Friday, April 29, 2011

NYT: the limits of school reform

April 25, 2011

The Limits of School Reform

By JOE NOCERA

I find myself haunted by a 13-year-old boy named Saquan Townsend. It’s been more than two weeks since he was featured in The New York Times Magazine, yet I can’t get him out of my mind.

The article, by Jonathan Mahler, was about the heroic efforts of Ramón González, the principal of M.S. 223, a public middle school in the South Bronx, to make his school a place where his young charges can get a decent education and thus, perhaps, a better life. Surprisingly, though, González is not aligned with the public school reform movement, even though one of the movement’s leading lights, Joel Klein, was until fairly recently his boss as the head of the New York City school system.

Instead, González comes across as a skeptic, wary of the enthusiasm for, as the article puts it, “all of the educational experimentation” that took place on Klein’s watch. At its core, the reform movement believes that great teachers and improved teaching methods are all that’s required to improve student performance, so that’s all the reformers focus on. But it takes a lot more than that. Which is where Saquan comes in. His part of the story represents difficult truths that the reform movement has yet to face squarely — and needs to.

Saquan lands at M.S. 223 because his family has been placed in a nearby homeless shelter. (His mother fled Brooklyn out of fear that another son was in danger of being killed.) At first, he is so disruptive that a teacher, Emily Dodd, thinks he might have a mental disability. But working with him one on one, Dodd discovers that Saquan is, to the contrary, unusually intelligent — “brilliant” even.

From that point on, Dodd does everything a school reformer could hope for. She sends him text messages in the mornings, urging him to come to school. She gives him special help. She encourages him at every turn. For awhile, it seems to take.

Meanwhile, other forces are pushing him in another direction. His mother, who works nights and barely has time to see her son, comes across as indifferent to his schooling. Though she manages to move the family back to Brooklyn, the move means that Saquan has an hour-and-a-half commute to M.S. 223. As his grades and attendance slip, Dodd offers to tutor him. To no avail: He finally decides it isn’t worth the effort, and transfers to a school in Brooklyn.

The point is obvious, or at least it should be: Good teaching alone can’t overcome the many obstacles Saquan faces when he is not in school. Nor is he unusual. Mahler recounts how M.S. 223 gives away goodie bags to lure parents to parent association meetings, yet barely a dozen show up. He reports that during the summer, some students fall back a full year in reading comprehension — because they don’t read at home.

Going back to the famous Coleman report in the 1960s, social scientists have contended — and unquestionably proved — that students’ socioeconomic backgrounds vastly outweigh what goes on in the school as factors in determining how much they learn. Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute lists dozens of reasons why this is so, from the more frequent illness and stress poor students suffer, to the fact that they don’t hear the large vocabularies that middle-class children hear at home.

Yet the reformers act as if a student’s home life is irrelevant. “There is no question that family engagement can matter,” said Klein when I spoke to him. “But they seem to be saying that poverty is destiny, so let’s go home. We don’t yet know how much education can overcome poverty,” he insisted — notwithstanding the voluminous studies that have been done on the subject. “To let us off the hook prematurely seems, to me, to play into the hands of the other side.”

That last sentence strikes me as the key to the reformers’ resistance: To admit the importance of a student’s background, they fear, is to give ammo to the enemy — which to them are their social-scientist critics and the teachers’ unions. But that shouldn’t be the case. Making schools better is always a goal worth striving for, whether it means improving pedagogy itself or being able to fire bad teachers more easily. Without question, school reform has already achieved some real, though moderate, progress.

What needs to be acknowledged, however, is that school reform won’t fix everything. Though some poor students will succeed, others will fail. Demonizing teachers for the failures of poor students, and pretending that reforming the schools is all that is needed, as the reformers tend to do, is both misguided and counterproductive.

Over the long term, fixing our schools is going to involve a lot more than, well, just fixing our schools. In the short term, however, the reform movement could use something else: a dose of humility about what it can accomplish — and what it can’t.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Doninger v. Niehoff ruling in school's favor

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/school_law/2011/04/court_backs_discipline_of_stud.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS2

Court Backs Discipline of Student Over Internet Speech

By Mark Walsh on April 25, 2011 1:19 PM | 1 Comment |

In a case raising novel issues about student speech rights in the Internet era, a federal appeals court has upheld the discipline of a Connecticut student who had harshly criticized school officials in her Web journal.

The closely watched case involves Avery Doninger, who was a junior at Lewis S. Mills High School in Burlington, Conn., in 2007 when she tussled with school officials over the scheduling of a band contest known as "Jamfest."

Doninger, who was a student council member and junior class secretary, went home and wrote in an entry in her public blog at the website livejournal.com that "jamfest is cancelled due to douchebags in central office" and that readers should contact the superintendent "to piss her off more."

School officials, citing disruption by the emails and Doninger's Web comments, barred her from running for senior class secretary. She wasn't suspended.

Doninger and her mother initially sought an injunction barring her discipline, but a district court and a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, in New York, which included then-Circuit Judge Sonia Sotomayor, ruled against her.

The student continued to press her claims for damages under the First Amendment's free-speech clause. She lost in 2009 in federal district court, which granted qualified immunity to the school officials who disciplined her.

In a decision on Monday, a new 2nd Circuit panel ruled unanimously that school officials were immune from Doninger's suit.

"It was objectively reasonable for school officials to conclude that Doninger's behavior was potentially disruptive of student government functions (such as the organization of Jamfest) and that Doninger was not free to engage in such behavior while serving as a class representative—a representative charged with working with these very same school officials to carry out her responsibilities," Judge Debra Ann Livingston said in her April 25 opinion for the panel in Doningerv. Niehoff.

The court said it was "not clearly established at the time of these events that Doninger had any First Amendment right not to be prohibited from running for senior class secretary because of offensive off-campus speech, at least when such speech pertained to a school event, invited students to read and respond to it by contacting school administrators, and it was reasonably foreseeable that the speech would come on to campus and thus come to the attention of school authorities."

The court stressed that it was stopping short of ruling whether the school discipline actually violated Doninger's free speech rights. And, "to be clear, we do not conclude in any way that school administrators are immune from First Amendment scrutiny when they react to student speech by limiting students' participation in extracurricular activities."

But the speech at issue in Doninger's case was closely tied to school events, and the student's role as a council member and class officer was signficant in the qualified-immunity analysis, the court said.

The court noted that the U.S. Supreme Court "has yet to speak on the scope of a school's authority to regulate expression that, like [Doninger's], does not occur on school grounds or at a school-sponsored event."

On a separate issue in the suit, the 2nd Circuit court upheld school officials' immunity over barring Doninger from wearing a T-shirt related to the controversy at a school election assembly. The T-shirts said "Team Avery" on the front, in reference to Doninger, and "Support LSM Freedom of Speech" on the back, referring to the high school. Doninger and her supporters were told they could not wear the shirts into the assembly.

The federal district court had sided with Doninger on the T-shirt issue, holding that her right to wear such a shirt into the assembly was clearly established.

But the 2nd Circuit panel reversed, granting immunity to school officials who barred the T-shirts, even if they were mistaken legally.

The school principal "faced a difficult task in assessing whether the threat of disruption was severe enough to justify preventing Doninger from wearing her T-shirt into the assembly," the 2nd circuit said. A reasonable jury might find that the threat of disruption was not sufficiently substantial, the court added.

"We cannot conclude, however, that such a mistake was anything but reasonable - the very sort of mistake for which the qualified immunity doctrine exists to shield officials against unwarranted liability."

Monday, April 25, 2011

From Summary to Synthesis: Common Core Standards in Action in NY

This was published today: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/nyregion/100-new-york-schools-try-common-core-approach.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

April 24, 2011

A Trial Run for School Standards That Encourage Deeper Thought

By FERNANDA SANTOS

Until this year, Ena Baxter, an English teacher at Hillcrest High School in Queens, would often have her 10th graders compose papers by summarizing a single piece of reading material.

Last month, for a paper on the influence of media on teenagers, she had them read a survey on the effects of cellphones and computers on young people’s lives, a newspaper column on the role of social media in the Tunisian uprising and a 4,200-word magazine article titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

A math teacher, José Rios, used to take a day or two on probabilities, drawing bell-shaped curves on the blackboard to illustrate the pattern known as normal distribution. This year, he stretched the lesson by a day and had students work in groups to try to draw the same type of graphic using the heights of the 15 boys in the class.

“Eventually, they figured out they couldn’t because the sample was too small,” Mr. Rios said. “They learned that the size of the sample matters, and I didn’t have to tell them.”

In three years, instruction in most of the country could look a lot like what is going on at Hillcrest, one of 100 schools in New York City experimenting with new curriculum standards known as the common core.

Forty-two states, the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands have signed on to the new standards, an ambitious set of goals that go beyond reading lists and math formulas to try to raise the bar not only on what students in every grade are expected to learn, but also on how teachers are expected to teach.

The standards, to go into effect in 2014, will replace a hodgepodge of state guidelines that have become the Achilles’ heel of the No Child Left Behind law. Many states, including New York, lowered standards in a push to meet the law’s requirement that all students reach grade level, as measured by each state, in English and math. President Obama has expressed a desire to rewrite the law, and many experts predict the common core will be a centerpiece of the effort.

The new standards give specific goals that, by the end of the 12th grade, should prepare students for college work. Book reports will ask students to analyze, not summarize. Presentations will be graded partly on how persuasively students express their ideas. History papers will require reading from multiple sources; the goal is to get students to see how beliefs and biases can influence the way different people describe the same events.

There are a number of challenges.

There are guidelines for what students are expected to do in each grade, but it is still up to districts, schools and teachers to fill in the finer points of the curriculum, like what books to read.

There is no national body responsible for seeing that the standards are carried out, because of fears of giving too much control of education to the federal government. So far, only a few other large cities, including Boston, Cleveland and Philadelphia, have begun to apply the standards in the classroom. And depending on how No Child Left Behind is refashioned, it may still be left to each state to measure its own success.

“The standards create a historic opportunity in that we now have a destination worth aiming for, but only time will tell if they’ll create historic change,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., an assistant secretary of education in the Reagan administration and the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a group that supports national standards.

With 3,200 students, Hillcrest is the second largest school in the city’s pilot. Its size and diversity — whites are a minority (4 percent), Muslims are the religious plurality (about 30 percent) and one-tenth of students are learning English — made it an ideal laboratory to test how the standards might work in the city, officials said.

On a recent Wednesday, Jill Lee, an English teacher, closed a unit on the meaning of the American dream not by assigning a first-person essay, as she once did, but by asking each student to interview an immigrant and write a profile of the person.

Eleni Giannousis made a change in her 10th-grade English class that might make some purists blanch. She had students watch the filmed stage performance of “Death of a Salesman,” starring Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman, before they read the play. The idea was to have students absorb information through a medium they use for entertainment, one way she was experimenting with her lesson plans to try to meet the new goals.

“It wasn’t about making things easier for the students, but about challenging them to experience a classic in a different way,” Ms. Giannousis said.

While English classes will still include healthy amounts of fiction, the standards say that students should be reading more nonfiction texts as they get older, to prepare them for the kinds of material they will read in college and careers. In the fourth grade, students should be reading about the same amount from “literary” and “informational” texts, according to the standards; in the eighth grade, 45 percent should be literary and 55 percent informational, and by 12th grade, the split should be 30/70.

Shael Polakow-Suransky, the city’s chief academic officer, said the city plans to create an instructional package with exercises that teachers at Hillcrest and other schools have used; student work they have assigned; and guidelines for evaluating the work.

At a training session last month, teams representing several schools in the pilot were asked to list lessons they had learned. Teachers from the Forward School of Creative Writing, a middle school in the Williamsbridge section of the Bronx, wrote on a piece of cardboard: “Visuals help students make meaning” and “Many students are reading far below grade level.”

Timothy Shanahan, a professor of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago who helped write the common core standards for how to incorporate reading into science instruction, said that as a whole, the standards make no adjustments for students who are learning English or for children who might enter kindergarten without having been exposed to books.

“If I’m teaching fifth grade and I have a youngster in my class who reads as a first grader, throwing him a grade-level text is not going to do him any good, no matter what the standards say,” he said.

Mr. Polakow-Suransky, too, cautioned against overly optimistic expectations.

“This isn’t one of those things where you flip the switch and tomorrow, everything is going to be different,” he said.

Syria Escalates Crackdown as Tanks Go to Restive City

Gatsby House Demolished

English 3 and Am. Lit teachers might dig this.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1377951/Scott-Fitzgeralds-Great-Gatsby-house-famous-Roaring-Twenties-parties-demolished.html

(sent to me by Mike Palmquist)

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

What are Teachers in control of?

Teaser:

By Thomas Hurst

When is it fair to blame teachers for student performance? If you do your homework, you’ll learn that teachers are not to blame for as much as many — including U.S. policymakers — may think.

Research shows that there are a host of factors that can affect student achievement. A 2009 report released by the Educational Testing Service identified 16 variables that impact student achievement:

1. Curriculum rigor

2. Teacher preparation

3. Teacher experience

4. Teacher absence and turnover

5. Class size

6. Availability of instructional technology

7. Fear and safety at school

8. Parent participation

9. Frequent changing of schools

10. Low birth weight

11. Environmental damage (i.e., lead, mercury)

12. Hunger and nutrition

13. Talking and reading to babies and young children

14. Excessive television watching

15. Parent-pupil ration (# of parents)

16. Summer achievement gain/loss

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/teachers-blame-only-where-blame-is-due/2011/04/18/AFXszF2D_blog.html

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Thinking about Metaphors David Brooks

April 11, 2011

Poetry for Everyday Life

By DAVID BROOKS

Here’s a clunky but unremarkable sentence that appeared in the British press before the last national election: “Britain’s recovery from the worst recession in decades is gaining traction, but confused economic data and the high risk of hung Parliament could yet snuff out its momentum.”

The sentence is only worth quoting because in 28 words it contains four metaphors. Economies don’t really gain traction, like a tractor. Momentum doesn’t literally get snuffed out, like a cigarette. We just use those metaphors, without even thinking about it, as a way to capture what is going on.

In his fine new book, “I Is an Other,” James Geary reports on linguistic research suggesting that people use a metaphor every 10 to 25 words. Metaphors are not rhetorical frills at the edge of how we think, Geary writes. They are at the very heart of it.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, two of the leading researchers in this field, have pointed out that we often use food metaphors to describe the world of ideas. We devour a book, try to digest raw facts and attempt to regurgitate other people’s ideas, even though they might be half-baked.

When talking about relationships, we often use health metaphors. A friend might be involved in a sick relationship. Another might have a healthy marriage.

When talking about argument, we use war metaphors. When talking about time, we often use money metaphors. But when talking about money, we rely on liquid metaphors. We dip into savings, sponge off friends or skim funds off the top. Even the job title stockbroker derives from the French word brocheur, the tavern worker who tapped the kegs of beer to get the liquidity flowing.

The psychologist Michael Morris points out that when the stock market is going up, we tend to use agent metaphors, implying the market is a living thing with clear intentions. We say the market climbs or soars or fights its way upward. When the market goes down, on the other hand, we use object metaphors, implying it is inanimate. The market falls, plummets or slides.

Most of us, when asked to stop and think about it, are by now aware of the pervasiveness of metaphorical thinking. But in the normal rush of events. we often see straight through metaphors, unaware of how they refract perceptions. So it’s probably important to pause once a month or so to pierce the illusion that we see the world directly. It’s good to pause to appreciate how flexible and tenuous our grip on reality actually is.

Metaphors help compensate for our natural weaknesses. Most of us are not very good at thinking about abstractions or spiritual states, so we rely on concrete or spatial metaphors to (imperfectly) do the job. A lifetime is pictured as a journey across a landscape. A person who is sad is down in the dumps, while a happy fellow is riding high.

Most of us are not good at understanding new things, so we grasp them imperfectly by relating them metaphorically to things that already exist. That’s a “desktop” on your computer screen.

Metaphors are things we pass down from generation to generation, which transmit a culture’s distinct way of seeing and being in the world. In his superb book “Judaism: A Way of Being,” David Gelernter notes that Jewish thought uses the image of a veil to describe how Jews perceive God — as a presence to be sensed but not seen, which is intimate and yet apart.

Judaism also emphasizes the metaphor of separateness as a path to sanctification. The Israelites had to separate themselves from Egypt. The Sabbath is separate from the week. Kosher food is separate from the nonkosher. The metaphor describes a life in which one moves from nature and conventional society to the sacred realm.

To be aware of the central role metaphors play is to be aware of how imprecise our most important thinking is. It’s to be aware of the constant need to question metaphors with data — to separate the living from the dead ones, and the authentic metaphors that seek to illuminate the world from the tinny advertising and political metaphors that seek to manipulate it.

Most important, being aware of metaphors reminds you of the central role that poetic skills play in our thought. If much of our thinking is shaped and driven by metaphor, then the skilled thinker will be able to recognize patterns, blend patterns, apprehend the relationships and pursue unexpected likenesses.

Even the hardest of the sciences depend on a foundation of metaphors. To be aware of metaphors is to be humbled by the complexity of the world, to realize that deep in the undercurrents of thought there are thousands of lenses popping up between us and the world, and that we’re surrounded at all times by what Steven Pinker of Harvard once called “pedestrian poetry.”

Op-Ed Columnist: Pass the Boone Pickens Bill

Good Reading and Memorials

April 6, 2011

Out of Context

By CAROLINE ALEXANDER

THE 9/11 memorial in New York, still being planned, is to be dedicated on the 10th anniversary of the attack. Intended as a place for commemoration, reflection, education and solace, the memorial and museum will serve as a repository for the remains of the victims.

Some families of the victims have criticized the planned memorial because they are offended by the prospect of sharing the resting place of their loved ones with museum-going strangers. Because the structure will be built seven stories below the spot where the twin towers once stood, visitors will have to venture underground to pay their respects, a prospect that also is not comforting.

But one feature of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum seems above reproach: a quotation from Virgil’s “Aeneid” that will be inscribed on a wall in front of the victims’ remains.

The memorial inscription, “No day shall erase you from the memory of time” is an eloquent translation of the original Latin of “The Aeneid” — “Nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo.”

The impulse to turn to time-hallowed texts, like the classics or the Bible, is itself time-hallowed. In the face of powerful emotions, our own words may seem hollow and inadequate, while the confirmation that people in the past felt as we now feel holds solace. And the language of poets and great thinkers can be in itself ennobling.

But not in this case. Anyone troubling to take even a cursory glance at the quotation’s context will find the choice offers neither instruction nor solace.

Virgil’s epic relates the trials of the unhappy Trojan hero Aeneas, who, as Troy burns, flees with the remnants of his family and people to his ships and the sea, eventually winding up in Italy, where it is his destiny to lay the foundation of what will become Rome.

The immediate context of the quotation is a night ambush of the Rutulian enemy camp by two Trojan warriors, Nisus and Euryalus, whose mutual love is described in terms of classical homoerotic convention and whose deaths represent one of the epic’s famously sentimental set pieces. Falling on the sleeping enemy, the two hack away with their swords, until the ground reeks with “warm black gore.” Stripping the murdered soldiers of their armor, the two are in turn ambushed by a returning Rutulian cavalry troop. As each Trojan tries to save his companion, both are killed, brutally and graphically. At this point the poet steps in to address them directly:

“Fortunati ambo! si quid mea carmina possunt, nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo.”

“Happy pair! If aught my verse avail, no day shall ever blot you from the memory of time.” (The translation here is from the famously literal Loeb edition.) At dawn’s light, the severed heads of the two Trojans are paraded by the enemy on spears.

The central sentiment that the young men were fortunate to die together could, perhaps, at one time have been defended as a suitable commemoration of military dead who fell with their companions. To apply the same sentiment to civilians killed indiscriminately in an act of terrorism, however, is grotesque.

It is no easy duty to commemorate the dead. Possibly others have performed it worse, and at least some, worth studying, have done better. In Britain, the dreadful task of fixing an inscription for the million military dead in the wake of World War I fell to Rudyard Kipling — a task made especially delicate given the loss of his own son in the war. The simple quotation he selected, “Their name liveth for evermore,” reflects the same pledge of determined remembrance as the 9/11 memorial effort. But whereas the Virgilian quote dissolves on inspection, Kipling’s choice, from the 44th chapter of Ecclesiasticus, becomes more profound as its context becomes clearer.

“Let us now praise famous men,” begins that chapter of Ecclesiasticus, but it in fact goes on to evoke those who died obscurely, as well as those who died having performed great deeds; both will be remembered by their descendants. A long work, Ecclesiasticus is sure to hold something jarring for everyone; but overall, in context, the selected verse remains sound:

“Their seed shall remain for ever, and their glory shall not be blotted out. Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.”

The disastrous 9/11 memorial quotation was, evidently, never intended to be more than a high-sounding, stand-alone phrase, never intended to lead visitors to any more profound thoughts or emotions.

Finding words that do justice to a momentous event is always difficult — especially so, perhaps, in the age of Internet trawling, when a wary eye needs to be kept for the bothersome baggage that may be attached to the perfect-sounding expression. There is an easy mechanism, also time-hallowed, for winnowing out what may be right from what is clearly wrong: it’s called reading.

Caroline Alexander is the author, most recently, of “The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s ‘Iliad’ and the Trojan War.”

Op-Ed Columnist: Medicine on the Move

Ai Weiwei

I thought you might be interested in this:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ai-wei-wei/

That’s most interesting, but here’s a NYT article published yesterday: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/arts/design/ai-weiwei-takes-role-of-chinas-conscience.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=holland%20cotter%20weiwei&st=cse

Live Eagle Cam!

Did you see this article in Monday’s Tribune? http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-ap-us-eaglecam,0,3712631.story

Here’s the link to the live nest cam: http://www.raptorresource.org/falcon_cams/index.htm

Friday, April 1, 2011

NYT debate: Why Blame the Teachers?

Comments by a variety of educators and policy makers.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/03/06/why-blame-the-teachers/talking-in-circles-about-teachers

It Started With 'No Child Left Behind'
Diane Ravitch, author and historian
A Policy Debate, Not an Attack
Frederick M. Hess, American Enterprise Institute
A Bipartisan Assault
Richard D. Kahlenberg, Century Foundation
Talking in Circles About Teachers
Michael Goldstein, MATCH Charter School
What Politicians Don't Know
Molly Putnam, high school teacher
Discouraging New Teachers
Jeffrey Mirel, historian, University of Michigan
Reforms Driven by Education Fads
Pedro Noguera, sociologist, New York University
Elevate, Don't Denigrate
Donna Foote, author of "Relentless Pursuit"