Could This Be Gadfly’s End? Top 12 Articles From 2023 Read By Fewer Than Ever

December 22, 2023 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Accountability, Budget, Censorship, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Education, history, Labor, Learning, McKeesport Area School District, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Philosophy, Pittsburgh, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, School Choice, School Funding, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teach for America, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Technology, Uncategorized 2023, After School Satan Club, Asian-Americans, blog, bloggers, charter schools, Commonwealth Charter Academy, Cyber Charter Schools, education, Education Bloggers Network, end of the year, library, MAP test, Politics, Propel Charter Schools, teacher salary, teachers, woke

Thank you, loyal readers, but this may be the end of Gadfly on the Wall.

Readership has fallen off to such a degree that I’m just not sure it’s worth continuing anymore.

That combined with increasing difficulties in my own life have made me truly question whether I should (or can) go on with it.

Don’t get me wrong. I will truly cherish every moment writing these articles, fighting for what I (still) think needs to happen in public education so that our children can be fairly treated and succeed.

There is so much I think most people don’t know about what happens in our schools and what could be done to make them better for children, families and the people who work there.

But after 9 years of pounding my head against the wall – well, it seems like the wall is winning.

This blog used to be read by at least half a million people each year. But social media – the prime distributor of this material – is not what it was a decade ago. In 2021, I had 222,414 hits. Last year it was 124,984. This year it was 73,121.

And much of those were for articles I’d written in years past. The highest three articles this year were not written in 2023. They were: The MAP Test – Selling Schools Unnecessary Junk at Student Expense ( 2,344) from Aug. 2022, When Good Students Get Bad Standardized Test Scores (1,775) from Oct. 2022, and Lesson Plans Are a Complete Waste of Time (1,544) from Sept. 2021.

Why keep putting out new content? It often feels like I’m saying the same thing over and over anyway – and not really being heard except by the same few people.

So I’m going to pause, take a moment and really think about things.

Heck! I might find out that I simply can’t quit because I’ve got too much to say. Then again, I may only write when something really important comes up that I absolutely have to let loose on.

Or this could be it.

I don’t know.

In any case, thank you so much for nearly 10 years of readership. I assume most people seeing this would have been here for the long haul.

It has been an amazing experience. I’m not sure what comes next, but for now I leave you with some outstanding moments from 2023.

All the best in the future!

-Steven Singer

The Gadfly on the Wall

12) Standardized Tests Hurt Asian-American Students, Too, Though Many Get High Scores

Published: March 27

Views: 243

Description: Asian-Americans – taken as a whole – score better on standardized tests than white Americans. But they are just as much victimized by testing as any other minority. The only difference is their success is held up as an excuse for upholding this deeply inequitable practice. It obscures that all Asians are not the same, certain types do not score as highly yet all are held to unfair expectations.

Fun Fact: This is a rarely explored or reported on aspect of the standardized testing phenomenon. I’m proud to have written on it despite its low readership.

11) Fact Checking Propel Charter Schools – Do They Live Up to Their Own Hype?

Published: Jan. 20

Views: 572

Description: The Propel Charter School network of 13 schools based in Pittsburgh, Pa, has advertisements everywhere proclaiming its virtues. However, this is just advertising. From test scores to safety to class size to teacher qualifications and many other factors, the charter chain comes up short again and again. Compared with authentic public schools in the same neighborhoods where these schools are located, Propel compares rather badly.

Fun Fact: I think this is incredibly important in the western Pennsylvania region. This information should be shared far and wide. It should at very least spark media investigations comparing Propel and authentic public schools so parents could make informed choices about where to send their children. But we never see that because Propel is a frequent advertiser. If the media provided this information – and didn’t just uncritically repeat propaganda – the media conglomerates would lose valuable advertising revenue. I am proud I could provide this public service.

10) Stay Woke, Public School Teachers

Published: March 12

Views: 588

Description: Being “woke” just means being alert to racial prejudice and discrimination – just knowing that these things exist and trying to recognize them when present. The way I see it, that’s well under a teacher’s job description. After all, who else will teach the true history that for more than 400 years in excess of 15 million men, women and children were the victims of the transatlantic slave trade? Who will teach the true history of the fight against human bondage and the struggle for equal rights? Who will teach about women’s fight for suffrage, equal pay, and reproductive freedom? Who will teach about the struggle of the individual to affirm their own gender identity and sexual expression? It’s up to us.

Fun Fact: Republicans are so anti-teacher, they’ve made the acquisition of knowledge part of the culture war and turned teachers into the enemy. This was just my way of pushing back a little.

9) Where Have School Libraries Gone?

Published: Aug. 25

Views: 681

Description: McKeesport Area School District – where I graduated and my daughter still attends classes – closed its high school public library for good. They gave away the books and turned it into a large group instruction room. And this kind of thing is happening all across the country. This is a problem because every book is not available on-line. In fact, the number and variety of books available digitally is much smaller than most public or school libraries typically have in their collections – if you’re not going to pay an additional fee. I can read most of the classics of world literature on the Internet, but anything that isn’t in the public domain is going to require me to pony up some dough. And the same goes for most respected resources.

Fun Fact: This was a truly depressing discovery but even more so was the response. Many people couldn’t grasp why libraries are even necessary today. Libraries used to be something society provided to every citizen just as a matter of course. Now our expectations are so low that we’ve nearly given up on this essential resource.

8) After School Satan Clubs Are Teaching Public School Districts an Important Lesson in Free Speech

Published: May 17

Views: 691

Description: Thousands of districts in the US allow religious organizations and clubs to operate on public school property, especially after classes are over. So The Satanic Temple goes around proposing After-School Satan Clubs at the same districts – and all Hell breaks loose.

Fun Fact: You want to let religion in the school house door, you have to let all of them in. You can’t pick and choose.

7) Congress May Raise Educators’ Minimum Salaries to Combat the Teacher Exodus

Published: Jan. 1

Views: 699

Description: A group of Congressional Democrats have proposed a national minimum salary for teachers. Rep. Frederica Wilson and Rep. Jamaal Bowman, (both former teachers) and six other members of the House have introduced The American Teacher Act establishing a minimum salary of $60,000 for all public school teachers working in the U.S. – the first legislation of its kind. The average starting salary of teachers nationwide was $41,770 in the 2020-21 school year, according to the National Education Association (which supports the bill).

Fun Fact: What a lovely thought! Still waiting on this to be approved. Any day now. Come on, Congress!

6) I am a Charter School Abolitionist, and You Should Be, Too

Published: March 22

Views: 701

Description: Charter schools have been around since 1992. Though it seems like they’re everywhere these days, only 45 states and the District of Columbia allow these schools and even then they enroll just 6% of the students in the country – roughly three million children. The five states that do not have charter school laws are Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Vermont. So after 32 years of trial and error, we’re left with a charter school system that does not get better academic results than authentic public schools (despite being given dramatic advantages in their charter agreements) and in many cases drastically fails by comparison. Not to mention all the fraud, malfeasance and ineptitude you get from removing regulations for any Tom, Dick or Harry who thinks he can open a school. Time to abolish these schools and end this failed experiment.

Fun Fact: This article really angered some folks. There are lots of people who hate the idea of charter schools in general but want to preserve anything that they think might give their own kids an advantage over others. Even if that is rarely the case! However, the gleam of the new has definitely worn off this concept and an increasing number of folks are open to limiting or ending this fiasco.

5) A Private Equity Firm, The Makers of the MAP Test, and an Ed Tech Publisher Join Forces

Published: Jan. 26

Views: 930

Description: A year after being gobbled up by private equity firm Veritas Capital, ed tech company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) is acquiring K-12 assessment giant Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA). Let me put that in perspective – a scandal-ridden investment firm that made billions in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan bought one of standardized testing’s big four and then added the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test to its arsenal. This almost certainly means the cost of state testing is going to increase since the providers of the tests are shrinking.

Fun Fact: This is the kind of story that will creep into our lives before we even realize what is happening. We’ll wonder why our districts and even entire states which rely heavily on the MAP test are buying as much HMH curriculum as possible. That way they can teach directly what is on their standardized tests. Bye, bye, tax dollars that could have been spent to educate kids!

4) Top 4 Things McKeesport Area School Directors Need to do to Extinguish the District Dumpster Fire

Published: Oct. 8

Views: 963

Description: My neighborhood district – McKeesport Area School District (MASD) – is going through tough times. School directors reneged on a teachers contract. Their business manager ran for the hills. And at a board meeting two school directors had their dirty laundry aired during public comments prompting one to call a White Oak Councilperson a homophobic slur. I had four suggestions to right the ship: (1) Pass a Code of Conduct for Board Members and Administrators, (2) Start Streaming Council Meetings Again, (3) Hire a New Reputable Business Manager, and (4) Pass a Teachers Contract with No Tax Increase.

Fun Fact: This article got a lot of notice in the neighborhood and some of my suggestions actually got done. The district hired a new business manager and will begin streaming new meetings. They’re also negotiating with teachers so fingers crossed.

3) Teach for America Promised to Fix the Teacher Exodus Before Anyone Even Noticed There Was One. Now It’s Choking on Its Own Failure

Published: Aug. 7

Views: 1,070

Description: Teach for America (TFA) was supposed to fix the teacher exodus by fast tracking non-education majors into the classroom where they would teach for a few years and then enter the private sector as “experts” to drive public policy. College graduates would take a five-week crash course in education and commit to at least two years in the classroom thereby filling any vacant teaching positions. Not only didn’t it work, it ended up making the situation worse. Now the organization created in 1990 is expecting its lowest enrollment in 15 years. TFA anticipates placing slightly less than 2,000 teachers in schools across the country this fall. I guess watering down what it means to be a teacher is even less popular than actually being an educator.

Fun Fact: People really hate TFA. The organization’s cred has gone down more than anything else in the education field – even more than charter schools. The fact that the emperor has no clothes here is painfully obvious.

2) Come Visit Your Wasted Tax Dollars at Commonwealth Charter Academy’s Waterfront Luxury Office Space

Published: Feb. 4

Views: 1,236

Description: If you go to the Waterfront in Homestead, PA, you’ll find the newest satellite office of Commonwealth Charter Academy (CCA) – the biggest cyber charter school network in the entire state. It’s one of 51 locations statewide. Only 27 states allow CYBER charters like this – schools that teach mostly (or entirely) distance learning through the Internet. Nationwide, Pennsylvania and Ohio have the largest cyber charter enrollment. In 2020-21, the Keystone State enrolled 61,000 students in 14 cyber charters – and roughly 21,000 attend CCA! There’s an authentic public school in this neighborhood, too – Steel Valley School District – right up the hill. It’s not located in nearly as trendy a spot though. Moreover, its four buildings were constructed around the 1970s and are crumbling down in places. But the new cyber charter school building looks like a palace!

Fun Fact: I don’t think most people who go to the Waterfront understand what the CCA location really is. To them it’s just another school, kind of sleek and modern looking. This article was my attempt to tell them. Thankfully it proved relatively popular, though the CCA people absolutely had a conniption. They couldn’t believe someone was criticizing their profitable business venture. This story brought the most trolls of any this year.

1) McKeesport Teachers Without a Contract Because of Bad Business Manager or Bad Faith School Board?

Published: Aug. 16

Views: 1,409

Description: McKeesport Area School District (MASD) botched a new teachers contract. So the question is – does it have a terrible business manager or a regressive school board? School directors and the teachers had agreed to a new contract, but the board tabled it in June after concerns that the western Pennsylvania district didn’t have the money to pay for moderate raises. Then the board skipped the entire month of July without a meeting as if the livelihoods of hundreds of employees don’t count. By the time classes were set to begin in August, the board was no closer to solving the problem. Board members mostly blamed the business manager who eventually quit. The situation still has not been resolved.

Fun Fact: This article hit the neighborhood like a nuclear blast. Everyone seemed to be talking about it. Someone in the neighborhood literally called me a “local legend” for having written it. I’m just glad it focused people’s attentions on the facts of the matter. If anything gets me to blog again, it will be writing more about the local stories that are so important but no one else is talking about.

Gadfly’s Other Year End Round Ups

This wasn’t the first year I’ve done a countdown of the year’s greatest hits. I usually write one counting down my most popular articles and one listing articles that I thought deserved a second look. Here are all my end of the year articles since I began my blog in 2014:

2022:

Gadfly’s Most Outrageous Articles in 2021 That You May Have Missed or Been Too Polite to Share

Gadfly’s Top 10 Articles of 2021 – Shouts in the Dark

2020:

The Most Important Education Articles (By Me) That You Probably Missed in 2020

Outrunning the Pandemic – Racing Through Gadfly’s Top 10 Stories of 2020

2019:

Sixteen Gadfly Articles That Made Betsy DeVos Itch in 2019 

2018:

A Gadfly’s Dozen: Top 13 Education Articles of 2018 (By Me)

2017:

What’s the Buzz? A Crown of Gadflies! Top 10 Articles (by Me) in 2017

Hidden Gadfly – Top 5 Stories (By Me) You May Have Missed in 2017

2016

Worse Than Fake News – Ignored News. Top 5 Education Stories You May Have Missed in 2016

Goodbye, 2016, and Good Riddance – Top 10 Blog Post by Me From a Crappy Year

2015

Gadfly’s Choice – Top 5 Blogs (By Me) You May Have Missed from 2015

Who’s Your Favorite Gadfly? Top 10 Blog Posts (By Me) That Enlightened, Entertained and Enraged in 2015

2014

Off the Beaten Gadfly – the Best Education Blog Pieces You Never Read in 2014

Standardized Tests Lie

November 19, 2023 stevenmsinger Accountability, capitalism, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Data, Education, Journalism, Labor, Learning, Media, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, reading, School Funding, Schools, Standardized Testing, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Toxic Testing, Uncategorized badass teachers association, education, high stakes testing, Journalism, lies, media, NAEP, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Politics, reading, schools, standardized testing, test scores, test-based accountability

Whom do you trust?

So much in life comes down to that simple question.

When two groups disagree, which one do you believe?

If it’s a matter of fact, you can look at the raw information yourself and come to your own conclusions. But often the matter under discussion is so complicated and the field so rarefied that you can’t hope to make a rational decision alone.

So we appeal to the experts.

In education, the experts are basically classroom teachers and standardized testing companies.

Sure there are students who experience all of their own educations. But that experience is by definition subjective and applies only to them. Something similar can be said of parents who experience the process second hand through their children. They can make decisions about the individuals in question but don’t have enough information to fully generalize about the entire system.

Those with the most exposure to the most diverse educational experiences are teachers and testing companies.

On the one side you have teachers who instruct students for at least 180 days a year, giving formal and informal assessments throughout to provide a classroom grade. On the other you have the testing companies that give students a single assessment over a period of hours or days.

And often they come to different conclusions.

Many times children get high classroom grades but low scores on the standardized test.

So let us ask the question that the media never does: which should we believe?

News sources almost always act as if there was no question in the first place. They invariably go with the test as if it were a pure matter of fact. But it isn’t. There are economic reasons for this sleight of hand – not academic ones. After all, the huge media conglomerate that ultimately pays the journalist’s salary often owns the standardized testing company or the publishing house or technology company that provides remediation for that particular assessment.

It’s also more interesting to write about failing test scores than kids doing well in school. An alarmist narrative certainly sells more papers. Would there even be a story if a reporter wrote “Majority of Kids Pass Courses and Graduate Again This Year”?

So we’re bombarded with doomsayer stories about failing schools, failing teachers and failing students.

Education Week ran a story last week titled “U.S. Parents Think Reading Instruction Is Going OK—Until They See National Test Results.”

And another called “Students’ Grades May Not Signal Actual Achievement, Study Cautions.”

It’s too bad the article never explains why we should take standardized test scores over classroom grades.

The first story even centers on a misreading of test scores.

The test in question is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) . Sometimes called the Nations Report Card, the assessment is given to a random sampling of elementary, middle and high school students in participating countries to compare the education systems of nations.

According to the latest NAEP results, about 2/3 of US students read below “proficient.” And when parents are told this, a new survey finds they lower their opinions of students’ reading abilities.

However, what the article fails to mention is that “proficient” on the NAEP is a misleading benchmark and always has been.

On the NAEP, “proficiency” does not mean students can read at grade level. Being able to do that would actually earn them a “basic” score.

If you read the NAEP’s own Website about how to interpret the scores, you’d see that:

“The NAEP Proficient achievement level does not represent grade-level proficiency, but rather competency over challenging subject matter. NAEP achievement levels are to be used on a trial basis and should be interpreted and used with caution.”

So why are journalists continually spreading false claims about the tests that the test makers, themselves, dispute? And why have they been doing so for decades?

Part of the problem is the NAEP has not revised a purposefully misleading grading scale since it was first given in 1969. As much as representatives will dispute the interpretation of scores if pressed, they could do something about it if they cared to do so. They could even put out press releases about how the organizations’ scores are being misread. But that never happens. They remain quiet unless you ask them specifically about the scores and – surprise – education journalists are not very curious about this issue. It would ruin their stories!

Only about 1/3 of US students were below NAEP’s Basic score. In other words 2/3 of US students read at or above grade level – the exact opposite of what journalists are reporting based on their interpretation of the results! However, even the meaning behind that is debatable because each state has a different definition of reading at grade level. A more accurate metric might be reading at age level, but NAEP scores don’t really correlate with it. Good luck getting anyone interested in reading about that.

Then we have the article about student grades not showing actual learning achievement.

The story is about schools in Washington state where students earned increasingly higher classroom grades but lower end-of-the-year standardized tests scores.

Why did the education journalists decide the standardized test scores were accurate and the classroom grades were not?

Good question, but you won’t find the answer in the story. This is taken as an article of faith.

Obviously the standardized tests scores are better. They were given by a corporation. Classroom grades were given by teachers.

This just goes to show the media’s glaring bias against educators and in favor of big business.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average salary of public school teachers in Pennsylvania (my home state) is between $53,000 and $59,000 per year.

Meanwhile, more than $1.7 billion is spent on standardized testing in the US each year, according to a study by the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings. Another $669 million is spent on elementary assessments. Between $34-65 per student per year is spent by the states on standardized testing.

To put that in perspective, perhaps the biggest standardized testing corporation, Pearson, reported revenues of $5.511 billion and profits of $762 million in 2018. That doesn’t include $89 million in additional profit for Pearson from its ownership stake in Penguin Random House Publishers, a major world school textbook publishing company.

Pearson’s main competitor, Educational Testing Services (ETS), reported revenues of $2.1 billion for the same time period. And the College Board, maker of the SAT test, reported another $1.068 billion in revenue in 2017.

Standardized testing companies want people to believe there is a crisis in our public schools and that children are not learning well unless they are held accountable by the same standardized tests these companies make and manufacture. These companies make the tests, grade the tests and then sell school remediation materials when kids don’t pass.

There are certainly real problems with our educational system.

For instance, the U.S. is one of the only countries in the world – if not probably the ONLY country – that funds schools based largely on local taxes. Other developed nations either equalize funding or provide extra money for kids in need. In the Netherlands, for example, national funding is provided to all schools based on the number of pupils enrolled. But for every guilder allocated to a middle-class Dutch child, 1.25 guilders are allocated for a lower-class child and 1.9 guilders for a minority child – exactly the opposite of the situation in the U.S.

If we want to compare the US to other countries, this is a perfect place to start.

But a focus on test scores obscures the differences.

Virtually all of the top scoring countries taking the NAEP exam have much less child poverty than the U.S. If they had the same percentage of poor students that we do, their scores would be lower than ours. Likewise, if we had the same percentage of poor students that they do, our scores would go through the roof! We would have the best scores in the world!

NAEP scores just mirror back to us our child poverty rate – that more than 1/3 of our students live below the poverty line and more than half of public school students qualify for free or reduced lunches.

But this myopic focus on standardized tests also blinds us to the ways our system is superior to that of many other countries.

We do something that many international systems do not. We educate everyone! Foreign systems often weed children out by high school. They don’t let every child get 13 years of grade school (counting kindergarten). They only school their highest achievers.

So when we compare ourselves to these countries, we’re comparing ALL of our students to only SOME of theirs – their best academic pupils, to be exact. Yet we still hold our own given these handicaps!

This suggests that the majority of problems with our public schools are monetary. Pure and simple.

A 2018 review by Northwestern University found that in 12 out of 13 studies increased spending had a positive effect on student outcomes. And that result has been verified by studies since then in California, Texas, Wisconsin and other states.

Money makes a difference.

Money spent on students – not more testing.

The bottom line is that standardized tests are not accurate assessments of student learning. They are corporate propaganda.

Standardized tests lie, and the corporate friendly education media feed us those same lies as if they were fact.

Like this post? You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

School Directors Shouldn’t Double Down on PA’s Keystone Exam Circus

November 11, 2023 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Accountability, Budget, capitalism, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Education, ESSA, Every Student Succeeds Act, Harrisburg, history, Keystone Exams, Learning, Local Control, McKeesport Area School District, NCLB, No Child Left Behind, Parents, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Schools, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Politics, portfolio-based assessments, Prejudice, School Funding, Schools, Standardized Testing, Student Mobility, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Uncategorized annual testing, economics, education, Greed, Keystone Exams, Pennsylvania, Politics, standardization, standardized testing, Students, teachers, Test Prep, test-based accountability, testing

Ladies and Gentlemen, children of all ages, welcome to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Keystone Exam Circus!

Here you will see children of 14 to 18-years-old perform death defying stunts just in order to graduate!

They’ll jump through the flaming hoop of the Algebra I Exam!

They’ll hop through the spiked hoop of the Literature Exam!

And they’ll even bound through the nitroglycerine filled hoop of the Biology Exam!

All this just so they can qualify for a diploma they’ve already earned by passing 12 years or more of coursework!

Now isn’t that the greatest show on Earth!!!!!!?

Apparently, some school directors must think so. Because they’ve decided to force all the students in their districts into the center ring.

Because as stupid as the state law is – and it is very, very stupid – it doesn’t require all students to pass these tests to graduate. Kids don’t even have to take the tests if they don’t want.

If they so choose, they may skip one or more of these ridiculous assessments in favor of an alternative.

They can take a different test like the SAT, ACT, etc., achieve an industry-based competency certification, successfully complete a service-learning project, or finish an internship or cooperative education program, among other metrics.

Sure! It’s a glorified fetch quest full of unnecessary complications and anxiety, but it’s better than being forced to pass a cockamamie fill-in-the-bubble corporate boondoggle.

Unfortunately some school board members don’t see it that way.

It’s not that they want to remove this senseless hurdle from students who have already proven they’ve learned the prerequisite skills to graduate. They still want kids to go on a wild goose chase, but they can’t stomach the idea of kids picking their own goose.

To switch back to the metaphor with which I started this piece, they would rather students jump through the standardized testing hoop – the one made by Data Recognition Corp (DRC), the Minnesota corporation that writes the Keystone Exams and has been gorging on $533 million in Commonwealth tax dollars for the last decade. Not the hoop that pays the College Board or one that – God forbid – doesn’t make a huge corporation any richer.

Why?

It’s beyond me.

Maybe they think forcing students down the DRC path will help improve district academics.

Maybe they love fill-in-the-bubble tests.

Or maybe they just hate kids…

I don’t know.

But one thing is certain – the Keystone Exams are a costly mistake the state forces taxpayers to fund and kids to endure unnecessary gatekeeping and narrowed classroom curriculum.

The whole mess started when the federal government reauthorized its education law formerly called No Child Left Behind (NClB). That law required kids to take standardized tests in middle school and once in high school. When Congress changed the name to the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), it allowed more flexibility in the high school test. It didn’t just have to be a standardized test. The state could pick from all kinds of options. Pennsylvania chose one of almost everything including new standardized tests – the Keystones!

But the state legislature couldn’t decide whether to make it a graduation requirement until just last year.

Students who graduated in May (2023) were the first required to pass these exams or qualify with an alternate assessment, and the data is still out on its full impact.

A report conducted by The Philadelphia Education Research Consortium estimated that only about one third of city students would meet graduation requirements by passing the Keystone Exams. Specifically, nearly 50 Philadelphia high schools had less than 25% of their students with Keystone proficiency rates sufficient to graduate. The report concluded that some additional percentage of students would graduate with alternate assessments but there was no way to estimate what percentage that would be. Would fewer graduate? The same? More? No one knows yet.

Given this uncertainty, it’s difficult to fathom why school board members would want to require tests that may stand in the way of students’ future success.

This is especially true in districts serving poorer families.

Kids in wealthier districts almost always do better on the Keystone Exams than those in poorer districts, according to a report by State Auditor General Eugene DePasquale and State Sen. Andy Dinniman.

In fact, the report notes that of the 100 state schools with the highest scores, only five were located in impoverished districts —where the average household income is below $50,000.

Why would any district – especially those serving students with lower socioeconomics – feed kids into such a system, especially when they don’t have to play that game?

“The Department of Education itself said they [the Keystone Exams] are not an accurate or adequate indicator of career or academic readiness,” Dinniman said. “…These tests have faced opposition from almost every educational organization that exists.”

He’s right.

A 2019 report conducted by the state Legislative Budget and Finance Committee found that state educators (both principals and classroom teachers) overwhelmingly disapprove of the state’s standardized tests. That includes the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) tests given in grades 3-8 and Keystone Exams given in high school. Educators think these tests are ineffective, expensive and harmful to district curriculum and students.

When it comes to the PSSAs, 76% of teachers and 67% of principals said the tests were bad assessments.

For the Keystone Exams, 60% of teachers and 45% of principals said the tests were ineffective indicators of student achievement.

Both principals and teachers said their curriculum had been narrowed to prepare students for PSSAs and Keystone Exams. Instead of going into more depth on regular classwork or learning new skills, the focus shifts to teaching to the tests.

Taking the tests also eats up valuable class time. Administering the assessments takes between 5.7 to 8 days for each kind of test – the PSSA and the Keystone Exams, according to principals.

In addition, the report details the cost of giving these tests. In fiscal year 2017-2018, the state Department of Education paid $42.17 million for these tests.

This is part of a national trend:

“Standardized tests and test preparation have subsequently become big business and that multibillion dollar business continued to grow since the enactment of NCLB and the subsequent enactment of ESSA. According to the Pew Center on the States, annual state spending on standardized tests increased from $423 million before the NCLB (enacted in 2002) to upwards of $1.1 billion in 2008 (to put this in perspective this reflects a 160 percent increase compared to a 19.22 percent increase in inflation during the same time period). A more recent study by the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brooking put the cost at upwards of $1.7 billion in 2011 related to state spending on standardized tests.”

In just one year (2019) the state paid DRC $17.6 million to administer and score the Keystone Exams, said DePasquale. Between 2015 and 2021, the state spent nearly $100 million on the exams. And if we add in the PSSA, the corporation has collected $533 million from the Commonwealth over the last decade, DePasquale said.

Why are some school board members so dead set on making sure we keep paying them?

Federal law requires some kind of accountability measure before graduation whether it be a standardized test or something else. Why can’t the state simply use classroom grades for this measure? These are the daily assessment of student learning. How does it help students by inserting a corporation to make more money off of taxpayers?

The whole process is a complicated, unnecessary circus with our kids in the role of trained monkeys spinning plates so big business can slurp up more of our money.

I hope school directors will begin to understand this and not give in to the standardized testing spectacle.

It’s time for someone to send the clowns back home.

Like this post? You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

Stop Trying to Hide S-E-X From Students in School – They Already Know All About It From the Internet

November 1, 2023November 2, 2023 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Accountability, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Education, Harrisburg, Josh Shapiro, Learning, LGBT, literature, Local Control, Parents, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Philosophy, Pittsburgh, Politics, Prejudice, Propaganda, Republican, Schools, Social Justice, student teacher relationship, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Technology, Uncategorized ALEC, Censorship, education, Pennsylvania, Politics, public schools, puritanical, religious fundamentalism, schools, sex, sex education, teachers

“Mr. Singer, do you know what foot finder is?”

“No,” I said to the 5th grade girl in the class where I was substitute teaching.

Her friends and her giggled through an explanation of the Website where people post pictures of their feet for sexual gratification.

***

Several days later, I tried to play a video on ancient Rome for my students, but before it even began the 8th grade class burst into laughter over the station identification.

The video was produced by the British Broadcasting Company. The BBC.

I looked at them in confusion until I heard some of them muttering about “Big Black Cock” – a class of porn video many of them had seen online identified with the same abbreviation.

***

Yesterday I overheard some of the girls in my 7th grade homeroom talking. One girl was saying how she really liked a certain boy but wasn’t sure if she was ready.

I smiled thinking about my first kiss. Then I heard her ask a friend, “Can you get pregnant from swallowing it?”

This is middle school, people.

Most of the kids here already know about sex. They know way more than I did at their age. But what they know is a jumble of images and details without the big picture.

And here come Republicans with a bunch of copycat laws to make sure public schools do nothing to dispel children’s ignorance.

In my home state of Pennsylvania, GOP lawmakers are taking action once again to hide any mention of S-E-X in schools throughout the Commonwealth.

They’re sending Senate Bill 7 to Harrisburg, another piece of legislation pumped out by the American Legislation Exchange Council (ALEC) following in the fundamentalist footsteps of fascist Florida.

The latest bit of dark ages lawmaking would require parent authorization before schools from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia could provide students with materials that contain anything that might be considered sexually explicit.

For kids in kindergarten through 8th grade, this even includes books with depictions of any kind of nudity.

God forbid they saw a wee wee or a va-jay-jay!

Fun fact: did you know that most public school students have genitals?

It’s true.

Many boys have access to a penis anytime they want – in their underwear.

Many girls have access to even naughtier bits.

And don’t even get me started on nipples! Under their shirts, the Devil’s raisins!

Thankfully the GOP legislation only prohibits depictions of these things in books. Kids are still allowed to look at their own bodies.

For now.

The bill passed the Senate in a 29-21 vote nearly along party lines, with only one Democrat supporting the proposal. It faces an uncertain future in the House where Democrats hold a one seat majority and would also require the signature of Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro before becoming law.

A similar measure was passed before Democrats took the House last year but was vetoed by the previous Democratic Governor Tom Wolf.

If the new bill became law, districts would need to go through all books in their libraries and classrooms and list any that contain potentially sexual material. These would be books used in classroom instruction or available in the library that would then require parents to sign an opt-in form to grant permission for their children to access the books.

The bill defines sexually explicit as showing “acts of masturbation, sexual intercourse, sexual bestiality or physical contact with a person’s clothed or unclothed genitals, pubic area, buttocks, or, if the person is a female, breast.”

It is beyond ridiculous.

Not only is it closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, but it’s a transparent attempt to quash any discussion of LGBTQ issues.

What better way to discourage certain lifestyles than to legislate them out of existence?

Schools can provide a safe place to discuss issues kids may be uncomfortable talking about with other adults. Books provide a safe way to mentally grapple with concepts and ideas of the adult world.

For example, in my 7th grade classes, we read “Silent to the Bone” by E.L. Konigsburg. The book is about a middle school age boy who has gone mute after a questionable interaction with an adult.

There’s nothing very graphic in the text, but among other issues it does discuss physical attraction, sexual coercion and an erection.

The book was approved by the school board and has helped foster many productive – if uncomfortable – conversations that help kids put their thoughts on these matters into words.

In my daughter’s school, in 9th grade she read “Speak” by Laurie Halse Anderson. The book is about a high school girl dealing with being raped and the stigma of trying to talk about it.

The text does a marvelous job of getting into the point of view of the girl and the trauma she endures while still being humorous, touching and empowering.

Narratives like these are absolutely vital. They allow kids to relate to issues many of them have not directly experienced (but some have) and find a common language to discuss it. When we censor sex and sexuality and paint all of it as something dirty that can’t be talked about seriously, we do our children a major disservice.

Conservatives complain that talking about these things grooms kids for greater sexual activity, but that’s nonsense. Kids grow into adults many of whom become sexually active. That’s positive and healthy. Meeting that in the safe places of the classroom and books helps kids prepare for adulthood without becoming victimized.

But nothing grooms a victim more than the prohibition against talking about trauma.

Finally, let’s consider the amount of ridiculous extra work this bill demands of schools and teachers. You really expect every educator with a classroom library to go through every book in it looking for anything that someone might consider sexually explicit!? Some people might think a book about a kid with two daddies is sexually explicit. You want teachers to become your perverted morality police!? Please!

I dearly hope this bill has little chance of passing.

It’s just another example of the Republican culture war against reality.

It’s a way of insinuating that public schools are doing things they aren’t.

No school is indoctrinating kids to be sexually active. But kids are coming into contact with sexually explicit material – usually on the Internet – and they have few tools to deal with it.

Taking away public schools’ power to combat this ignorance is the worst way we could respond.

Like this post? You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

The Hidden Bias Against Male Teachers

September 30, 2023 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Accountability, Child Safety, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, discipline, Education, Labor, Learning, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, school segregation, school violence, Schools, security, small class size, student teacher relationship, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Uncategorized bias, discipline, education, male, Politics, sexism, student discipline, teachers

No one wants to be the disciplinarian.

Not at the expense of being a teacher.

Often you need to do the one so you can do the other. After all, it’s difficult to teach a class that can’t listen or sit or refrain from arguing.

But that’s the role men are often given in the field of public education.

We’re the disciplinarians – especially of male students.

We’re consistently given more students with perceived behavioral issues, with more histories of suspensions, and we’re given less administrative support than female teachers.

It’s not fair at all.

Many of these kids are suffering from poverty, malnutrition and/or trauma. Putting them in a room with a male authority figure cannot solve all of their problems. Yet that’s what happens more often than not.

Male teachers are not seen as teachers first and foremost. We’re the enforcers of school rules. And it’s driving so many of us from the field or discouraging even more from entering it in the first place.

Consider this: teaching is a female dominated field.

According to the National Center for Education statistics, 77% of public school teachers were female and 23 percent were male in 2020–21 – the most recent year for which there is data.

It’s worse at the elementary school level where only about one in ten teachers (11 percent) are male. However, things are not much better at the secondary level where less than 4 out of 10 teachers (36 percent) are male.

And these statistics have remained roughly the same for at least a decade.

It’s not true just in the United States. Around the world men are underrepresented especially in the elementary school education workforce. So much so that a 2017 article in the Economics of Education Review wondered, “Are male teachers headed for extinction? The 50-year decline of male teachers in Australia.”

This has both an academic and social impact on male students who look to male teachers as role models. Without a positive male influence in the classroom, boys tend to see education as distinctly feminine and either out of reach for them or something that they should not even be trying to accomplish. Moreover, male teachers demonstrate ways that men can interact in a nonviolent way especially toward women. Their very presence can promote a new conception of masculinity that is gender equitable and solves problems through reason, agreement and team building.

Not to mention that the idea of male teachers as being primarily disciplinarians has no basis in fact. It is a gender stereotype as much as women being more nurturing and suited to childcare. In the field of education it only sets up expectations that men should be sent more students with behavioral issues and that their natural maleness will somehow bring about a solution.

Such attitudes are harmful to male teachers careers.

After all, too firm a focus on student discipline reduces teachers job satisfaction and the likelihood that educators will stay in the field until retirement.

Student misbehavior is a main source of teacher stress and burnout. When administrators give them fewer honors courses and/or fill their classes with more difficult students, it create a more hostile work environment for them and thus increases turnover.

Even expectations for male teachers’ own behaviors are different. While female teachers can be expected to have a variety of personas, men are expected to be strict, rule followers who will not let students get away with anything – and any deviation from this expectation can result in negative evaluations and lower administrative reviews.

The result is lower job satisfaction. Male teachers can feel frustrated due to so much of their time having to focus on discipline issues and so little of it being able to focus on actual instruction. This is especially true in districts where principals, deans and others do not properly support classroom disciplinary decisions.

When a classroom teacher sends a student to the office after numerous redirections and finds that the student is sent back almost immediately with only a warning, it can be incredibly demoralizing. As if the classroom teacher is incapable of a warning, himself!? Numerous steps have already been taken to correct the behavior before it was sent to the next step for higher order discipline of which the classroom teacher does not have the authority to conduct. When such support is lacking, the classroom teacher feels helpless and alone.

Then there’s the issue of being effective as a teacher. When there’s little time for anything but discipline, much instruction is lost. So many male teachers feel ineffective and are judged as being ineffective because of circumstances beyond their control. They were not set up for success but blamed for the situation they were given. And this results in higher turnover.

Corinne Moss-Racusin, an associate professor of psychology at Skidmore College and lead researcher, said:

“There’s no evidence that men are biologically incapable of doing this work or that men and women are naturally oriented toward different careers. It’s a detriment to society if we keep slotting people into gendered roles and stay the course on gender-segregated career paths, regardless of whether those jobs are traditionally associated with women or men. That’s a powerful way of reinforcing the traditional gender status quo.”

In closing, I must admit this was a hard article for me to write.

Just broaching the subject feels like whining. Black teachers – especially black male teachers – experience the same problem to an even greater degree. And women teachers experience their own types of bias and sexism. However, none of that erases the unfairness male teachers endure often in silence until they’ve had enough and slink away from a career they once cherished like the sun, itself.

Like this post? You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

If You Don’t Want Teachers to be Saviors, Don’t Put Them on a Cross

September 14, 2023 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, absenteeism, Accountability, antisemitism, Budget, capitalism, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", COVID-19, Credibility, Data, Democrat, Journals, Labor, Learning, literature, Philosophy, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, Racism, Republican, School Funding, Schools, small class size, Social Justice Unionism, Special Education, Standardized Testing, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Technology, Uncategorized, Unions Civil Rights, colonizatiion, education, Journals, Politics, public schools, racism, schools, Students, teachers, teaching, The Diary of Anne Frank, To Kill a Mockingbird, white savior

At the end of the school year, I like to show my 8th grade students the movie “Freedom Writers.”

It’s a good culminating film for the class because many of the subjects and texts we read are mentioned by the characters – “The Diary of Anne Frank,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the civil rights movement, journal writing, etc.

It reinforces the relationship between historical narratives and the fight for human rights as well as underlines the importance of raising your own voice.

However, it is also a movie that has come under fire for perpetuating the white savior trope.

The film is based on the true story of Erin Gruwell, a white middle class woman, who taught inner city children to find their own voices by writing about their lives in Freedom Writer journals.

The biggest problem seems to be that in the film the teacher takes on more jobs to afford supplies, spends time putting together field trips, and even ends up losing her marriage so her students’ needs will be met in the classroom.

Is she a white savior transforming, saving and redeeming the lives of her students through her own personal sacrifices?

Is this essentially a feel good story about a white person saving otherwise irredeemable brown skinned children?

Honestly, I don’t think so. I suppose the answer depends on how much the students’ success should be attributed to the sacrifices of their teacher, and how uncomfortable we should be by the fact that she’s white while her students are predominately children of color.

Is there something wrong with these kids? Absolutely not. Stereotypes aside, their problems arise from the circumstances in which they live more than anything else.

But if I’m being truthful, I have to admit these are tough questions, even more so when we’re asking them about real teachers and students. After all, I show the movie to my students because we’re in a somewhat similar relationship. They have many analogous experiences and I try to teach them using some corresponding texts and methods.

And am I not also a white teacher with a class of mostly black and brown children?

How often are people in my own position labelled white saviors? And what part of that label is denigration and what part valid criticism?

On the one hand, there are legitimate challenges born out of this situation.

About eight-in-ten U.S. public school teachers (79%) identified as White (non-Hispanic) during the 2017-18 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Fewer than one-in-ten teachers were Black (7%), Hispanic (9%) or Asian American (2%). So this situation is pretty much the norm – most students of color have white teachers.

This is challenging because study after study shows white teachers bring their biases with them to the classroom. They often have lower expectations for students of color, which greatly affects their students’ motivation and achievement. This may even impact expulsion and discipline rates as well as other facets of students’ academic experiences.

With the constant emphasis on standardized test scores and the testing gap, it is easy to fall into the trap of seeing students of color as less than. After all, children of color in general do not score as well as richer whiter kids. So teachers are encouraged to look at the situation as one in which they can act on their students and MAKE them have higher scores simply by giving the right test prep and forcing their students to do these boring and extrinsic assignments by using increasingly punitive inducements.

However, I do not think it is correct to characterize this as being a white savior. I think it is being a colonizer, and I have seen the same kinds of attitudes and actions from people of various races and ethnicities.

In my own admittedly limited experience, the most test obsessed teachers and administrators I have ever know have been people of color – almost as if they were trying to make a point about their own racial identity by raising test scores of the children in their charge.

The problem is that the testing gap has nothing to do with any deficiency in black and brown students. It comes from biased and unfair questions which are based more on privilege and culture than authentic academic ability.

The problem with being a colonizer is that it enforces a prejudicial status quo. So raising test scores (even if you’re successful) does little to help people of color. It simply justifies making them jump through biased and unfair hoops in the first place with the excuse, “See? They did it. Why can’t you?”

In this way, I agree with, Dr. Christopher Emdin, an associate professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, who advised educators in his book “For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y’all Too”:

“You are there not as a savior, but as a revolutionary.”

Teachers should be openly antiracist – especially white teachers. As difficult as it can be sometimes, we must not allow racism to become a taboo topic – something to be whispered about but never spoken of by name. We need to have the uncomfortable conversations. We need to read texts by people of color and honor every student’s race and culture. We need to prize difference and examine our own reactions to it.

However, as I said I do not think the issue here is saviorism.

That is something completely different though just as harmful.

Regardless of race or ethnicity, teachers are forced to be martyrs .

You can criticize Gruwell’s story because of all she gives up for her students, but that is kind of what teachers are obliged to do if they want to accomplish even a smidgen of their responsibilities.

In fact, it is almost impossible to be a teacher – especially a teacher of predominantly black and brown students – and not be viciously coerced to sacrifice yourself.

For example, more than 90 percent of educators use their own money to buy school supplies for their students, according to a survey from the National Education Association (NEA).

An analysis from My eLearning World showed teachers for the 2022-2023 school year spent an average of $820.14 on classroom supplies.

However, educators cannot deduct even half of that cost from their taxes.

Why do teachers do this? Because schools don’t purchase what kids need. So – especially in impoverished areas – educators are left with the choice of watching students do without or simply meeting that need, themselves.

Almost every aspect of teaching involves some kind of sacrificial trade off like this.

You can have a classroom with bare walls or you can buy and put up your own decorations to make it a welcoming environment for students. You can try to get kids up to your school’s meager library (assuming one even exists with a full-time librarian to keep books in stock) or you can just purchase your own classroom library.

Heck! There are only about 40 minutes or so in most teachers’ day to plan their lessons and grade student work. That’s not nearly enough time. Just to get the bare minimum done, educators have to spend hours and hours extra daily without pay.

Moreover, teachers salaries are not commensurate with other professionals. They are paid 20% less than other college-educated workers with similar experience, and a 2020 survey found that 67% of teachers have or had a second job to make ends meet.

You want more teachers of color to enter the profession? Then stop making privilege a prerequisite to apply!

This is why so many teachers are leaving the profession. They don’t want to be sacrificial offerings anymore.

The entire country is in the midst of a national educator walk out. Teachers are refusing to stay in the classroom due to poor salary, poor working conditions, heavy expectations and lack of tools or respect.
After decades of neglect only made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re missing almost a million teachers.

Nationwide, we only have about 3.2 million teachers left!

Finding replacements has been difficult. Across the country, an average of one educator is hired for every two jobs available.

And you want to complain that teachers are acting like saviors!?

Fine! Stop giving us two pieces of wood and some nails!

While there is a legitimate caution behind the white savior teacher trope, it is mischaracterized and misused in order to gaslight educators to simply take the abuse and be quiet.

Yes, educators need to stop defending the status quo. We need to examine our biases and embrace racial and cultural differences. We need to actively work to tear down systems of oppression even in our educational system.

But we also need to reform those systems so they don’t require us to self immolate. We need an education system that actually provides enough resources to students so that their teachers don’t need to jump on the pyre to keep them warm.

These are two sides of the same coin. The same system that oppresses children of color by withholding enough compels teachers to become saviors. The one is built upon the other.

Civil rights activists need to do a better job recognizing this and speaking out against it.

As activist Lilla Watson famously said:

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

Like this post? You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

Teaching in Pennsylvania’s Unconstitutional School Funding System

September 4, 2023 stevenmsinger Accountability, Allegheny County, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Education, Harrisburg, history, Labor, Learning, Local Control, McKeesport Area School District, Parents, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, private schools, privatization, Propaganda, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, small class size, Social Justice, Special Education, Students, Supreme Court, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Uncategorized #FairFundingPA, classroom, education, fair funding, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Politics, school funding, school funding lawsuit, school vouchers, Steel Valley Schools, Supreme Court, teachers

It’s hard not to wonder about things in my new basement classroom.

I kill what bugs I can, wipe away the damp from the desks and try to think over the rattling hum of the ancient overhead heating and cooling system.

The room is about 1/3 smaller than the space I had last year and the class size is about that much larger.

I smile for a moment remembering that after nearly a decade of litigation, Pennsylvania’s state Supreme Court ruled in February that our school funding system violates the constitutional rights of students in poorer school districts like where I teach.

The deadline to challenge this ruling expired in July.

So where’s the additional funding?

I wonder about this as I prepare to teach classes at Steel Valley School District in the western part of the state near Pittsburgh.

Plaintiffs including six school districts, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools claimed that billions more dollars in state aid are necessary to meet the state’s constitutional obligation.

And the judge agreed, but why didn’t she direct the state legislature on exactly how much more state aid to distribute and how?

I mean even Judge Judy would have done that! She would NOT have said, “You owe him money! Now figure out how much and pay him somehow!”

I wonder about that as I get sick from the damp and the mold in my new classroom space.

I wonder about it as I see the school library in my alma mater of McKeesport Area High School permanently closed, the books given away years after the librarian positions were eliminated and the space now becomes a large group instruction room.

I wonder about how students at Steel Valley will access their library now that the sole librarian for the high school and middle school has to teach additional classes reducing the library’s hours almost to nothing.

I wonder about teachers (some retired, others forcibly moved) whose positions were eliminated and the resulting impact on class size and resources.

I wonder about the increasing number of special education students, emotional support students, and English Language Learners all squeezed into larger and larger classes (often with less and less physical space) who are forced to vie with each other for a single teacher’s limited attention.

I wonder about my own daughter in McKeesport sitting in stifling hot classrooms and eating increasingly disgusting lunches.

I wonder about the thousands of experienced teachers who have left the profession for good because of poor salary, poor working conditions, heavy expectations and lack of tools or respect. In McKeesport the school board can’t even agree to the contract its business manager negotiated with its teachers because they think the business manager somehow misunderstood what the district could afford.

I wonder about school boards filled with volunteers who are charged with the task of making water into wine and often end up turning water into vinegar.

I wonder about our legislature mired in a more than two-month-old partisan budget stalemate between Gov. Josh Shapiro, the Democratic-controlled House and the Republican-controlled Senate.

Republicans (and even the Democratic Governor to some extent) want to use taxpayer dollars to pay for students to attend private and religious schools. GOP operatives have signaled that any discussion about meeting the judge’s order to increase funding will have to involve spending more on school vouchers lite (tax deferment scholarships) or the full fledged variety.

I just don’t get it. The Supreme Court case was about public schools – not private and parochial ones. Taxpayers have no obligation to pay for people to send their kids to schools that aren’t governed by elected school boards, that won’t accept all students regardless of race, gender, religion, ethnicity, etc. Why are Republicans putting their ideological priorities in front of the law? If they want to use taxpayer money for this stuff, just make it a voter referendum. Ask taxpayers if they want their money spent this way. And change the constitution so that it’s legal to do so.

Compliance with the judge’s ruling should have nothing to do with it. Instead we should look to ensure every public school district has enough staff to keep class size low and constructive. We should ensure all schools have safe buildings and grounds. We should make sure all schools have broad curriculum with plenty of extracurricular activities and opportunities for students to learn. We should make sure all students have the services they need and the opportunities to access those services.

But we’re not doing that.

We’re just playing politics as usual.

Meanwhile in classrooms across the state the situation gets worse every day.

Parents, students and teachers waited almost a decade for this ruling. And it looks like we’ll have to wait even longer for anything of substance to actually happen because of it.

Our schools are drowning and our kids inside them. No one is even looking for a life preserver.

Like this post? You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

Teach for America Promised to Fix the Teacher Exodus Before Anyone Even Noticed There Was One. Now It’s Choking on Its Own Failure

August 7, 2023August 7, 2023 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", COVID-19, Credibility, Data, Democrat, Education, Labor, Learning, NEA, Pennsylvania, Politics, privatization, Republican, School Choice, school vouchers, Schools, Standardized Testing, student teacher relationship, Students, Teach for America, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Uncategorized, union busting, Unions education, Politics, schools, Teach for America, teacher exodus, teacher shortage, teachers, TFA

Teach for America (TFA) was a solution to a problem it helped create.

Educators have been leaving the profession for decades due to poor salary, poor working conditions, heavy expectations and lack of tools or respect.

So Wendy Kopp, when in Princeton, created a program to fast track non-education majors into the classroom where they would teach for a few years and then enter the private sector as “experts” to drive public policy.

These college graduates would take a five week crash course in education and commit to at least two years in the classroom thereby filling any vacant teaching positions.

Surprise! It didn’t work.

In fact, it made things worse. Apparently deprofessionalizing education isn’t an incentive to dive into the field.

That isn’t to say everyone who went through the program became a bad teacher. But the few good and committed educators that did come through the program could have done so even more successfully by graduating with a degree in education.

Now the organization created in 1990 is expecting its lowest enrollment in 15 years. TFA anticipates placing slightly less than 2,000 teachers in schools across the country this fall. That’s two-thirds of the number of first-year teachers TFA placed in schools in fall 2019, and just one-third of the number it sent into the field at its height in 2013.

Apparently fewer people than ever don’t want to train for four to five years to become lifelong teachers – and neither do they want to be lightly trained for a few years as TFA recruits, either – even if that means they can pass themselves off as education experts afterwards and get high paying policy positions at think tanks and government.

On the one hand, this is good news.

Watering down what it means to be a teacher is even less popular than actually being an educator.

On the other hand, we have a major crisis that few people are prepared to handle.

The US is losing teachers at an alarming rate.

After decades of neglect only made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re missing almost a million teachers.

Nationwide, we only have about 3.2 million teachers left!

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 567,000 fewer educators in our public schools today than there were before the pandemic. And that’s on top of already losing 250,000 school employees during the recession of 2008-09 most of whom were never replaced. All while enrollment increased by 800,000 students.

Meanwhile, finding replacements has been difficult. Across the country, an average of one educator is hired for every two jobs available.

Not only are teachers paid 20% less than other college-educated workers with similar experience, but a 2020 survey found that 67% of teachers have or had a second job to make ends meet.

It’s no wonder then that few college students want to enter the profession.

Over the past decade, there’s been a major decline in enrollment in bachelor’s degree programs in education.

Beginning in 2011, enrollment in such programs and new education certifications in Pennsylvania — my home state— started to decline. Today, only about a third as many students are enrolled in teacher prep programs in the Commonwealth as there were 10 years ago. And state records show new certifications are down by two-thirds over that period.

To put that more concretely, a decade ago roughly 20,000 new teachers entered the workforce each year in the Commonwealth, while last year only 6,000 did so, according to the state Department of Education (PDE).

But don’t look to most of the so-called experts to solve the problem. A great deal of them are former TFA recruits!

Through programs like TFA’s Capitol Hill Fellows Program, alumni are placed in full-time, paid staff positions with legislators so they can “gain insights into the legislative process by working in a Congressional office” and work “on projects that impact education and opportunities for youth.”

Why do so many lawmakers hire them? Because they don’t cost anything.

Their salaries are paid in full by TFA through a fund established by Arthur Rock, a California tech billionaire who hands the organization bags of cash to pay these educational aides’ salaries. From 2006 to 2008, alone, Rock – who also sits on TFA’s board – contributed $16.5 million for this purpose.

This isn’t about helping lawmakers understand the issues. It’s about framing the issues to meet the policy initiatives of the elite and wealthy donors.

It’s about selling school privatization, high stakes testing and ed-tech solutions.

As US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) said on a call with Justice Democrats:

“I don’t think people who are taking money from pharmaceutical companies should be drafting health care legislation. I don’t think people who are taking money from oil and gas companies should be drafting our climate legislation.”

I’d like to add the following: people taking money from the testing and school privatization industry shouldn’t be drafting education policy. People who worked as temps in order to give themselves a veneer of credibility should not be treated the same as bona fide experts who dedicate their lives to kids in the classroom.

The whole point of this scam is to serve the needs of the privatization movement.

Investors want to change public education into a cash cow. They want to alter the rules so that corporations running districts as charter or voucher schools can cut services for children and use the extra cash for profits.

And that starts with teachers.

If we allow privatizers to replace well-prepared and trained teachers with lightly trained temps, we can reduce the salaries we pay instructors. We delegitimize the profession. We redefine the job “teacher.” It’s no longer a highly-trained professional. It’s something anyone can do from off the street – thus we can pay poverty wages.

And the savings from cutting salaries can all go into our corporate pockets!

This kind of flim-flam would never be allowed with our present crop of highly trained professionals because many of them belong to labor unions. We have to give them the boot so we can exterminate their unions and thus provide easy pickings for the profiteers.

This helps explain why so many plans to address the teacher exodus are focused almost exclusively on recruiting new hires while completely ignoring the much larger numbers of experienced teachers looking for the exits.

According to the National Education Association (NEA), it is teachers who are quitting that is driving a significant part of the current educator shortage. More teachers quit the job than those who retire, are laid off, are transferred to other locations, go on disability or die. And this has remained true almost every year for the last decade with few exceptions.

To put it another way, you can’t stop a ship from sinking if you don’t plug up the leak first!

But experienced teachers always have been the biggest obstacle to privatizing public schools and expanding standardized testing.

That’s why replacing them with new educators has been one of the highest priorities of corporate education reform.

After all, it’s much harder to try to indoctrinate seasoned educators with propaganda that goes against everything they learned to be true about their students and profession in a lifetime of classroom practice than to encourage those with no practical experience to just drink the Kool-Aid.

So it should come as no surprise that supply side policymakers are using the current teacher exodus as an excuse to remake the profession in their own image.

As Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff to President Barack Obama (Later Chicago Mayor) said:

“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

If our policymakers really want to solve the problem, we’d spend at least as much time keeping the experienced teachers we have as trying to get new ones to join their ranks.

Research shows that teacher experience matters.

“The common refrain that teaching experience does not matter after the first few years in the classroom is no longer supported by the preponderance of the research,” Tara Kini and Anne Podolsky write in Does Teaching Experience Increase Teacher Effectiveness?

“We find that teaching experience is, on average, positively associated with student achievement gains throughout a teacher’s career.”

Their analysis is based on 30 studies published over the past 15 years and concludes:

1) Experienced teachers on average are more effective in raising student achievement (both test scores and classroom grades) than less experienced ones.

2) Teachers do better as they gain experience. Researchers have long documented that teachers improve dramatically during their first few years on the job. However, teachers make even further gains in subsequent years.

3) Experienced teachers also reduce student absences, encourage students to read for recreational purposes outside of the classroom, serve as mentors for young teachers and help to create and maintain a strong school community.

The road to keeping experienced teachers isn’t exactly mysterious.

First, there must be an increase in salary. Teacher pay must at least be adequate including the expectation that as educators gain experience, their salaries will rise in line with what college graduates earn in comparable professions. This is not happening now.

In addition, something must be done to improve teachers working conditions. Lack of proper support and supportive administrators is one of the main reasons experienced teachers leave a building or the profession.

And perhaps most obviously, politicians have to stop scapegoating educators for all of society’s problems and even for all of the problems of the school system. Teachers don’t get to make policy. They are rarely even allowed a voice, but they are blamed for everything that happens in and around education.

If we want teachers to work with socially disadvantaged students, they must be provided with the institutional supports needed to be effective and steadily advance their skills.

But this requires making education a priority and not a political football.

To do that, you would need to stop bankrolling organizations like TFA.

However, the billionaires funding school privatization and the standardized testing industry would never allow it.

So unlike our public schools, as fewer and fewer applicants come to TFA, there will always be money to keep it afloat.

Those who are causing the teacher exodus will never be the ones to fix it.

Like this post? You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

Florida Attempting to Revive the “Happy Slave” Myth as Real History

July 24, 2023 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Accountability, Civil Rights, Compassion, Education, Florida, history, Learning, literature, Politics, Prejudice, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, School Funding, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Uncategorized Black History, Censorship, education, Florida, Frederick Douglass, freedom, Politics, Ron DeSantis, schools, slavery, teachers, woke

Frederick Douglass was widely considered the most photographed American in the 19th century, though he never smiled in a single portrait.

He stares out of the frame with a look of quiet dignity, but never joviality or contentment.

The reason for this is simple – he didn’t want to perpetuate the myth of the “Happy Slave.”

Douglass was born into bondage until he fled to the North at age 20. He was considered a fugitive for nine more years until 1845 when English friends raised $711.66 to buy his freedom. He was already a famous orator, author and abolitionist.

But he knew the power of a picture and how a still image of him grinning ear-to-ear might be used by slaveholders to indicate that people of color enjoyed their own servitude.

Now 158 years after the Civil War, the Florida Department of Education is trying to perpetuate that same myth with its new guidelines for Black history curriculum in public schools.

Among other things, the guidelines suggest that American slavery was not all bad because enslaved people developed skills that “could be applied for their personal benefit.”

The guidelines say that teachers’ lessons should “examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).”

This seems like a strange thing to emphasize about people who were engaged in back-breaking, life-shortening fieldwork on the cotton, rice and sugar cane plantations. Putting the focus on the various tasks they completed seems to make slavery little more than another type of “agricultural work” – just one of many “trades.”

But we’re losing sight of the fact that it was forced labor! That seems an essential feature – a defining characteristic!

So enslaved people might acquire skills in bondage that they did not previously possess. They could sometimes become expert artisans who might earn money to buy things.

But they did not own their own bodies! They were property! That limits your buying power in kind of a major way – not to mention your humanity!

No skills, nothing you could purchase could possibly make you cherish your lack of freedom.

In his autobiography, Douglass wrote:

“I have observed this in my experience of slavery, that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom.”

People like to tell stories of enslaved people singing on the plantations to ease their load and as proof of how much they enjoyed their work.

Of this, Douglass wrote:

“Every tone was testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. . . . To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. . . . The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.”

The new education guidelines in the Sunshine state are the latest since the Stop Woke Act was enacted in July 2022. The law says discussions about race must be taught in an “objective manner” and should not be “used to indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular point of view.” It also states that students should not feel guilty for actions taken in the past by people of their same race or origin.

Florida has taken broad measures to align its education standards with Gov. Ron DeSantis’s vision of a state “where woke goes to die,” which constrains teachers to discuss race, gender and sexuality, if at all, only in a way in which the Governor would approve.

The irony is that these guidelines show exactly why teachers need to discuss these subjects more openly and freely – why authentic history MUST be taught – not some far right fairytale vision of the past.

Not only are these guidelines insensitive at best, state policymakers do not understand the actual record. They seem to believe in Rudyard Kipling’s “white man’s burden” to colonize, civilize, and Christianize non-Europeans – that slavery was a means of protecting and bringing Africans into the civilized era.

But this is pure nonsense – what’s worse it’s antiquated nonsense.

People who were kidnapped from Africa and forced into slavery across the Atlantic were not savages who were civilized by white slavers.

These were people with their own cultures, heritages and, yes, skills.

Most Africans who were abducted to North America were from West Africa and West Central Africa.

Each regional clan or group had professions or crafts such as weaving, basket making, potting, or iron working. They grew agricultural products, made textiles, manufactured goods, music and art. They made traditional foods and had unique customs.

These skills were used by enslaved people in the American South and beyond creating many industries in the US, but their contributions were most often erased.

Take Jack Daniel’s whiskey.

Around 1850, an enslaved man named Nathan “Nearest” Green taught a white man, Jack Daniel, the art of whiskey distillation – though it would take another 150 years before this would be publicly acknowledged.

Daniel was an orphan working as a day laborer on the farm of Dan Call, a Lynchburg preacher, grocer and distiller. Daniel took an interest in the distillery and pleaded to learn the trade. Call eventually introduced him to Green, who he called “the best whiskey maker that I know of,” according to a 1967 biography, Jack Daniel’s Legacy. He instructed the enslaved man to teach the young boy his distilling process.

Green taught Daniel “sugar maple charcoal filtering” (now called the Lincoln County Process), a universally accepted critical step in the making of Tennessee whiskey. This involves filtering the whiskey through wooden charcoal chips before being placed in casks for aging. Food historians believe this was inspired by similar charcoal filtering techniques used to purify water and foods in West Africa. The process imparts a unique flavor that set Jack Daniel’s whiskey apart from its competitors.

After the Emancipation Proclamation, Daniel bought Call’s distillery, renaming it after himself. More than seven generations of the Green family worked either for or with the Jack Daniel’s brand.

It’s important to note that these were skills Green already possessed. They were not learned in bondage. They were brought with him to this country.

Another example of this would be Black cowboys.

Despite the relative lack of Black faces in Hollywood Westerns, Black men made up about 1 in 4 cowboys in the old West.

Men of color handled cattle, tamed horses, worked ranches, encountered outlaws and starred in rodeos. It’s estimated that anywhere from 5,000 to 8,000 Black cowboys were part of the legendary cattle drives of the 1800s.

Many Black cowboys developed their skills in Africa – not America. People abducted from countries such as Ghana and Gambia were already experienced in managing large herds of cattle and their abilities with animals were highly desirable.

During the Civil War, some Texas ranchers who fought with the Confederacy left enslaved people behind to maintain their ranches.

Once again these were skills brought to this country just as the people possessing them were – by force.

The Cotton Gin offers a more contentious example.

Eli Whitney, a white man, is given credit for inventing the machine that revolutionized the production of cotton by greatly speeding up the process of removing seeds from cotton fiber.

However, there is much debate about where he got the idea.

Some historians believe Catherine Greene, a woman he was living with, devised the cotton gin and Whitney merely built it and applied for the patent, since at that time women were not allowed to do this. Others believe the idea was Whitney’s but Greene played an important role as both designer and financier.

However, according to the University of Houston’s College of Engineering, Whitney got the idea from an enslaved person known to history only as Sam. Sam’s father came up with a kind of comb to get the seeds out of a cotton boll. Whitney heard about the idea and simply mechanized it.

Whether Sam or his father were able to invent the cotton gin because of skills learned in America or Africa is hard to say, but they certainly didn’t profit off of them. If they were given any remuneration, it was nothing in comparison to Whitney.

Ironically, this device made the mass cultivation of cotton profitable. The result was that the enslaved population in the United States jumped from about 250,000 around the time of the Revolutionary War to around 4 million at the time of the Civil War.

Sadly, this is far from the only example of white people getting the credit for the intellectual work of enslaved people.

Jo Anderson came up with the idea or at least co-invented a reaping machine that revolutionized agriculture. But the credit went to Cyrus McCormick, the white man who owned him.

Cutting wheat in the early 1800s was slow, difficult and labor-intensive. Workers had to walk and cut the stalks with scythes, and laborers (also called “binders”) walking behind them gathered and tied the stalks into sheaves. The reaper was a device that sheared a wide path of grain. A worker would just need to rake the cut stalks off the machine’s bed onto the ground in ready-to-bind stacks.

In the 1850s, Benjamin Montgomery invented a steamboat propeller designed for shallow water. But since he was enslaved, his invention could not be patented in his name. His owners – future Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his brother Joseph – then tried to patent the propeller in their names but the request was denied since they were not the inventors. It went unpatented.

In 1831, a freed slave named Henry Boyd invented a “Tester Bed” that used wooden side rails. However, he had to let a white man, George Porter, patent his design for him since he could not do it, himself.

Free Black men were technically allowed to patent inventions but it could be incredibly difficult to do so. Often they ended up putting patents in the names of their white lawyers to give them a better shot at acceptance.

While some of these skills may have been learned in servitude, Black people rarely got to experience the rewards they deserved for using them.

It should be achingly obvious that being kidnapped and enslaved did not in the final analysis profit Black people even if they may have occasionally learned skills or earned a little money. Any suggestion otherwise is pure fantasy.

It is a political fiction that is being revived to stop any attempts at actual justice in this country.

Though they are no longer enslaved, African Americans still suffer from the after affects of our peculiar institution. Jim Crow laws continued until the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement. Even then policies like red lining, discriminatory hiring practices, and over-policing of Black neighborhoods continued. Though progress has been made at each step along the way, Black people still suffer from institutional racism of which Florida’s new educational guidelines are a prime example.

Just in our public education system, children of color are more likely to find themselves in under-funded schools with fewer opportunities, narrowed curriculum and subjected to evaluation by biased standardized tests. They are targeted by fly-by-night charter schools which often have no elected school boards and worse academic records than neighborhood authentic public schools.

Florida’s new guidelines are another attempt to erase the problem without fixing it – to make even stating the racial realities impossible for teachers in the classroom and thus unlikely to be learned by anyone who doesn’t experience this type of inequity first hand.

As Douglass said in a speech in Cork, Ireland:

“The people of America deprive us [Black people] of every privilege—they turn round and taunt us with our inferiority!—they stand upon our necks, they impudently taunt us, and ask the question, why we don’t stand up erect? They tie our feet, and ask us why we don’t run? That is the position of America in the present time. The laws forbid education, the mother must not teach her child the letters of the Lord’s prayer; and then while this unfortunate state of things exist they turn round and ask, why we are not moral and intelligent; and tell us, because we are not, that they have the right to enslave [us].”

It’s no wonder he did not smile in his photographs.

I doubt his expression would change much, If he were alive today and presented with Florida’s idea of Black history.

Like this post? You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

What Can Educators Learn from “Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom”?

July 6, 2023July 6, 2023 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Accountability, capitalism, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", edtech, Education, Learning, Local Control, Politics, Schools, Standardized Testing, Student Mobility, student teacher relationship, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Technology, Uncategorized, video games assessment, Classroom Culture, education, Learning Community, Minecraft, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, Politics, Sandbox Game, schools, Students, teachers, test-based accountability, Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

So there I was, stranded at the bottom of a pit in the depths.

Shadows all around me, puddles of glowing purple gloom everywhere, the burbles of monsters slowly approaching…

No time to climb out – let’s build a hover bike!

And before you know it, I was zooming up and outta there!

Until I ran out of battery and went careening back to the ground. But I was out of the pit!

“The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” is a really great game – even for a nearly 50-year-old public school teacher like me.

As classes dwindled down in June and the summer approached, I noticed some of my students who had finished their work bringing the game in on their portable Nintendo Switch consoles.

Like me, they were enthralled by the level of choice the newly released game presents.

Rarely is there one answer to a problem.

The previous Zelda game in the series, “Breath of the Wild” (2017), threw the doors wide by giving players an open world to explore. No longer did you have to go down a linear path of which dungeons to complete in which order to defeat the bad guy. You could go in whatever direction you wanted, doing almost anything in whatever order you pleased.

The new game takes that even further. “Tears of the Kingdom” gives you three open worlds to explore and offers you the ability to build a wide range of contraptions to create your own solutions to problems.

For example, when I was stuck in that pit, I could have tried to climb out, I could have stood my ground, or I could have built almost anything imaginable that might help.

It’s that kind of increased choice that makes this game special and of particular interest to educators.

After all, this is something many of our students enjoy doing in their free time. The game sold 10 million copies in its first three days, becoming the fastest selling Nintendo game in history. That’s roughly $700 million and growing.

This doesn’t mean edtech companies should rush in to take over. Teachers and public schools are still the best way to educate students.

But the way I see it, if teachers can make learning more intrinsic and exciting, it’s a plus. These are my three major takeaways from the experience:

1) Power of the Sandbox

There are many types of video games.

Some are focused on action – such as shooting down the most enemies. Some focus more on puzzles to solve. Yet others are focused on building things like farms or homes or even civilizations.

Sandbox games are more self-directed. The idea is to create a space where gamers can do pretty much whatever they want. There’s no imposed objective. You’re given simple tools that you can easily see how to manipulate and you’re left to decide how to use them.

It’s based on the metaphor of leaving small children in a sandbox and just letting them play.

The most popular model is the game Minecraft. In it, players are thrust into a world made entirely of blocks that can be combined and recombined to build anything they want. It’s almost like a virtual world of LEGO bricks.

Players build structures like dream homes or space ships. Some tell stories. Some recreate real or imagined structures like the Eiffel Tower or the Death Star from “Star Wars.”

While there are also dungeons you can fight through to get more materials for your creations, the main emphasis seems to be on building.

Minecraft, in itself, is a very popular game and has been so since 2011.

However, “Tears of the Kingdom” takes this a step further by making the sandbox a tool in a world with a specific objective.

Like most Zelda games, you play as a character, Link, who has to save the princess, Zelda, and the kingdom of Hyrule from a bad guy, Gannondorf. The difference is that one of your tools to do that in this game is an ability to combine certain items together into structures.

These aren’t just blocks. They can be as complex as fans or lasers.

You can try to build a flying machine, but you have to make sure the fans or rockets or whether you’re using to propel them are pointing exactly where you want them, don’t consume too much battery, etc.

It takes design, testing, a knowledge of basic physics, etc.

For example, one of my first attempts at a plane kept flipping over. The reason – my fans were placed in opposite directions so that the lift given by one was counteracted by the other. Another device only went straight up. The reason – rockets only provide lift in one direction and quickly give out.

Players can easily get lost in building things. Sometimes that can seem way more interesting than the overall objective of beating the bad guy and winning the game.

However, there are certain game objectives that help you become a better builder – give you longer battery life, etc. So the game rewards you for progressing along each route – the story objective and the sandbox.

It’s a fascinating game loop that may keep this adventure fresh with replayability long after the main objective is complete.

So how does that impact education?

We know students like self-directed learning. If they are at all interested in the subject, giving them the power of following their natural curiosity can lead to amazing results.

This is often used in STEM lessons, where kids are given an objective and various tools and told to try to figure out how to achieve that objective. Who can build the highest tower that won’t fall over? Who can build the fastest race car on this track? Who can build a boat out of cardboard and duct tape that will float longest in a swimming pool? Etc.

However, it can also be done in other disciplines. You might study how the writer Langston Hughes communicates his message in a poem like “Mother to Son” and then ask students to do the same kind of thing in their own poem. You might read several stories and poems by a single author like Edgar Allan Poe and then ask students to find similarities between the author’s work and life.

In each instance, it’s not about just giving students tools and leaving them alone to discover what to do with them. It’s up to the teacher to provide a goal or a direction in which to go. The students take it from there.

The freedom of the sandbox by itself can be thrilling to some students in certain disciplines. But it can also be terrifying. Both aspects are necessary to reach the most students. When learning can be both intrinsic but directed, that’s when students get the greatest results.

We often pretend that students can do just as well without instruction – and there can be marvelous gains by some students in this way. However, teachers are there for a reason. We know the curriculum and many avenues to understanding it. We can point students many ways to understanding that they might not discover on their own.

Games like “Tears of the Kingdom” show the importance of both choice and direction.

2) Importance of a Learning Community

One of the things I was surprised about the most in “Breath of the Wild” and this new Zelda game is the way each created an online gaming community.

In particular with “Tears”, I found several YouTubers who focused on the game and made videos about nearly every aspect of it.

There were walk-throughs of various parts of the game: how to find different armor, defeat bosses and mini-bosses, build the best things, etc. However, there were also videos focused just on individual’s personal experiences with the game and even conjectures on the lore.

It is unclear how some of the elements from the first game impact the second that the developers kept intentionally vague. The community of players stepped in to fill in these gaps with theories that would put the best literary analysis to shame.

For example, the first game was full of Sheika Shrines. In the second game, the shrines were gone from most of the same locations. Instead there were new Zonai shrines in disparate locations. Why the discrepancy? There seems to be a growing consensus that the Sheika shrines were either dismantled by the Hyrulians and/or destroyed by Gannondorf when he reawakened to begin the current upheaval.

All of this really enhances the gaming experience. Not only do you feel less isolated, but you feel validated. You’re part of the act of making meaning out of the whole experience – listening to others, adding to the conversation, etc.

For example, there are certain enemies that just scared the heck out of me – chief among them were Gloom Hands. These are puddles of slime that come out of nowhere and shoot hands out at your character that can squeeze you to death in seconds.

Then I saw several videos where YouTubers explained how Gloom Hands freaked them out, too, (some complete with funny videos of them screaming when being ambushed by these creatures) and how to deal with them.

By watching these videos, I got to be much better at the game than I would have been otherwise. Some vloggers were so calm and reassuring when they said these sorts of creatures were easy to deal with and nothing to panic over that I felt way more confident. Moreover, if I did come across something that gave me trouble, I knew where to turn for help and guidance.

How important this is in the classroom!

Teachers often fill this role, but if we can create a community in the classroom, itself, that is even better. When students can discuss assignments and help each other through obstacles, that is so much better than the teacher being the only person in a position to help.

I try to foster as much discussion as possible in my classes through Socratic Seminars and informal groups. However, if you can get small group work to function while still being focused and productive, you can increase this aspect, too.

It’s all about the classroom you can create. You need shared values, empathy and students who understand how to best interact with each other. It’s easier said than done but a worthy goal for sure.

3) The Danger of Outside Assessment

This may be the most overlooked lesson from games to the classroom.

One of the biggest differences between the gaming and school experience is whether someone is looking over your shoulder or not.

In a video game, the player decides what he or she wants to get out of the experience. Do you want to simply beat the game? Or do you want to 100% it – achieve every goal the programmers put into it.

How long you take and how much you complete is up to you.

Sometimes the gaming community can contribute to this by giving opinions about which goals are worthy of completion, etc. However, whether you have achieved everything you want and the ultimate assessment of such things are really up to the individual.

Things are different in class.

On one level, students are assessed by their teachers. They grade assignments, give tests, etc. However, this is similar to the game, itself. When you fight Gannondorf, the game tells you whether you’ve beaten him and sometimes how well this is accomplished.

For example, there are a few different endings to the game that you can get depending on how well (or completely) you achieved certain objectives.

I think that’s similar to what the classroom teacher does. It’s part of the experience taken in context and (hopefully) well understood by the student.

The difference comes from forces outside the classroom.

Students don’t just achieve grades. They are also subject to standardized tests. These are assessments created out of context of the classroom, graded by hired hands, that are used to determine how well the curriculum has been learned.

They are artificial, biased and politically motivated.

Imagine if after playing a video game someone from the government had to come in and give you a score. Imagine if they made you play another (different) game to determine how well you did on this one. Maybe you feel like you aced “Tears of the Kingdom” but they said you didn’t do so well on “MarioKart” and thus failed the experience.

Outside assessment can kill intrinsic learning. It can make everything extrinsic – will this be on the test? What do I need to pass the test? Etc.

It would poison the video game experience as it poisons the classroom one.

We only allow it because of strange outdated ideas about learning and psychology. We pretend it’s all behaviorism – students given this stimuli should produce this response. We know that’s not how the human mind works, but politics and capitalism refuse to let us move beyond it.

Someone is making money off of this and we can’t disrupt that with real reform.

Perhaps if we looked more closely at how things function in the world of video games, we’d have a better idea of how to change things for the better in the classroom.

To better understand learning, we should look to the whole child – and the whole child’s experience outside of school.

This includes Zelda, Gannondorf and Link.

Like this post? You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

gadflyonthewallblog

"To sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth."

teacher autonomy

Standardized Tests Lie

School Directors Shouldn’t Double Down on PA’s Keystone Exam Circus

The Hidden Bias Against Male Teachers

Teach for America Promised to Fix the Teacher Exodus Before Anyone Even Noticed There Was One. Now It’s Choking on Its Own Failure

What Can Educators Learn from “Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom”?

1) Power of the Sandbox

2) Importance of a Learning Community

3) The Danger of Outside Assessment

12) Standardized Tests Hurt Asian-American Students, Too, Though Many Get High Scores

11) Fact Checking Propel Charter Schools – Do They Live Up to Their Own Hype?

10) Stay Woke, Public School Teachers

9) Where Have School Libraries Gone?

8) After School Satan Clubs Are Teaching Public School Districts an Important Lesson in Free Speech

7) Congress May Raise Educators’ Minimum Salaries to Combat the Teacher Exodus

6) I am a Charter School Abolitionist, and You Should Be, Too

5) A Private Equity Firm, The Makers of the MAP Test, and an Ed Tech Publisher Join Forces

4) Top 4 Things McKeesport Area School Directors Need to do to Extinguish the District Dumpster Fire

3) Teach for America Promised to Fix the Teacher Exodus Before Anyone Even Noticed There Was One. Now It’s Choking on Its Own Failure

2) Come Visit Your Wasted Tax Dollars at Commonwealth Charter Academy’s Waterfront Luxury Office Space

1) McKeesport Teachers Without a Contract Because of Bad Business Manager or Bad Faith School Board?

Gadfly’s Other Year End Round Ups

2022:

2021:

2020:

2019:

2018:

2017:

2016

2015

2014

1) Power of the Sandbox

2) Importance of a Learning Community

3) The Danger of Outside Assessment