Disrespecting Teachers,
Benefits of a Book-oriented Home,
Math is for Boys and Girls,
Poverty Affects Achievement,
Bill of Rights for School Children.
Benefits of a Book-oriented Home,
Math is for Boys and Girls,
Poverty Affects Achievement,
Bill of Rights for School Children.
THE DISRESPECT OF TEACHERS
Our Public Schools Aren’t Failing; We’re Failing Our Public Schools
As professionals, teachers are disrespected.
Ed reformers blame teachers for "failing schools" but that's because the truth is closer to home. Here we read about Michigan's "failing schools" caused by legislative neglect or, more likely, legislative abuse.
The state’s public schools were once admired across the nation. They were well-funded and supported, and provided an excellent education for children. These schools became “the center of community life” in many places in the state, and still do in many communities.
But our state’s “new landlord”, aided and abetted by the “multi-level marketing robber barons” of West Michigan, stopped funding our schools, allowing too many of them, especially in our largest cities, to fall into neglect and disrepair. Michigan’s last governor took $1 billion from the state’s education fund, while declaring himself the “education governor”, and we wonder why Detroit’s schools don’t have the resources needed to maintain their facilities, or pay their teachers a competitive salary. Our current Secretary of Education suggested the best solution to the problems with Detroit’s schools would be to simply shut down the entire district, and let families find other places to send their children–and this is the person in charge of the nation’s public schools.
Teachers not appointed to governor's teacher compensation commission
As professionals, teachers are disrespected.
The State Board of Accounts includes CPAs...the Native American Indiana Affairs Commission includes members of local Native Americans...
But a commission directly affecting teachers in Indiana has no teacher as a voting member.
Gov. Eric Holcomb followed through Tuesday on his pledge to charge a state commission with finding ways to make Indiana teacher pay more competitive with neighboring states.
However, none of the seven voting members of the Next Level Teacher Compensation Commission is a teacher.
At What Point Do We Stop Blaming Teachers?
As professionals, teachers are disrespected.
State legislatures and policy makers choose how and what teachers must teach. When their choices don't improve achievement, however, the teachers are the ones who are blamed...
As a teacher who has been told to teach a program as it’s written, how the hell is it my fault if the assignments students get are not challenging enough? I’m not the one who designed the assignments.
If you’re requiring me to read from some stupid script written by publishers who’ve never met my students, then how can you fairly evaluate my instruction? It’s not my instruction.
Should we be surprised that students aren’t engaged during a lesson that’s delivered by a teacher who had no hand in creating it and who sees it as the contrived lump that it is? I’m not a terrible actor, but hand me a lemon and I’m going to have trouble convincing even the most eager-to-learn student that I’m giving them lemonade.
THE BENEFIT OF HOME LIBRARIES
Home Libraries Confer Long-Term Benefits
Reading aloud to children is the single most important activity that parents and caregivers can do to help children become readers and achieve success in school. The study linked here reinforces the benefits of living in a book-oriented environment and explains that it has life-long benefits. Unfortunately, not all parents are able to afford the books for a home library or even provide transportation to public libraries.
Fortunately, there are a few sources of free books for children.
We've known for a while that home libraries are strongly linked to children's academic achievement. What's less certain is whether the benefits they bestow have a long-term impact.
A new large-scale study, featuring data from 31 countries, reports they do indeed. It finds the advantages of growing up in a book-filled home can be measured well into adulthood.
MATH IS FOR GIRLS, TOO
No intrinsic gender differences in children’s earliest numerical abilities
It turns out that men don't have any more "natural" inclination for math then do women.
Across all stages of numerical development, analyses consistently revealed that boys and girls do not differ in early quantitative and mathematical ability. These findings indicate that boys and girls are equally equipped to reason about mathematics during early childhood.
LOOKING BACK
Here are two posts from the past which are still relevant to today's educational environment.
Poverty Limits Student Achievement
Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success
David C. Berliner's 2009 report explains the ways that poverty impacts student achievement. We must address poverty at the same time as we address school achievement or we're doomed to fail. Legislators who blame teachers or students for "failing schools" must take responsibility for their own failure to create an equitable society. They must provide high-poverty schools with the resources needed to counteract the out-of-school factors impacting student achievement.
Because America’s schools are so highly segregated by income, race, and ethnicity, problems related to poverty occur simultaneously, with greater frequency, and act cumulatively in schools serving disadvantaged communities. These schools, therefore, face significantly greater challenges than schools serving wealthier children, and their limited resources are often overwhelmed. Efforts to improve educational outcomes in these schools, attempting to drive change through test-based accountability, are thus unlikely to succeed unless accompanied by policies to address the OSFs that negatively affect large numbers of our nations’ students. Poverty limits student potential; inputs to schools affect outputs from them.
The Schools All Children Deserve
A Bill of Rights for School Children
Russ Walsh's 2016 book, A Parent's Guide to Public Education in the 21st Century, contains this gem, a Bill of Rights for School Children, first published on his blog.
Fulfilling the items on this list would go a long way to providing equitable educational opportunities for all children.
As we look to future, it may be useful to consider some principles about public education that, for me at least, seem immutable. A Bill of Rights for the school child if you will.
1. Every child has a right to a free, high quality, public education.
2. Every child has a right to attend a well-staffed, well-resourced, clean and safe local neighborhood school.
3. Every child has the right to be taught by well-informed, fully certified, fully engaged teachers who care about the child as a learner and as a person.
4. Every child has the right to a school that provides a rich and varied curriculum that includes the visual and performing arts, integrated technology, and physical education.
5. Every child has a right to a school that provides a rich and varied extra-curricular program including athletics, clubs, and service learning opportunities.
6. Every child has a right to instruction that is well-planned, engaging, and collaborative.
7. Every child has a right to instruction that is developmentally appropriate.
8. Every elementary school child has a right to daily recess.
9. Every child has the right to go to a school with adequate support personnel including librarians, nurses, guidance counselors, and learning support specialists.
10. Every child has a right to an element of choice in the educational program, including the right to choose to take advanced level courses.
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