Dangerously Irrelevant

Why are we educators having so much trouble mobilizing our voice in ways that are effective?

Are we afraid to speak up?

Are we ineffective when we do speak up?

Do we need to do a better job of marketing?

Are we not taking these educational and policy changes seriously enough yet?

Do we not have a viable and compelling counternarrative?

Are we so downtrodden that we feel that any efforts we make to speak up are pointless?

Are we simply getting outspent by those with deeper pockets?

Why can’t we tell our story in ways that resonate with others? And why are most of us unwilling to even try in the first place?

Image credit: Silence, Bigstock

the definition of ideology is doing the same thing over and over again without regard to evidence or experience.

When your method fails, and fails, and fails, and fails, don’t blame the kids. Blame the method.

Diane Ravitch via http://dianeravitch.net/2012/09/20/some-people-never-learn

The following table represents the responses in 2005 of representative samples of American adults, state legislators, school board members, and school superintendents. They were asked to rate the relative importance of 8 broad public school goals. Note the emphasis on things other than just basic knowledge and skills.

I’m guessing that we would get similar results today, across geographic locations, educational levels, and income strata. How have we allowed the conversation on education to become hijacked? And, more importantly, how do we reclaim it?

Source: Economic Policy Institute, The goals of education

People see bad teaching and they become convinced that the real issue is planning. Eventually, they decide that it would work best to have all teachers on “the same page” (my God, what would life be like if we all approached reading that way — laboriously moving page by page in the same book as everyone else?) with a lesson plan format.

….

teachers are often asked to focus on  the minutia. They are judged on their compliance regarding the physical space of their classrooms, the rigid format of their lesson and their ability to follow clerical procedures. In the process, teachers, indeed entire schools, become focused with things that have little to do with what it means to teach and to learn.

Often the focus is on strategies that are really helpful to teachers who are struggling. However, standardizing prescriptive formulas can be a bad idea. Oxygen tanks are great when they save lives. However, if someone is breathing just fine on his or her own, it might not be necessary to force to use it in the name of being “on the same page.” Similarly, medicine can save a life. However, if it is given to someone who doesn’t need it, I would consider it malpractice.

… we are so obsessed with teacher “support” and so convinced that teachers need more training and more skills that we are missing some of the greatest areas of need among teachers who are not among the bottom ten percent: affirmation, time, autonomy and creative control.

The very rope tossed out to help some teachers has become a leash that is holding back those are already doing great things. So maybe the real solution to teacher quality isn’t additional ropes. Maybe the solution is to cut the rope and see what happens. Otherwise, it might just become the noose that strangles the best of teachers.

John Spencer via http://coopcatalyst.wordpress.com/2012/08/18/teachers-need-less-support

the “no excuses” mantra focuses the public and political gaze where the powerful want it—on the families, children, and institutions overburdened by poverty and not on the powerful who have the resources and influence to shape the inequity upon which they feed

Paul Thomas via http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/10353-what-really-determines-student-performance

I am posting Chris Lehmann’s recent post almost in its entirety because it’s that important. Some pictures are below…

there are a lot of powerful folks right now who are advocating for a pedagogy that they do not want for their own children. Some of these powerful people are running networks of schools that have a pedagogical approach that is directly counter to the educational approach they pay for for their own children. Moreover, these same powerful people tend to get upset when asked about the disconnect, saying that that question is off limits.

I don’t think it is.

I think we should ask why people of power advocate for one thing for their own children and something else for other people’s children, especially when those other children come from a lower rung on the socio-economic scale or when those children come from traditionally disenfranchised members of our society. I think that’s a very dangerous thing not to question.

Because we’ve done this before in America, and when we did that to the Native Americans, it did damage that has effects today.

To me, when you ensure your own child has an arts-enriched, small-class size, deeply humanistic education and you advocate that those families who have fewer economic resources than you have should sit straight in their chairs and do what they are told while doubling and tripling up on rote memorization and test prep, you are guilty of educational colonialism.

And it’s time we start calling that what it is.

Image credits

• Carlisle School – Printing shop
• Blacksmithing at the Indian training school, Forest Grove, Ore., 1882
• The School sewing room
• Little girls praying beside their beds, Phoenix Indian School, Arizona, 06-1900
• Carlisle Indian School, Pennsylvania

The Republican Party of Texas states in its official 2012 political platform:

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based  Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

This is astounding since most everyone else in America seems to understand that our educational graduates and our employees need greater, not less, development of critical and higher-order thinking skills in order to be effective citizens, learners, and workers in our hyperconnected, hypercompetitive global information society. This political platform item is an absolutely stunning example of educational and economic cluelessness and is a surefire recipe for complete irrelevance in the 21st century.

In recent years, I don’t believe I’ve heard of any other groups officially opposed to teaching students critical thinking or higher-order thinking. Have you? Other thoughts?

Hat tip: Slate

We are literally living in a world where the primary motivation behind the proposals that determine what schools look like ISNT designing the kinds of learning environments that our kids deserve. Instead, the primary motivation behind the proposals that determine what schools look like is designing the kinds of learning environments that might get a legislator reelected.

Bill Ferriter via http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/the_tempered_radical/2012/04/meritpay-tenure-philberger-edpolicy.html.