City (and Philadelphia as well, to wit Rittenhouse Square, which is a neighborhood very similar to the Village) that most other people, particularly her principal foe, New York City “master builder” Robert Moses, simply could not or would not. Her powers of perception, and her gift for composing lucid prose that dealt with complex issues, have made The Death and Life of Great American Cities a staple of urban planning curricula at the college level. Robert Caro has apparently said that the book was the strongest influence on his masterful biography of Moses, The Power Broker.
Diane Ravitch opens her book The Death and Life of the Great American School System by announcing that its title is an homage to Jane Jacobs and her magisterial assessment of the life of cities. That’s clearly the case, but there’s much more to this book–and what it says about Diane Ravitch the historian and author. Like Jane Jacobs, Dr. Ravitch possesses exquisitely subtle powers of observation and perception. Her bailiwick, however, is public education. While it is true that Robert Moses was the leader of a large bureaucracy, he clearly enjoyed the limelight, which made him a focal point for Jane Jacobs, a clearly identifiable opponent. Educational “reform” is a dense and tangled forest of persons, bureaucracies, institutions, and foundations (not to mention motivations), many of whom operate surreptitiously. Sorting out the strands of this web–something for which many busy teachers have no time, if no patience as well (I certainly don’t)–takes real dedication and talent, something Diane Ravitch, the reader will observe from the first page of her book, possesses in ample measure. As a prose stylist, she surpasses Ms. Jacobs, which is no mean feat.
In any case, this book addresses the tendency of education scholarship, theory, and practice, to cycle through various fads. While these generally range from the silly to the occasionally deleterious, it is our current state of “reform” faddism, led by “reformers” like Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Arne Duncan, and the man who succeeded Mr. Duncan as United States Secretary of Education (after antagonizing parents and teachers across New York State), John King, Jr., that this book exposes and analyzes. The corporate foundations–Bill and Melinda Gates, The Walton (i.e Wal-Mart) Family Foundation, The Broad Foundation and their ilk–that abet the various enterprises that this group of functionaries oversees suggests what the real project here is: privatizing public education so that “educational entrepreneurs” can capitalize on it. It’s no coincidence that various hedge fund billionaires–you know, those self-proclaimed geniuses who were culpable in almost driving the world economy off a cliff in 2008–have jumped on this particular bandwagon. Dr. Ravitch has followed these trends closely, knows the players–in some cases personally–and sorts them out for her reader.
What makes this book particularly compelling is the fact that Dr. Ravitch, who served in the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, was a proponent of George W. Bush’s signature, and dubious, education legislation, “No Child Left Behind.” One of the most compelling moments in her narrative occurs when she realizes that No Child Left Behind is doomed to failure, and that she has bet on the wrong horse. Indeed, she repudiates this piece of dismal legislation in a few economical but well-sourced sentences.
As that great subverter Nietzsche wrote, “a very popular error–having the courage of one’s convictions: Rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one’s convictions.” Diane Ravitch demonstrates such courage here, and I have to imagine that it was neither fun nor easy to excoriate one’s former positions before the public as she does in this book. What makes Dr. Ravitch a paragon of scholarly disinterest and integrity is her willingness to follow the evidence. She does so here, and distills it into highly readable (I envy her ability to pack so much information into a single declarative sentence) account of these reformers and their failed ideas.
Posted in Essays/Readings, New York City, Social Sciences
Tagged professional development
There are number of charter school chains operating in New York City, and nationally, which vaunt their “no excuses” approach to student discipline. My own admittedly cursory understanding of this behavioral cosmology is that it means what it says: teachers, school administrators–in other words, the authority figures that matter in school–will accept “no excuses” for poor disciplinary or academic performance in school.
Unsurprisingly, this controversial approach to dealing with students has found its way into public schools, and into the collective consciousness and discourse of administrators and teachers. Whatever the merits or demerits of this approach to managing students’ behavior, it militantly ignores the economic, social and emotional realities of students’s lives. Indeed, the quality of students’ interior and social lives is essentially shunted aside in favor of the metrics that standardized tests provide.There is talk now of a test to measure “grit,” which is the new buzzword to describe a student’s resilience. This has tended to strike me as primarily an ideological and bureaucratic fantasy, and ignores psychological realities, among others.
The “no excuses” ideology has lodged itself among educators in what has begun to look like an institutional denial of poverty as a cause of children’s problems in school. Facebook friends of mine who work as educators complain regularly of their superiors’ unwillingness to discuss the role of poverty, in professional development sessions and the like, in our students’ struggles. This is particularly offensive to many teachers, as it–patently–displays an appalling ignorance of the role of poverty in students who struggle in school. I suspect that for many of us, our understanding of this dynamic is common sense, or instinctual.
Happily, and thanks to Sendal Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir and their excellent book Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How it Defines Our Lives, teachers now have ready access to the empirical data they need to support their arguments on poverty’s effect on students’ intellectual lives. Both of these scholars are leaders in their fields. Yet they have written a highly readable, cogent work that presents their important scholarship in plain English.
To make a concise story short for the purposes of this review, Messrs. Mullainathan and Shafir designed a number of basic experiments in cognitive psychology that called upon subjects to consider outcomes and make decisions in circumstances of real or imagined scarcity. What they found, unsurprisingly, is that when people must make decisions in straitened circumstances, they tended to lose several IQ points. In other words, poverty and scarcity hamper clear and effective cognition.
Needless to say, I’d like to see another book from these scholars that explores this further. I don’t know about you, but in the meantime, if I encounter administrators or colleagues who tout the “no excuses” line, I’ll point out that ignorance of this research and its literature is no excuse for not understanding poverty’s effect on our students’ lives.
Do you have people in your life with poor personal boundaries? Do they approach you and seek to retail what my students have designated (from texting usage, I must assume) “TMI”–too much information? Do these people–even worse–elicit your advice, or, heaven forfend, presume to offer you advice? The legendary dramatist George S. Kaufman dealt with these people, and, as this hilarious anecdote from Jon S. Winokur’s The Portable Curmudgeon (New York: Plume, 1992) shows, Mr. Kaufman didn’t suffer them gladly:
“On the television show This Is Show Business, a youthful Eddie Fisher complained that girls refused to date him because of his age, and he asked Kaufman’s advice. Kaufman replied. ‘Mr. Fisher, on Mount Wilson there is a telescope that can magnify the most distant stars up to twenty-four times the magnification of any previous telescope. This remarkable instrument was unsurpassed in the world of astronomy until the construction of the Mount Palomar telescope, an even more remarkable instrument of magnification. Owing to advances and improvements in optical technology, it is capable of magnifying the stars up to four times the magnification and resolution of the Mount Wilson telescope.
“Mr. Fisher, if you could somehow put the Mount Wilson telescope inside the Mount Palomar telescope, you still wouldn’t be able to detect my interest in your problem.'”
Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
Tagged drama/theater, humor
Over the years I’ve developed the habit of keeping a copy of the New York State Code of Ethics for Teachers–the 5 x 8 card stock copy the state distributes–in my briefcase. I like this simple, elegantly written set of principles and think it is a nice guide for my planning and conduct as a teacher. The document speaks to (dare I say this in this era of open contempt for educators?) the essential nobility of our profession.
My old copy has become frayed, so I typed it up. Here, then, I offer you the New York State Code of Ethics for Teachers as a Microsoft Word typescript.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
Tagged professional development, term of art
Are you done with the 2015-2016 school year? I gather that our school year here in New York City goes much later than other districts in the United States. Our last day was Tuesday the 28th.
So it’s summer break! I always schedule my share of fun for these months, but I also work some–because I want to. You can continue to look for the Weekly Text at Mark’s Text Terminal, because I only plan to miss three Fridays during the summer.
Over the years, as an employee of the New York City Department of Education, I’ve experienced a mixed bag of professional development sessions. A few years ago, at least in the school in which I presently serve, teachers were responsible for performing professional inquiry groups, which selected its own topic for, well, inquiry, and analysis, germane to the work we do, but obviously for improving pedagogy. For this week, then, here are–in three separate links–the raw materials for a professional development presentation on executive skills and function I wrote for the group I joined in the 2011-2012 school year.
First up are the the proposal for this inquiry group, and a learning support for teachers, which are the teacher’s materials for this presentation; second, here are four student surveys to assess executive skills; third, and finally, here is a letter explaining these surveys to students. I adapted the student surveys from Ellen Galinsky’s excellent book Mind in the Making.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
Have you read Theodore Sizer’s books? He was among the founders of the Coalition of Essential Schools, which served to put into practice the principles of secondary education he espoused in the first book of the Horace Trilogy (as it has come to be known), Horace’s Compromise. I recently read the second volume of the trilogy, Horace’s School, which my incessant haunting of used bookstores fortuitously supplied me.
I wish it were possible for every high school in the United States to have someone with the late Mr. Sizer’s intellect, passion, talent and decency on its faculty.
In the Horace trilogy, Mr. Sizer uses the fictional and allegorical Horace Smith to spin out a didactic exploration of the state of American high schools. Horace, unsurprisingly, finds that his high school–therefore mine and yours–falls short. Our schools don’t fall short because of low test scores, but because they fail utterly to perceive, let alone work to develop, the innate and unique talent every child possesses and with which they arrive at school. Mr. Sizer patently–and refreshingly, in our currently benighted atmosphere of educational policy–respected children and their parents; his model of the ideal high school exemplifies that respect.
In an educational cosmology where one size fits all, and tests are considered the only reliable lens through which to view educational ability and attainment, Theodore Sizer firmly and thoughtfully dissented. He observes, in an exercise of common sense that in a reasonable world would persuade even the most myopic educational “reformers,” that not all children learn in the same way, possess the same interests, or arrive from the same social or family milieu. His view that our schools ought to recognize, respect and even honor these differences seems basic–and would give us, in Diane Ravitch’s elegant phrase, the schools we deserve. Yet current educational policy pointedly, indeed aggressively, ignores these differences.
In the final analysis, if we are to educate all children, we must recognize the differences in the way they learn, their backgrounds, their individual strengths and weaknesses, and their common humanity. We ignore this at our peril, as the state of our schools presently attests.
Ted Sizer died in October of 2009. His passing impoverishes, alas, our discourse on education and therefore, our schools.
I’ve always enjoyed this squib from David Grambs’ The Random House Dictionary for Readers and Writers (New York: Random House, 1990) which appears, alas, to be out of print.
“Timestyle, Time-ese n. The characteristically heady and melodramatically compressed prose style of Time magazine, with particular reference to its zesty verbs, marshaled characterizing adjectives and hyphenated compound words, clever coinages and puns, and above all (formerly) the frequent use of verbs at the beginnings of sentences and hence inverted syntax.
Brain child of joke-making, china-dog-collecting, cordovan-shoe-wearing Briton Hadden more than Time co-founding, beetle-browed, baggy-britched Henry Luce was Timestyle. Wrote Wolcottt Gibbs in a New Yorker profile of Luce: ‘Backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind. Where it will end, knows God!’ Ended has inversion since Godwent Luce.'” –John B. Bremner, Words on Words
Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
Tagged humor, literary oddities
Reading Jonathan Mooney and David Cole’s book Learning Outside the Lines offers the special education teacher both a disturbing and an edifying look at special educational theory and practice as students experience them. This is particularly true for these authors, both of whom struggled in special ed classrooms. Their book also tells a distressing story about the hell on earth school can be for students with diverse learning styles. Both Mr. Mooney and Mr. Coles are quite candid about their struggles in their lives at school.
Mr. Mooney, I suspect, is the dominant prose stylist in this book’s composition; he went on to write the entertaining and enlightening travelogue (reviewed elsewhere on this blog), The Short Bus. That said, both of the authors contribute a great deal to this useful and heartfelt manual.
For those of us who seek to assist struggling learners, it shouldn’t be terribly surprising that many of our charges don’t appreciate their roles as the objects of our efforts. Who better than our students themselves to aid us, and thereby become the co-subjects of our teaching? Who better understands the needs of a struggling learner than that learner him or herself? This book, which was really written for students, makes a powerful case for the teacher’s role as that of facilitator, and therefore as cooperating agent in the project to raise our students’ (nascent?) awareness of their own way of learning and understanding the content we are obliged to teach them. For me, the strength of this book rests in what it offers people who are not necessarily its intended audience, i.e. teachers. As the book’s graphic design indicates, Messrs. Mooney and Cole wrote it for students who want to learn with their own “…purpose in mind–not your parents’, not your teacher’s, not your school’s.”
Dr, Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist who specializes in issues of focus, concentration and attention, supplies a thoughtful forward. A self-described “stupid kid,” Dr. Hallowell is a widely published author and served on the faculty of Harvard Medical School for 21 years. Given these bona fides, and given the fact that Jonathan Mooney and David Coles both graduated near the top of their class at Brown, the thoughtful reader will pause to wonder just what it is people mean when they speak of “stupid kids.”
This insiders’ perspective on education in general and “special education” in particular is simply invaluable. Those of us working in the field will recognize an unhappy aspect of our work: we are trained, whether we care to admit it or not, to recognize learning struggles and differences as disabilities and deficits. Within this epistemological framework, recognizing and assessing potential is by definition a challenge. This is unfortunate indeed, as it is almost inevitably an outlook that will diminish goals and reinforce the status quo.
Until special education teachers (and I confess I am increasingly uncomfortable with the term “special education”) are trained to recognize and nurture potential, and not plan for deficits and disabilities, we condemn ourselves–and more tragically our students–to an endless cycle of tedious remediation and rote work. We will miss the very rich possibility of helping our students develop potential and talents they may not even know they have. We should seek to be discoverers of potential, not describers of deficits.
I bid Jonathan Mooney and David Cole long and productive careers. We teachers need their counsel on how to do our jobs.
One of the subtexts in The Great Debaters is Melvin B. Tolson’s political organizing, specifically his commitment to helping African American sharecroppers and workers achieve something like social and economic equity in the Jim Crow South. In the film, Mr. Tolson (again, Denzel Washington plays him) is seen meeting with African American farmers, which is soon broken up by the KKK. The redneck sheriff, played with drawling, ignorant, aplomb by John Heard, holds Mr. Tolson’s political and social activism over his head, and the viewer understands that Melvin B. Tolson is probably a communist.
Anyone who had read the novel Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison or, more specific and literal to the subject, Richard Wright’s memoir Black Boy, has some background knowledge on the relationship between African Americans and the Communist Party, particularly in the 1930s.
Here, in the last of three Weekly Texts for Black History Month, is a reading on the allure of the Communist Party USA for African Americans, particularly in the 1930s. I understand that in certain school districts, this reading may well be forbidden fruit. That being so does not, I think, diminish the importance of understanding this part of our American past. I would think for educators teaching units on either Invisible Man or Black Boy. this reading would be de rigueur.
And that’s what I have to offer for Black History Month, 2016. As always, if you used any of this material, I hope you found it helpful; I would, again, as always, be grateful to hear from you about what worked or didn’t in your use of these readings.
Until next week….
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
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