People want change, but they don’t want anything to change… you have to do things different. There’s going to be some chaos as part of getting to a better place for kids… We rarely talk about teachers and schools being engaged with parents. My son goes to a school that is rated A in Louisiana. If I never showed up at my son’s school, they would be okay.
Kenneth Campbell of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Connecting the Dots conference, pointing out the reality that systemic reform — especially the second-generation efforts now being undertaken — requires moving away from traditionalist thinking and policies that have harmed so many children. This includes expanding school choice and Parent Power laws so that families can play lead decision-making roles in education for their children.
We have to acknowledge that there are plenty of adults who profit from nothing changing in education.
David Harris of the Mind Trust, also at the Connecting the Dots conference, hitting on a point that Dropout Nation has made since its inception. Contrary to the arguments of intellectual charlatans such as Diane Ravitch, traditionalist players, including the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, profit from the status quo remaining ante.
I used to be afraid of the Common Core, a national effort to align public school curriculum goals across state lines and provide better tools for measuring what students are learning. I feared the new standards would lead to my students failing and that I would be scapegoated for those failures. But after two years of working with the Common Core in my Boston classroom, I’m a convert… That said, the first year wasn’t pretty. I struggled, and so did my students, and when it came time for the first assessment exams of the year, my kids bombed. My ego was bludgeoned and my students were frustrated with the new types of questions used in the exams. I was afraid I would be viewed as an ineffective teacher, but thankfully, my principal remained unwavering in his support of the staff. He knew the transition would take time, and he wasn’t looking to blame teachers.
Last spring, for example, as my eighth-graders read Tim O’Brien’s powerful(1955-1975)” Vietnam War novel “The Things They Carried,” they also read primary source materials from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They drew their own connections between those wars and O’Brien’s Vietnam. One student, for example, read O’Brien’s sentence: “We went to war because we were ashamed not to.” He then raised his hand. “Isn’t that why a lot of people are upset about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Because they don’t understand why we’re going to war?” That kind of discussion occurs naturally with the Common Core. Previously, nonfiction would have been a separate unit of study. But I’ve found that this new way of integrating it with the novels students read helps them make connections between literature and the real world.
Moreover, the new curriculum helps students build the kind of educational scaffolding that will serve them well in high school and college. This is important for all kids, but it’s particularly important at high-poverty, historically underperforming urban public schools such as the one where I teach… The Common Core also pushes students to be better writers. Early last year, my students read “Catcher in the Rye,” and alongside it they read psychology texts that helped them understand the turmoil Holden Caulfield was feeling. I knew my students had gripping stories of their own to tell, but many were afraid of opening up. So, to complement the book and our discussions, I invited adults from across the school, including the principal and the guidance counselor, to come into the classroom and share stories from their lives. The process created a safe space that allowed my students to open up in their own writing. One, whose mother had died of cancer when he was young, wrote about his last conversation with her. He read it aloud in front of the entire middle school, breaking into tears and bringing many of his classmates and teachers to tears too. He received a standing ovation.
Los Angeles teacher Andrew Vega, in the Los Angeles Times, explaining why everyone should embrace the implementation of Common Core reading and math standards.
We spend years of our lives working to obtain a diploma. We invest substantial capital in it. And yet… a college diploma is an opaque and unrevealing document. If we were building a higher education system from scratch, would our records of assessment and certification look anything like today’s diplomas?…
Two hundred years ago, what you learned about Latin, the Bible, and mathematics when you were 21 was just as likely to be true when you turned 70. So you spent four straight years in college lecture halls and libraries, you acquired skills and knowledge that would serve you for life, and then you were done. Now, in today’s fast-changing world, it makes more sense to learn provisionally, opportunistically, as new challenges and necessities arise.
To make this style of learning more practical, we need certification for it that employers will grow to trust and value even more than they do traditional bachelor’s degrees because the efficacy will be so much better. Imagine an online document that’s iterative like a LinkedIn profile (and might even be part of the LinkedIn profile), but is administered by some master service that verifies the authenticity of its components. While you’d be the creator and primary keeper of this profile, you wouldn’t actually be able to add certifications yourself. Instead, this master service would do so, verifying information with the certification issuers, at your request, after you successfully completed a given curriculum.
Over time, this dynamic, networked diploma will contain an increasing number of icons or badges symbolizing specific certifications. It could also link to transcripts, test scores, and work examples from these curricula, and even evaluations from instructors, classmates, internship supervisors, and others who have interacted with you in your educational pursuits. Ultimately the various certificates you earn could be bundled into higher-value certifications. If you earn five certificates in the realm of computer science, you might receive an icon or badge that symbolizes this higher level of experience and expertise. In this way, you could eventually assemble portfolios that reflect a similar breadth of experiences that you get when you pursue a traditional four-year degree.
Reid Hoffman, on LinkedIn, articulating why even higher education must be overhauled.
There are those who would seal up our lips on the subject of slavery, because its discussion is calculated to irritate the south: they would have us delay the work of reform to a more convenient season. But we cannot comply with their wishes for the following reasons: To keep silence would be disobeying the command, “Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them”—and we are sure that if we and our children were in the condition of the slaves, and the slaves in ours, we should deem them hard-hearted if they suffered any notions of… policy to deter them from exposing the injustice of our oppressors, and pleading for our emancipation.
Again, we cannot be silent, because we dare not disobey God: He has said—”Open thy mouth for the dumb, in the cause of all such as are appointed for destruction. Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.” “The slaves cannot speak for themselves—we speak in their stead, and on their behalf, and who, that “judgeth righteously,” but will admit that they are “poor and needy,” and “appointed for destruction?”” Again, we cannot desist, because our advisers never pretend to designate a period when it will be more safe to plead for the oppressed than at the present time; and until they do so, we feel ourselves obligated to go on.
Again, we dare not delay, because they are unable to prolong our lives, and only the present time is ours—to-morrow we may be in eternity. We must therefore plead now, or death may shortly arrest our career. Again, we decline giving up our cause for a time, because it is morally certain that every thing is lost, and nothing gained, by compromising with sinners—that if it be dangerous to touch the slave system now, it will be far more dangerous to meddle with it when it shall have reached (as it will very shortly) double its present magnitude—and that if it is difficult to obtain the liberation of two millions of slaves now, it will be altogether impracticable to emancipate four, eight or sixteen millions in after years.
Finally, we are unwilling to fold our arms, and suppress our voices, for the reason given by our advisers, namely, that all allusions to slavery are offensive to the planters, because we do not believe that if we should be asked in rendering up our final account, why did we not cry aloud and spare not, Jehovah would be satisfied with a reply like this—”…while we were waiting and dozing for the proper time to come around, death cut us down, and this is the reason why we opened not our mouth for the suffering and the dumb—and we left the pastors and members of churches, of all denominations, sighing and waiting to see the day when it would be safe to maintain the cause of the afflicted and the right of the poor—when the thief would be more willing to be recognized as a thief, and the fraudulent as dishonest, and the oppressor as an unjust man.” Could we make such a plea at the bar of God?
William Lloyd Garrison, in the Liberator in 1832, declaring why he and his fellow abolitionists could not keep silent or not take action against slavery. Garrison’s words, true nearly 181 years ago, should be embraced today by reformers looking to end another form of slavery that comes in the guise of the nation’s education crisis. You cannot lead by being silent.
Illustration courtesy of Abstractusart.com