Notes from the UNI Education Summit

Notes from the UNI Education Summit in Cedar Falls, Iowa a couple of weeks ago…

• Website
• Schedule

Jonathan Kozol (wow, was he wonderful to listen to…)

• I try to be bipartisan but former Iowa U.S. Senator Tom Harkin has talked with me for years about the damage that testing is doing to children.
• I’m glad there are so many educators here; I always feel safer in a room of teachers!
• Teachers have been taking quite a beating lately. In many states they’ve become a scapegoat for all of the evils and injustices of society. But teachers are my heroes.
• Teachers, particularly those who teach in our most disadvantaged communities, need to be protected.
• I said to an African-American Boston minister after the Philadelphia disappearances, “How can I be of use?” He said, “You’ve had a wonderful education. I’d like you to put it to use for our children.”
• The city department of education sent me out as a substitute. My first day was in kindergarten. I was absolutely terrified! Ultimately I survived. I’ve been working with low-income children, mostly Black and Hispanic, ever since. I’m currently working with children, families, and schools in the South Bronx in New York City.
• I’ve written several books about those children. The sum of it all is that, almost everywhere I go, those funding inequalities are still with us. It’s sad that there is such thing as a ‘poor school’ in America, the wealthiest nation on Earth.
• The rich districts can go way above foundational funding. In wealthy neighborhoods in cities, parents are holding fundraisers that earn as much as $1 million in a single night to add to their school’s budget.
• Poverty is poverty, whether in cities or rural areas. The traumatic effects apply to children everywhere. But for minority children in concentrated neighborhoods of poverty, it goes to new levels. 
• We see hyper-segregation of Black and Hispanic children in every city, large or small. Textbooks sugar coat realities a bit. The media does this too. They indicate that racial isolation is primarily a thing of the past. In reality the very opposite is true. These children are more isolated intellectually and separated physically than any time since 1968.
• Every year on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, white politicians who have never lifted a finger to solve inequity and segregation visit some urban school and give their version of the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. I still believe that Brown v. Bd. of Education was essentially correct. Isolation sends terrible messages to our youth.
• Langston Hughes’ poem, What happens to a dream deferred? I was in Baltimore 8 days ago. 
• There’s another kind of inequality: rich preschool education. I ask kindergarten teachers in impoverished neighborhoods how many of their children have had real, developmental pre-K for a couple of years beforehand (the kind that wealthy or middle class kids get). They say maybe 40%. The most exclusive pre-Ks in New York City cost $35,000 per child. They’re known as the ‘Baby Ivys.’ There’s not even a pretense at meritocracy.
• When test scores come out, guess who does well and guess who gets blamed?
• Could we take the billions of dollars that are going to testing companies and put it into rich, developmental pre-K? This should be a rich entitlement of childhood here in America, along with necessary wrap-around services. Instead of castigating poor parents, help them get the skills they need.
• Virtually every sector of the population has to take standardized exams. Like in other states, here in Iowa high stakes exams start in 3rd grade. In wealthy neighborhoods in New York, there are strong parent movements to opt out their kids from the exams. The wealthy parents aren’t scared, but the poor people are.
• In affluent communities, standardized testing takes a lesser toll. The kids easily score fairly well. Parents aren’t frightened of the test. Their concern is whether their children get into their first choice of college.
• Principals of poor schools are the ones that are running scared. Teachers are obliged to write on the board the specific skill (and number) that they’re teaching. In New York City, it’s very prescriptive. Poor schools are told not to wander too far from the standards, there’s little time for student questions and critical thinking. “Curiosity is nice, but it’s not going to be tested.” Neither will delighted learning, which may indeed be a distraction. Delight and curiosity can get you way off track from the standards.
• Endless, run-on sentences full of ‘ands’ and ‘buts’ – second graders are almost as good as William Faulkner – at the end, there’s usually hidden treasure and good teachers know how to unlock that. Test-driven teachers usually cut them off and they never reach the hidden treasure.
• Once we lock a child’s spirit into silent stone, he may never dare again to speak with authenticity.
• Teachers in these schools are usually told they have to teach reading from standardized materials. Not all of these books are bad. I’m not a fanatic hippie type who thinks that phonics are a form of oppression. Neither are phonics the cure to all of the ills of society (e.g., the lady I met that I now call the Phonics Fanatic of Phoenix!). I hate the emphasis that many urban teachers have to place on decoding, not on the content of what they’re reading (e.g., scripted teaching methods). What happens to many of these children is that they lose the beauty of reading real books, books that are a joy to read. The only reason to read is for the joy it gives you, not to get a number plastered on your forehead. I majored in Elizabethan poetry. Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse is right up there with Hamlet!
• Learning for its own sake, immersing oneself into the joy and beauty of learning… in many inner-city and/or test-driven schools, this is being lost. There’s no time for orchestra or school plays (but there is in suburban schools). For poor kids who have less aesthetic beauty in their physical neighborhood, we owe it to them to have art and music in school.
• Many teachers in poor schools are warriors for justice. They represent the best of America.
• If you do teach in those neighborhoods, don’t assume that children are empty vessels waiting to be filled. Bring out the beauty that’s in their souls. Let their dreams and longings be the starting point for lesson plans, not something that’s cordoned off or relegated to 20-minute enrichment.
• There’s usually a reason that parents can’t come to school, they’re dealing with their own chaos. Instead of demonizing them, find a way to reach them.
• Children need beauty in their lives. Other than their family, the teacher is the only adult in their lives that’s around regularly. If you don’t give them happiness, who will?
• “Mr. Kozol, the whole schools is talking about how quietly your children file down the hallways.” – our way of subverting the system so they would leave us alone and we could have fun without being bothered
• Teachers often are afraid in poor neighborhoods. In 25 years, I’ve never been touched. I think it’s more psychological than physical. I think it’s the fear of those communities’ suffering and the challenge to their conscience.
• Fred Rogers (Mr. Rogers) may have been the biggest hero that kids have ever had. He was a wonderful listener to children. He went with me to the South Bronx. On the #6 train in NYC, it’s only about seven stops from the richest to the poorest neighborhood in the city. Sanitation workers embraced him. Children said ‘welcome to my neighborhood, Mr. Rogers.’
• The dreams and innocence of children will outlive us all. Life goes fast, my friends, use it well.

Dr. Mark Grey, Iowa’s (Rapidly) Changing Populations

• Anthropology professor at UNI, directs the New Iowans Center
• The context in Iowa is changing rapidly
• Global events are having local consequences
• Issues we used to consider secondary or tertiary (religion, language, ethnicity) have become primary
• Two fundamental shifts
• The Latino Boom, 1993-2008 (plus smaller populations of Bosnians and other refugees)
• Today = Microplurality
• many smaller, ethnically and linguistically distinct populations
• e.g., 50 langages at Marshalltown HS, 100+ languages in Des Moines Public Schools
• 180 estimated languages in Iowa now
• 1990 = only a few Latinos; in 25-30 years, maybe over 400,000 (~12% of total)
• One-third of Iowa counties reached their peak population in 1900; another one-third in 1950 or so
• Iowa overall v. Latino median age difference = 15.4 years
• Brain drain – we lose about half of our college graduates to other states
• Birth rates in Iowa are less than 2.0; need 2.1 to replace the existing population
• Four impacts on population = birth rates, death rates, length of life, migration (we have no idea what this will look like)
• African-American population (including African refugees)
• 2020 = 125,000; 2040 = 185,000+
• Asian / Pacific Islander population
• 2020 = 75,000; 2040 = 110,000+
• Native-American population will stay fairly stable (but they’re incredibly diverse; numerous tribal affiliations)
• 2020 = 11,000; 2040 = 13,000
• Microplurality
• Growing non-Latino populations in the Heartland
• Southeast Asia (Hmong, Vietnamese, Burmese, etc.), East Asia (Chinese), former Soviet Union, ultra-Orthodox Jewish (Israel and East Coast), African (Sudan, Somalia), Central Pacific (Marshall Islands, Paulau), Ukrainian Pentecostals, Bhutanese from Nepali refugee camps, African-Americans from Chicago and Detroit, Iraqi refugees, and many more…
• Iowans take pride in their acceptance of refugees – we have the only state-level office dedicated to refugee resettlement?
• Sponsorship of refugees dropped to an absolute trickle after 9/11
• African refugees are pouring into our state – usually they are secondary migrants (first stop was another U.S. location)
• This is a legal workforce
• In many districts, multiple languages but they only have a small handful of children that speak each language
• We have labor vacuums – most local kids aren’t going to pack meat or eggs

 David Drew, Reforming STEM Education in America

• What’s driving the emphasis on STEM? 
• Shift to high-tech and service economy – what’s required for jobs has changed
• Our nation doesn’t seem to be doing well on international measures of STEM achievement
• False myths that undermine education reform
• Restoring American K-12 education in its previous glory
• the aptitude excuse (e.g., girls, poor kids, students of color can’t do math & science)
• curriculum reform – the teacher is more important the curriculum – curriculum is important but it isn’t going to save us
• finding new teachers – we need to do a better job of preparing AND retaining classroom educators
• Compared to students in high-achieving countries, American students believe strongly that mathematical talent is innate and believe less strongly that effort makes much difference – Anne C. Lewis