Friday
June 29, 2007
It will likely be years before the full impact of the Supreme Court’s latest school integration decision is clear. In the meantime, there’s plenty of commentary to keep us busy.
Just have time to read one thing? My recommendation is NPR senior correspondent and biographer of Thurgood Marshall, Juan Williams, who takes the controversial position that “it is time to acknowledge that Brown’s time has passed” in his New York Times OpEd “Don’t Mourn Brown v. Board of Education.”
Want to hear Juan Williams instead of reading him? Try his NPR conversation with Renee Montagne.Desegregation does not speak to dropout rates that hover near 50 percent for black and Hispanic high school students. It does not equip society to address the so-called achievement gap between black and white students that mocks Brown’s promise of equal educational opportunity.
And the fact is, during the last 20 years, with Brown in full force, America’s public schools have been growing more segregated — even as the nation has become more racially diverse. In 2001, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the average white student attends a school that is 80 percent white, while 70 percent of black students attend schools where nearly two-thirds of students are black and Hispanic…
...Racial malice is no longer the primary motive in shaping inferior schools for minority children. Many failing big city schools today are operated by black superintendents and mostly black school boards.
And today the argument that school reform should provide equal opportunity for children, or prepare them to live in a pluralistic society, is spent. The winning argument is that better schools are needed for all children — black, white, brown and every other hue — in order to foster a competitive workforce in a global economy.
Looking for balanced television coverage of the decision? Try NewsHour.
Have hours and hours? Google News is your source for EVERY. ARTICLE. EVER. WRITTEN. It’s overwhelming, but a great resource.
Labels: Conversations, Resources
Thursday
June 28, 2007
Last week I had dinner with a former colleague, and we caught up on all the gossip: who was doing great at college, who had had a baby, who had come out of the closet, who had won a scholarship, who had suffered a great tragedy. Finding out where life has taken my former students is a great joy, especially for being so rare.
My favorite run-in has to be the year I took a few students to the Rainbow/PUSH conference downtown. At lunch, they handed out the NAACP scholarships for that year, and who should be on the list but Darius, a boy who was possibly the greatest challenge of my challenging first year teaching 8th grade. This was a boy who had impersonated his mother when I tried to call home, whose mother had threatened to sue me, who threw temper tantrums in class, who wrote inappropriate essays just to see what I’d do. And yet, when I saw him after the awards ceremony, he was so happy to see me and we had a wonderful talk. He had grown up, had found ways to survive the chaos at home and no longer take it out on those around him, had channeled his energies into getting a full scholarship to college.
I was reminded of these conversations when I was referred to these fascinating articles, which Alexander Russo refers to as time-lapse journalism:
So, how about your students? Where are they now?
Labels: Conversations
Thursday
June 21, 2007
A recent New York Times Magazine piece unpacked the increasingly common practice of “redshirting” kids who would be young for their grade, sitting them out for another year so they’ll be the oldest in their grade.
An interlocking set of motives are guiding this trend:
[According to one development psychologist,] “We used to revere individual accomplishment. Now we revere self-esteem, and the reverence has snowballed in unconscious ways - into parents always wanting their children to feel good, wanting everything to be pleasant.” So parents wait an extra year in the hope that when their children enter school their age or maturity will shield them from social and emotional hurt. Elizabeth Levett Fortier, a kindergarten teacher in the George Peabody Elementary School in San Francisco, notices the impact on her incoming students. “I’ve had children come into my classroom, and they’ve never even lost at Candy Land.”
>many parents, legislatures and teachers find the current curriculum too challenging for many older 4- and young 5-year-olds, which makes sense, because it’s largely the same curriculum taught to first graders less than a generation ago…
...In a report on kindergarten, the National Association of Early Childhood Specialists in State Departments of Education wrote, “Most of the questionable entry and placement practices that have emerged in recent years have their genesis in concerns over children’s capacities to cope with the increasingly inappropriate curriculum in kindergarten.”
Some states are considering countering this trend by pushing back their kindergarten age cutoffs so that all kindergartners will be older. But this is not a solution, because it highlights one of the primary troubling effects of this trend:
one serious side effect of pushing back the cutoffs is that while well-off kids with delayed enrollment will spend another year in preschool, probably doing what kindergartners did a generation ago, less-well-off children may, as the literacy specialist Katie Eller put it, spend “another year watching TV in the basement with Grandma.” What’s more, given the socioeconomics of redshirting - and the luxury involved in delaying for a year the free day care that is public school - the oldest child in any given class is more likely to be well off and the youngest child is more likely to be poor. “You almost have a double advantage coming to the well-off kids,” says Samuel J. Meisels, president of Erikson Institute, a graduate school in child development in Chicago. “From a public-policy point of view I find this very distressing.”
Education bloggers Alexander Russo and Joanne Jacobs both commented on this article, and Russo even introduced me to a neat tool to see what all the bloggers out there are saying about it.
Labels: Conversations
Wednesday
June 20, 2007
Now that school’s over and you’ve got some time to think, is anyone considering going for National Board Certification next year? According to the consortium National Board Certification Chicago,
The true value of earning the profession’s highest distinction comes from the enhanced pedagogical skills teachers obtain upon finishing the NBC process. The descriptive, analytical and reflective writing about your practice will make the experience priceless while impacting the academic achievement of your students.
The value of NBC to teachers is also financial, with Illinois offering NBCTs a $3,000 per year bonus for up to ten years. Chicago teachers are eligible for additional awards through National Board Certification Chicago.
For support through the NBC process, try National Board Certification Chicago or Illinois National Board Professional Preparation and Support System. ISBE’s website has more info on NBC for Illinois teachers, and the National Board itself has a good website with lots of information and links relevant for teachers nationwide.
I’m interested to start reviewing the literature on National Board Certification, especially in light of the recent flurry of interest in teacher retention. Could NBC be one of the tools we use to try to keep those highly educated new teachers in the profession not just for five years, but for 10, 15, 20 years? Perhaps the professional and intellectual support provided in the program is a piece of the puzzle of keeping talented teachers in the career.
Labels: Resources
Friday
June 15, 2007
A big golden apple for all of you who just finished the school year, whether it was your first, your last, or anywhere in between. You made a difference this year.
What do teachers make?
(If you’re rolling your eyes because you’ve had this forwarded to you a zillion times, watch the video! The real version is much tougher, funnier, and - at least to me - more inspirational than the email forward version. Warning: there’s some minor strong language.)
Labels: Conversations
Monday
June 11, 2007
I met today with local education technology expert Lucy Gray, and she introduced me to ning, a new social networking site that’s attracting a great group of educators. The two sites I’ve explored so far are Lucy’s Global Education Collaborative and the group exploring how to fully integrate new interactive technology into the classroom, a phenomenon known as Classroom 2.0. Both are open to any interested teacher, and feature discussions, video clips, and blogs. (Just like the new TEN will!)
For more ideas about how technology can improve your teaching (and/or your life), start with Lucy’s blog and Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed and just click on the links for anything that sounds interesting!
(By the way, that’s my high-tech advice for anyone just getting started using blogs and other internet tools: click anything that sounds interesting! If you’re using Firefox or Safari or the newest version of Internet Explorer, be sure to use the tabs feature! It’s a huge time and energy saver.)
Labels: Resources
Thursday
June 07, 2007
Today the Illinois Education Research Center (based at SIU-Edwardsville) released a new report, Leaving Schools or Leaving the Profession: Setting Illinois’ Record Straight on New Teacher Attrition. [PDF]
The report counters the endlessly repeated statistic that half of all teachers leave within their first five years, pointing out that 1/3 of teachers who leave in the first five years ultimately return to teaching, and if these returners are accounted for, the rate of loss shrinks to 27%. (The rate could actually be even less, given that they were unable to track teachers to schools in other states or to private schools).
Interestingly, they found that highly educated teachers were most likely to leave their initial schools and the profession generally. While new teachers with masters degrees have tended to be a small proportion of the teaching force, the study points out, “as more academically strong teachers are recruited to disadvantaged schools, we can expect attrition rates to increase unless other conditions for working and learning also improve.”
Oops, says the Chicago Sun Times. CPS has gone out of its way in the last ten years to increase the number of new teachers pulled from selective colleges and holding advanced degrees.
But here’s the rub. New teachers with just such qualifications are among the most likely to leave…
Why are the best and brightest more likely to leave? For starters, they could face culture shock working in schools that may look far different from the ones they attended.
Plus, they are attractive to other schools—be they more advantaged ones or suburban schools with higher top pay scales.
Susan Kurland, a CPS principle quoted in the Sun Times story offered another explanation:
“Possibly people with higher ACTs have higher expectations for themselves, and they find the failure to be more overwhelming than someone else. It’s brutal.”
If we (as teachers, as professional development providers) are committed to attracting well-educated critical thinkers to this profession, this study suggests that we need to be deliberate about how we go about keeping them in the profession. As someone who came into teaching with a masters degree from a fancy school, and left after four years, this all cuts very close to home for me and leaves me wondering what such measures would look like, and how to do this in a way that doesn’t leave a bad taste of elitism in everyone’s mouth.
Labels: Conversations
Monday
June 04, 2007
Just a few of the many options out there…
Revolutionize your teaching practice at the Lesson Study Summer Insitute.
Attend a chess and math workshop (or many others!) at the Chicago Teacher Center.
Learn to teach science using food.
Conduct action research as part of the Teachers Network Leadership Institute. ($1,000 fellowship stipend!)
Win a grant to start a podcasting program at your school.
Explore moral choices, courage, compassion, race, and identity.
Labels: Resources
