The Last Day of School

June 23, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Data, Education, Learning, Philosophy, principals, Schools, Social Justice, student action, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Unions Accountability, authentic teaching, education, educators, Learning, public schools, Purpose of Education, schools, Students, Teacher Evaluation, teachers, teaching, The Last Day of School

On the last day of school this year, my 8th grade students gave me one of the greatest salutes a teacher can get.

They reenacted the closing scene of “The Dead Poets Society.”

You know. The one where Robin Williams’ Mr. Keating has been fired from a boarding school for teaching his students to embrace life, and as he collects his things and leaves, the students get up on their desks as a testament to his impact and as a protest to the current administration’s reductive standardization.

That’s what my students did for me. And I almost didn’t even notice it at first.

The whole thing went down like this.

The bell rang and an announcement was made telling us that the day was done.

I was immediately rushed by a crowd of children turning in final projects, shaking my hand, saying goodbye.

In fact, I was so occupied with the students right in front of me that I didn’t notice what was happening with the ones just behind them.

I heard someone say in a ringing voice, “Oh Captain, my Captain!”

I looked up and there they were.

About a dozen students were standing on their desks, looking down at me with big goofy grins.

Some had their hands on their hearts. One had raised his fist in the air. I think someone in the back was even making jazz hands. But they were each standing up there with the same look on their faces – a mixture of independence, humor and gratitude.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that this happened. Some of them had threatened months ago to make just such a demonstration.

We had watched the movie together back in April at the introduction of our poetry unit. I guess it was my way of trying to show them that poetry could make a deep impact on people. But I certainly hadn’t wanted them to put themselves at risk by standing on the furniture.

In fact, I had specifically cautioned them NOT to do this exact thing because someone might fall off their desk and hurt themselves.

But on the last day of school after the last bell has rung and my tenure as their teacher has expired – well, things are different then.

“Thank you,” I said. “That is really one of the nicest things students have ever done for me.”

Then I took out my phone and asked if I could snap a few pictures, because who’d ever believe me if I didn’t? They didn’t mind.

When I was done, they hopped down one at a time, many of them rushing forward to give me a hug.

This class will always be a special one in my heart.

We’ve come a long way together.

For most of them, I was their language arts teacher for two years. When they first came in the classroom they were just babies. Now they are going off to high school.

Unless you’re a parent, you wouldn’t believe how much kids can grow and change in just a few short years. And the middle school years are some of the most extreme. The line between child and adult fades into nothingness.

I’ve had a handful of children who were enrolled in my classes for multiple years before, but I’d never had so many. In some ways, we were more like a family than a classroom.

I had been there when parents got sick, left, died. I knew them all so well – who would ask questions just to stall, who never got enough sleep and why (often Fortnite), which ones had athletic aspirations, which were incredible artists, etc. Some had come out of the closet to me and their classmates but not at home.

Many of us went on a school field trip to Washington, DC, together. We’d toured the Holocaust Museum and Arlington National Cemetery. When I was invited to do a TED talk, they tracked it down on YouTube. They even found my Twitter account and made merciless fun of my profile picture. And when I actually had my book published on education issues last year, a bunch of my kids even came out to hear me talk about it at local book stores.

It’s hard to explain the depth of the relationship.

At the end of the year, I always give my students a survey to gauge how they think I did as their teacher. It’s not graded, and they can even turn it in anonymously.

The results are almost always positive, but this year, I got responses like never before:

“I love you, Mr. Singer. Thanks for a great 2 years. I will terribly miss you.”

“I’ve never been bored here. You are the first teacher that made me want to go to their class and has been one of my favorites.”

“He stayed cool as a cucumber and was never angry… Basically the greatest teacher I’ve had all year.”

He was “fair to all students.”

“He was more inclusive to many different groups.”

“He made sure I didn’t fool around. He let me hand in my work late. He was always very kind and he cares about us. He shows us that he cares about how we feel. He made sure everything was fair.”

“He breaks things down A LOT better than other teachers. He’s a very nice person. I like the way he teaches.”

“Mr. Singer did well to motivate us and help us to succeed and get a better grade.”

“He explained things better than other teachers.”

“He helped me mentally and physically to be ready for the PSSAs. Also he gave us good books to read and not bad ones such as “The Outsiders,” “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Also you taught me a lot these past 2 years to be ready for high school.”

“To be absolutely honest, I don’t think my teacher needs to improve. He actually has done more than the rest of my teachers.”

“Well he encouraged me to succeed more in his class and in life as well. He also taught me that the meaning of life is not how you take it but where you go with it. I’m thankful that he taught me more than the history my actual history teacher taught me. He also told me the truth of our history. He talked about the parts no one else would talk about.”

I’m not sure there’s much to say beyond that.

As these now former students reluctantly walked away in ones or twos, a few stayed behind.

I did a lot of reassuring that 9th grade would be great and that I’d probably be right here if they needed me.

I overheard one girl say to another that a certain teacher was good but not “Mr. Singer good.” I thanked her and she blushed because I wasn’t supposed to hear that.

There were tears. Some of them shed by me.

But when the last student left, I remained at my desk surrounded by a hum of fluorescent lights and ear numbing silence.

There is no emptiness like that of a space that has just been filled – a space that cries out for more.

My classroom is like that. And so is my heart.

Don’t get me wrong. I need this summer break to recover.

But I also need the end of August, when a new group of students will come rushing through those doors.

Here’s looking forward to the first day of school.

Like this post? I’ve written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

School Field Trip Turns Into a Tour of Our Nation’s Unhealed Scars

June 10, 2019 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Civil Rights, Donald Trump, Education, Learning, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, Propaganda, Racism, Schools, Social Justice, Students, Teachers Bull Run, civil war, Confederate, Donald Trump, field trip, history, Learning, Manassas, Politics, prejudice, racism, schools, Stonewall Jackson, Students, teachers, union, Virginia, Washington D.C.

You’ve got to be a little crazy to take a bunch of teenagers on a field trip – especially overnight and out of town.

But that’s what I did, and – yeah – guilty as charged.

For the second time in my more than 15-year career as a public school teacher, I volunteered along with a group of parents and other teachers to escort my classes of 8th graders to Washington, DC, and surrounding sights.

And I never regretted it. Not for a moment.

Not when Jason bombed the bathroom in the back of the bus after eating a burrito for lunch.

Not when Isaac gulped down dairy creamers for dessert and threw up all over himself.

Not when a trio of teenage girls accidentally locked themselves in their hotel room and we needed a crowbar to get them out.

But as I stood in Manassas, Virginia, looking at a statue of Stonewall Jackson, the edge of regret began to creep into my mind.

There he was perched on the horizon, ripped and bulging like an advertisement for weight gain powder.

“We call him the superman statue,” the park ranger said.

And as I stood amongst the confused looks of my western Pennsylvania teens, I felt a wave of cognitive dissonance wash over me like a slap in the face.

Stonewall Jackson, a lanky Confederate General whose horse was too small for him, here mythologized, enshrined and worshiped like a hero. Yet he was a traitor to our country.

They call him Stonewall because the union army couldn’t get through his battle lines. He was like a wall the North could not break through.

So what?

He was fighting to preserve human slavery. Who cares how well he fought or how great his tactics? He was on the losing side of history.

We shouldn’t be praising him. He should be forgotten, at best a footnote in a record that celebrates those fighting to overturn human bondage, not those battling to uphold it.

But the confusion didn’t start at the statue. It began before our tour bus even arrived at the national park.

I teach Language Arts, not history, but I had never heard of the battle of Manassas. I knew it was close to Bull Run, a nearby creek where the two Civil War battles of that name were fought.

It was only when the park ranger was showing us the sights (of which there weren’t many) that the truth became clear.

Even today more than 150 years since Lee surrendered to Grant at the Appomattox Court House, the two sides can’t agree on the names of the battles.

In the South, they name them after the nearest city or town. In the North, we name them after the nearest geologic landmark.

So even though this battle took place on a farm in northern Virginia, we still can’t agree even on what to call the confrontation – much less its import to our shared history.

Before we stepped out onto the battlefield, the park service treated us to a short documentary film about the site and its history – “Manassas: End of Innocence.”

The film was narrated by Richard Dreyfus. I marveled at hearing Mr. Holland nonchalantly inform us that this first battle of the Civil War marked the titular “end of innocence.”

I’m still not sure who suffered such an end. Was it the nation, as a whole, which had never before experienced such a bloody war among its own citizenry, pitting brother against brother? Was it the North who had not until this point realized the South would resist with shot and shell? Was it the South who had not yet tasted the bitterness of Northern aggression?

The latter seemed to be the narrator’s implication.

Dreyfus painted a scene of peaceful life on the farm shattered by the sneak attack of union soldiers.

THAT is what marked this “end of innocence.”

“Innocence!?” I thought.

These people were not innocent. They owned slaves. Mrs. Judith Carter Henry, the 85-year-old who refused to evacuate her farm and was killed in the fighting, owned another human being.

In my book, that disqualifies you from any kind of innocence.

And that’s what this whole war was essentially about. Should people be allowed to own other people?

The answer is an unequivocal – NO.

The fact that an entire segment of our population still drags its feet on that question has implications that reverberate through our history and up through our last Presidential election.

A few days before venturing to Manassas, my students and I toured Washington, DC. We stopped in front of the White House.

I’d been there before. It’s a popular place for protests of every kind. But never had I seen it so crowded with discontent.

Political critics had set up booths and tents. They even brought speakers to blast out music to accompany their protests. My favorite was the song “Master of the House” from Les Miserables booming from a booth with multicolored “F- Trump!” signs.

But as we took our picture in front of that iconic Presidential manor, itself, partially built by slaves, I couldn’t help noticing another kiosk across the way – one selling MAGA hats.

In fact, they were everywhere.

A few students even bought them – cheap red knockoff baseball caps with a slogan of dog whistle hatred emblazoned on the front.

Make America Great Again? Like when union troops couldn’t get passed Stonewall Jackson?

We hit many more famous sites.

We went to the Jefferson memorial and all I could think about was Sally Hemings. We went to the FDR memorial and all I could think about were the Japanese internment camps. We went to the Martin Luther King memorial and all I could think about was how the struggle continues.

We didn’t talk much about what we were seeing. We just raced through the experience of it – going from one to another – gotta’ get back on the bus in time to hit the next one.

We had a really good time together on that field trip. Me, included.

But we took a lot more home with us than souvenirs.

It wasn’t just sight seeing or a vacation from the normal school day.

We toured the historic scars of our nation.

Scars still red and ripe and bleeding.

Will they ever heal, I wondered.

Will our nation ever become whole, healthy and clean?

I suppose that depends on us.

Because the first step to healing them is recognizing that they’re still there.

Let Voters Fix Harrisburg School Board – Not State Takeover

April 29, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Education, Election, Harissburg, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, Republican, Schools, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, Unions, voting community, corruption, Democracy, Harissburg, Local Control, Pennsylvania, Poverty, school board, school funding, school takeover, Students, teachers, voting

Pushing the self-destruct button is the ultimate measure of last resort.

But that’s how several Pennsylvania lawmakers are suggesting we fix the dysfunctional Harrisburg School Board.

An election that could oust most of the very school directors responsible for the district’s troubles is less than a month away. But Democratic Representative Patty Kim, Republican Senator John DiSanto and Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse all say we shouldn’t wait – The state should takeover the Harrisburg School District immediately.

This would effectively destroy all democratic government in a district located in the state capital.

While senators and representatives from all over the Commonwealth work to enact the will of their constituents from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, residents at city schools a few miles away would be robbed of their own voices.

Under state law, if the district were put into receivership, a court-appointed receiver would assume all the functions of a locally elected school board, except the power to raise and levy taxes. This appointee would effectively take charge of the district’s personnel and finances.

Oversight and public input essentially would be repealed. The receiver could do whatever he or she liked and there’s little anyone could do about it.

It’s a bad idea anywhere, though one can understand why state lawmakers have suggested it here.

Harrisburg Schools are a mess, and it’s largely because of the inept leadership of Superintendent Sybil Knight-Burney and five of the nine-member school board who consistently support her every move.

Declining academic performance, high teacher turnover rates, and poor fiscal management – all are hallmarks of the way Harrisburg schools have been run.

The state even suspended more than $10 million in funding to the district after the board voted not to cooperate with an audit requested because of allegations administration had mismanaged federal grant funds.

But the district’s problems begin before the school board even enters into the picture.

Like nearly every urban district in the Commonwealth, Harrisburg has a history of being neglected and underfunded. One estimate puts the Harrisburg shortfall between $35 million and $38 million a year.

That’s why the district is already under a state-mandated recovery plan. It serves a poor community whose tax base simply cannot support the needs of its own children. Like other impoverished schools, the administration and board are required to work with a recovery officer.

This recovery plan has not miraculously fixed the district’s problems. It’s magical thinking to suppose that a court-appointed receiver would do any better.

If the state wants to help, it should provide equitable and sustainable funding. However, it is completely reasonable that state lawmakers wait until responsible adults have taken back the school board first.

A citizen-led school reform group called CATCH (Concerned About the Children of Harrisburg) has been pushing to oust the incumbents who have consistently supported the administration’s disastrous decisions, most of whom are up for re-election.

There are nine board members. Five invariably vote with the administration: Danielle Robinson, Ellis Roy, Lola Lawson, Patricia Whitehead-Myers, and Lionel Gonzalez.

Three unfailingly vote against the administration: Brian Carter, Judd Pittman and Carrie Fowler. There is one wild card: Joseph Brown, who was just appointed to take a vacant seat on the board this month and has mostly abstained from voting.

Of these, Brown and all of those supporting the administration but Robinson are up for re-election.

To flip these seats on the board CATCH is pushing for Gerald Welch, Doug Thomson-Leader, Steven Williams, and Jayne Buchwach. The local teachers union, the Harrisburg Education Association (HEA), and the local chapter of The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) endorsed all of them and an additional one – James Thompson.

If even two of the newcomers are elected, that will shift the balance of power away from those who have enabled an administration infamous for irresponsible errors and neglect purchased at the expense of personal favors to weak willed school directors.

This includes an accounting error that kept 54 former employees on its healthcare plan, an investigation into improper grading allegations at one of its high schools, rapid teacher turnover, and falling student test scores. Administrators haven’t even presented a budget for the 2019-20 school year yet!

Meanwhile, this same quintet of school directors rewarded administration by reappointed Superintendent Knight-Burney last spring, hiring controversial attorney James Ellison as solicitor despite a record of fraud, lawsuits and delinquent taxes, and three times refused to fill Melvin Wilson’s vacant board seat with a candidate who had broad public support and instead punted the decision to the courts.

Despite an almost laughable record of corruption in the district, voters have a chance to change course in less than a month.

All of the reform candidates are Democrats so the matter could be settled by the May 21 primary.

It would be beyond absurd for the state to step in and deny the public the right to correct its own ship.

However, though new candidates could be elected in a matter of weeks, they wouldn’t be sworn in until December. So even under the best of circumstances, city schools would remain under the dysfunctional board for the foreseeable future.

That’s not good. There’s a lot of damage a lame duck board could do in that time. However, the alternative of receivership is worse.

Once you take away a school district’s right to govern itself, it’s hard to get it back again. Plus there is no guarantee that appointed bureaucrats will do a better job. In fact, they rarely do.

Education Secretary Pedro Rivera has remained silent on the issue of receivership. But in a recent statement he said his department “will consider all actions allowable by law” to guide the district through a financial recovery plan.

Here’s hoping that democracy is allowed to flourish in the capital of Pennsylvania.

‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ Has Never Been More Important Than It is Today

April 11, 2019April 11, 2019 stevenmsinger antisemitism, Art, Civil Rights, Compassion, Education, Hate Crimes, Journals, Learning, literature, Politics, Prejudice, protest, Racism, Refugees, Schools, Social Justice, Students, Teachers, Violence Against Children action, Anne Frank, anti-racism, anti-semitism, empathy, hate crimes, history, Holocaust, legacy, Politics, schools, Students, teachers, The Diary of Anne Frank, today

thumbnail_maxresdefault

The biggest mistake people make about “The Diary of Anne Frank” is to assume it’s about a little dead girl.

It’s not.

Anne Frank is not dead.

Not in 1945. Not in 2019.

Anne was a Dutch Jew hiding from the Nazis with her family and four others in a loft above her father’s former factory in Amsterdam.

The teenager is the most famous victim of the Holocaust, but her story doesn’t end when she succumbed to typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in the closing days of WWII.

Because it’s a story that never ends.

Her physical self may be gone, but her spirit remains.

In the 1990s, she was a Muslim Bosniak child killed by Christian Serbs in the former Yugoslavia.

In the 2000s, she was a Christian Darfuri in Western Sudan killed by Arab militias.

A decade ago, she was a Palestinian toddler torn to pieces on the West Bank – a victim of Israeli bombs.

And, yes, today she is a brown skinned Central American girl fleeing from violence to the United States only to be forcibly separated from her family and thrown in a cage.

Not only is Anne Frank not dead, she is more alive than most people who draw breath, whose hearts still pump blood, whose eyes shrink from the violence, prejudice and hatred all around them.

Perhaps that’s why it is so hard to teach her Diary in my 8^th grade class.

It’s not a particularly difficult book.

Her prose is uncomplicated. Her ideas clear.

In fact, she jumps right off the page and into the classroom.

But that’s what makes her so difficult for me, the teacher.

Every year I help bring her to life for my students. And I suffer her loss all over again each time.

I think everyone sees something different in Anne.

My students see themselves in her. Or they see their friends or siblings.

Her problems are their problems. They, too, can feel closer to one parent than another.

They, too, can hate to be compared with a “perfect” sibling.

They, too, feel all the emotions and frustrations of growing up – the confusion, passion and hurt.

For me, though, it is different.

I don’t see Anne primarily as myself. I see her as my daughter. Or perhaps I see my daughter in her.

A precocious child hunched over a book scribbling away her deepest thoughts? Sounds like my precious 10-year-old drawing her comic books, or writing her stories, or acting out melodramas with her dolls and stuffed animals.

I want to take her somewhere safe, to keep her away from the Nazis, to conceal her from all the evil in the world.

After teaching the book for almost a decade and a half, it was only this year that I hit upon a new perspective. I realized that if Anne had survived, she would be almost the same age as my grandmother.

And for a moment, an image of her was almost superimposed over my Grandma Ce Ce. There she was – a physical Anne, a living person. But then it was gone.

When speaking about her to my students, I try to be extremely careful of their feelings. I make it exceedingly clear from the very beginning where her physical life ends.

She and her family are in hiding for 25 months before the Nazis find and send them to concentration camps. Only her father, Otto Frank, is left.

I don’t want any of that to be a surprise.

Yet it is.

Every time.

My classes stare back at me with shocked expressions when we reach the last page.

That can’t be the end. There has to be more.

So we read first hand accounts of Anne in the camp.

But that can’t be all, either. Can it?

So we learn about her legacy – about the Anne Frank House, the Academy Award winning film, and how her book is an international best seller.

Somehow her spirit still refuses to die.

I think it’s because she has become more than just a victim. More even than a single physical person.

We know that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust. We know that 5 million non-Jews were also killed. But no matter how many documentaries we see, or how many pictures we look at – none of them come alive in quite the same way as Anne.

She is a face for these faceless.

She irreparably humanizes the other.

Once you read her Diary, you can’t forget that smiling little girl whose light was so suddenly snuffed out.

We can go numb at the numbers – the sheer scale of these atrocities.

But with Anne, it becomes something personal.

On Dec. 24, 1943, Anne wrote:

“I sometimes wonder if anyone will ever understand what I mean, if anyone will ever overlook my ingratitude and not worry about whether or not I’m Jewish and merely see me as a teenager badly in need of some good, plain fun.”

We see you, Anne.

And because we do, we see beyond you, too.

We see you in the continuing horrors of our age.

Because your death is never in the past tense. It is always present.

Your eyes look out at us through the victims of our day, too.

And your words ring in our ears:

“What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it happening again.” (May 7, 1944)

We have not prevented it.

It continues.

Hatred and prejudice and murder echo through our human interactions.

All while the history fades.

According to a 2018 study, only 22 percent of millennials say they’ve even heard of the Holocaust.

I don’t think any of those young adults read your Diary, because my students remember you.

That’s why I’ll never stop teaching your story.

In the vain hope that by remembering you, they’ll see your eyes on the faces of all the future’s would-be victims.

In the vain hope that caring about you will help them care about the faceless strangers, the propagandized others.

In the vain hope that knowing your face will force their eyes to see – actually see – the faces of those who are demonized and dehumanized so someone will care when the boot comes down on their visage.

So that someone will stop the boot from ever coming down again.

In one of her last entries, on July 15, 1944, Anne wrote:

“I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out.”

That time has come for us all.

Anne’s Diary remains to remind us – a clarion call to empathy and action.

Who’s Afraid of Public Schools?

March 16, 2019March 16, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, college, Corporate Education "Reform", Donald Trump, Education, Grit, Learning, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, White Privilege cheating, college, college admissions, College Cheating Scandal, Donald Trump, education, George W. Bush, Operation Varsity Blues, parents, Politics, public schools, schools, Students, teachers

Public schools are the bogeymen of American life.

We so often hear the bedtime story of “Failing Schools” that it’s no wonder some folks will do anything to ensure their kids get in elsewhere.

And let’s be honest. It’s the same impulse behind the latest college admissions cheating scandal.

A group of wealthy – though not too wealthy – parents thought their children should be able to enroll in the most prestigious schools.

So they bribed college admissions officers, cheated on standardized tests or paid coaches or other officials to accept their children as college athletes even if their kids had never played the sport.

We see the same kind of thing everyday in public schools – a confederacy of white parents terrified that their kids might have to go to class with black kids. So they dip into their stock portfolios to pay for enrollment at a private or parochial school.

Or they take advantage of a tax scholarship or school voucher to avoid an institution with low test scores by enrolling in one where students don’t have to take the tests at all.

Or they cross their fingers and enter their kid in a lottery to a charter school praying their precious progeny will escape the horrors of being treated just like everyone else’s kids.

And they call it a meritocracy!

What a joke!

They pretend that their children have earned special treatment.

WRONG.

No child deserves favoritism – paradoxically – because all children do!

There are really two important but related points here:

1) The children of the privileged don’t deserve a better education than anyone else’s.

2) Children who come from wealthy families (and or from privileged social circumstances) don’t do anything to distinguish themselves from the underprivileged.

But these nouveau riche parents tried to bribe the way forward for their kids anyway even though to do so they had to launder the money through a fake “charity.” They didn’t care that doing so would earn them a tax deduction and thus result in even less money for the underprivileged. They didn’t care about the underlying inequalities in the system. No. They only wanted their children to remain in the class of America’s chosen few.

And the best way to do that is with cold, hard cash.

America doesn’t run on Dunkin. It runs on greenbacks. Dinero. Swag. Bling. The prosperity doctrine made physical, quantifiable and mean.

No one really denies that there are two Americas anymore. We just lie to ourselves about how you get placed in one or the other.

And that lie is called excellence, quality, worth – the ultimate in class war gaslighting.

It’s a deception that this scandal has shattered to pieces.

The privileged don’t earn their privilege. It’s not something they possess on the basis of intelligence or hard work shown through test scores. They don’t have it because of drive, determination or grit – once again shown through test scores. They have it based on wealth – the kind of wealth that buys time and resources to either pass the tests or bribe the gatekeepers to change the scores.

Think about it.

George W. Bush got into Yale and Harvard and graduated with a 2.35 GP A. Why? Not because he had the grades and demonstrated his worth. He was a legacy. Like at least one third of all admissions to Ivy League schools, he got in purely because he had family who graduated from there.

You think Donald Trump threatened the College Board not to release his grades because they were all A’s!?

According to one account, his scores were merely “respectable.” Yet he still dropped out of the prestigious Fordham University and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania after two years based on family connections and the reputation of his father, Fred Trump, one of the wealthiest businessmen in New York at the time.

Moreover, his kids, Don Jr. and Ivanka, were both enrolled at Penn around the same time as their father made hefty contributions. They began classes in 1996 and 2000, respectively, just as the university and its private Manhattan clubhouse received more than $1.4 million in pledged donations from Trump, the school newspaper reported.

This is not merit. This has nothing to do with what these people deserve. It is money – a pure transaction, you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

The only thing that separates what the Trumps and the Bushes did with this latest scandal – the so-called Operation Varsity Blues – is the amount of wealth involved.
If you’re super rich, you can get away with it. If you’re just rich, you’d better not get caught.

And if you’re poor or middle class, you’d better stay in your lane.

But there shouldn’t be any lanes on this highway. Or at least they should only be in place to maximize fairness and student success.

We sneer at the idea of Affirmative Action but only because it’s directed at people of color. No one says anything about the real Affirmative Action that’s been in place since before our country even began – the system of reciprocity and privilege keeping wealthy white families in positions of power like Lords and Ladies while the rest of us serfs scramble for their leavings.

All children deserve the same opportunities to succeed. All children deserve the chance to get an excellent education. All children should attend a first class school filled with highly educated and experienced teachers who can draw on plenty of resources, wide curriculum, tutoring, counseling and support.

And the only way we’ll ever achieve that is through a robust system of public schools.

I’m not saying they’re perfect. In many neighborhoods, they’ve been sabotaged and surgically dismantled, but that’s a problem with an easy solution. Invest in public schools!

Because the stated purpose of public education, the reason it exists at all, is equity.
The alternatives – private and charter schools – are essentially unequal. That’s their raison d’être – to create a market that justifies their existence.

In order for charter and private schools to be a thing, there must be schools that don’t otherwise meet students’ needs. There must be an unreasonable demand that schools indoctrinate students into parents’ religious beliefs. There must be schools that aren’t as well funded or that have to meet ridiculous federal and state mandates.

The result is a two-tiered system. Schools for the haves and for the have-nots.
It’s an apparatus that perverts the public to make room for the private.

In the public system, students are segregated into communities based on race and class and then their community schools are funded based on what their parents can afford. The rich shower their children with the best of everything. The poor do what they can.

Then the federal government pretends to hold everyone “accountable” by forcing students to take standardized tests that merely recreate the economic and racial disparities already present in their districts and neighborhoods. In turn, this provides the justification for charter and voucher schools that further erode public school budgets and increases the downward spiral of disinvestment.

Meanwhile, few notice how the equity built into authentic public schools gets left behind by those enrolling in privatized alternatives. No more open meetings. No more elected school boards. No more public comment or even a voice in how the money is spent.

So long as there are two Americas, the fear of being in the wrong one will motivate the privileged to cheat and steal their way to the top. They will horde resources and wealth for themselves and their children while denying it to others.

It is a self-perpetuating system – a loop that we’re all caught in.
We must break the chain. We must recognize our common humanity and stop the zero sum game.

And perhaps the best way to begin is by supporting authentic public schools and not privatization.

We have been taught to fear public education, because it is really our only hope.

I Assign my Students Homework Despite Scant Research It Does Any Good

March 7, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Civil Rights, Compassion, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, edtech, Education, Homework, Learning, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, Schools, Students, Teachers, Technology children, Data, Debate, education, educators, empiricism, experiance, experiment, Homework, Learning, parents, Politics, research, schools, science, Students, study, teachers

In academic circles the debate over homework rages on.

Does it actually help students learn or does it just cause undue stress and frustration for children and parents?

As a teacher and a parent, I see both sides of the issue.

In class, I assign my students homework every week – Monday through Thursday. Never on the weekends.

My daughter’s teacher does the same. So at home, I’m on the receiving end, spending hours with my little munchkin helping her get through mountains of assignments for her classes the next day.

Perhaps this is what they mean by the proverb – you reap what you sow. Except my daughter isn’t doing the homework I assigned. She isn’t in my class and we don’t even live in the district where I teach.

But it sometimes does feel like payback plodding through seemingly endless elementary worksheets, spelling words and vocabulary.

After a while, even I begin to question whether any of this junk does any good.

As a teacher, I know the research on the subject provides slim support at best.

In fact, the closest we have ever come to an answer is a reformulation of the question.

It really comes down to a matter of causality – a chicken and the egg conundrum with a side of sharpened pencil and crumpled paper.

If we look really hard, we can find a correlation between students who do their homework and those who get good grades.

The problem is we can’t PROVE it’s the homework that’s causing the grades.

It could just be that kids who excel academically also happen to do their homework. If we removed the homework, these kids might still get good grades.

So which comes first – the homework or the grades?

There has been surprisingly little research that goes this deep. And almost all of it is anecdotal.

Even the investigations that found a correlation did so in tight parameters – only in secondary grades and usually just for math.

Some wealthy districts have even reduced the amount of homework without seeing a subsequent drop in learning.

But nothing has been tested across socioeconomic divides or with any consistency and very little has been proven definitively.

This doesn’t mean that there’s no consensus on the matter.

Both the National Education Association (NEA) and the National Parent Teacher Association (NPTA) suggest educators assign no more than a standard of “10 minutes of homework per grade level” per night.

In other words, a first grader should have no more than 10 minutes of homework on a given evening, a second grader no more than 20 minutes, etc.

However, it appears that students – especially in the primary grades – are getting more work than these recommended maximums.

A 2015 study published in The American Journal of Family Therapy surveyed more than 1,100 Rhode Island parents with school age children.

Researchers found that first and second graders received 28 and 29 minutes of homework per night – almost double the recommended maximums. Even more shocking, Kindergarteners – who according to the guideline should receive no homework at all – actually were assigned an average of 25 minutes per night.

That’s a lot of extra time sitting and slogging through practice problems instead of spending time with friends or family.

Though I live in western Pennsylvania, this study is certainly consistent with what I see in my own home. My daughter is in 4th grade but has been assigned between 30 minutes and two hours of homework almost every weekday since she was in Kindergarten.

It’s one of the reasons I try to abide by the guidelines religiously in my own classroom. I give about an hours worth of homework every week – 15 minutes per day for four days. If you add in cumulative assignments like book reports, that number may go up slightly but not beyond the recommended maximums.

I teach 8th graders, so they should not be receiving more than 80 minutes of homework a night. If the teachers in the other three core classes give the same amount of homework as I do, we’d still be below the maximum.

I’m well aware that the consequences of giving too much homework can be severe.

A 2014 Stanford study published in the Journal of Experimental Education found that giving too much homework can have extremely damaging effects on children.

Still this isn’t exactly hard science.

The researchers used survey data to examine perceptions about homework, student well-being and behavioral engagement in a sample of 4,317 students from 10 high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class California neighborhoods. They also used open-ended answers to gauge the students’ views on homework.

They concluded that too much homework was associated with greater stress, reductions in health, and less quality time with friends and family.

So where does that leave us?

We have anecdotal evidence that excessive homework is harmful. And limited evidence that homework may increase academic outcomes in the higher grades in math.

Frankly, if that was all I had to go on, I would never assign another piece of homework ever again.

But I’m a classroom teacher. I don’t have to rely solely on psychological and sociological studies. Everyday in school is an opportunity for action research.

My classroom is a laboratory. I am a scientist. Nearly every decision I make is based on empiricism, hypothesis and testing the results.

Maybe X will help students understand Y – that sort of thing.

This applies to homework, too.

I’ve had more than 15 years to test what works with my students. I’m not saying my results would necessarily be reproducible everywhere, but they’re at least as scientific as the body of research we have on homework. In fact, within these parameters they’re even more rigorous.

So why do I give homework?

For several reasons:

1) It prepares students for the higher grades.

Most of my career has been spent in the middle school teaching 7th and 8th grade. In my district, high school teachers give a lot of homework. I need my students to get used to that rhythm – homework being assigned and handed in – so that they’ll have a chance at being successful in the upper secondary grades. Too many students go no further academically than 9th grade. Giving homework is my way to help provide the skills necessary to avoid that pitfall.

However, this isn’t a sufficient reason to give homework all by itself. If high school teachers stopped assigning it – and maybe they should if we have no further reason to do so – then I’d have no reason to assign it either.

2) It makes kids responsible.

There’s something to be said for getting kids used to deadlines. You need to know what work you’re responsible for turning in, getting it done on your own and then handing it in on time. This is an important skill that I won’t apologize for reinforcing. I’m well aware that some students have extended support systems at home that can help them get their assignments done and done correctly, but I design the work so that even if they aren’t so privileged, it should be easily accessible on an individual level. Plus I’m available, myself, as a resource if necessary.

3) It’s good practice.

In school, we learn. At home, we practice. That pattern is necessary to reinforce almost any skill acquisition. I know it’s trendy to flip the classroom a la Khan Academy with learning done through videos watched on-line at home and practice done in school. But when Internet access in not guaranteed, and home environments often are the least stable places in my students’ lives, it makes little sense to try to move the most essential part of the lesson outside of the classroom. After all, it’s easier to find a place to do some low tech practice than it is to find space, silence and infrastructure for high tech learning.

Don’t get me wrong. We practice in school, too. But there’s only so many hours in the school day. I use homework in my language arts classes for a few select things: increased vocabulary, word manipulation, grammar, self-selected reading and the ability to do work on your own. I think it’s important for my students to increase their vocabularies. Having kids read a self-selected book (both inside and outside of class) helps do that. It’s also a benefit to be able to play with words and language, find words in a puzzle, recognize synonyms and antonyms, etc. Grammar may not be essential, but a rough knowledge of it is certainly useful to increase recognition of context clues and better writing skills. Finally, some students benefit from the simple opportunity to do an assignment by themselves without an adult or even a peer looking over their shoulder.

That being said, I think it is important that the homework I give be seen as something students can achieve.

I’ve had numerous co-workers tell me they don’t assign homework for the simple reason that their students won’t do it.

This isn’t a big problem in my class. Almost all of my students do the homework. Why? Because we go over it and they know it’s something they can do without too much difficulty.

I scaffold assignments building the difficulty progressively as we proceed through the year (or years). I make myself available for extra help. I accept late work (with a penalty).

And most of all – I stress that I’m not expecting anyone to be a genius. I’m looking for hard work.

I tell my students explicitly that anyone who puts in their best effort will pass my class – probably with a B or an A. And that’s exactly what happens.

Homework is a part of that equation. It demonstrates effort. And effort is the first step (the key, in fact) to accomplishment.

Do students complain about the homework?

Sure! They’re children!

I’d probably complain, too, if I were them. No one really wants to be given extra work to do. But it’s all part of the pattern of my classroom.

Students know what to expect and how to meet those expectations.

None of this makes me a super teacher. It certainly doesn’t put me on anyone’s cutting edge.

I’m just doing what educators have done for decades. I’m attempting to use best practices in my classroom with a full knowledge of the academic research and the pitfalls ahead.

I may assign homework, but I made sure to do my own before coming to that decision.

Still can’t get enough Gadfly? I’ve written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

Betsy DeVos’s Right Wing School Indoctrination Program

March 2, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Charter Schools, church and state, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Florida, home school, immigration, Learning, Parents, Pennsylvania, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Refugees, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Students, Teachers alternative facts, Betsy DeVos, Democrats, education, Florida, free thought, indoctrination, Pennsylvania, Politics, Republicans, school vouchers, separation of church and state, Students, Tax Credits, teachers

What do you do when thinking people reject your political ideology?

You get rid of thinking people.

That’s Betsy DeVos’ plan to rejuvenate and renew the Republican Party.

The billionaire heiress who bought her position as Donald Trump’s Education Secretary plans to spend $5 billion of your tax dollars on private, religious and parochial schools.

This would be federal tax credits to fund scholarships to private and religious institutions – school vouchers in all but name.

It’s a federal child indoctrination program to ensure that the next generation has an increasing number of voters who think science is a lie, white supremacy is heritage and the Bible is history – you know, people just gullible enough to believe a reality show TV star who regularly cheats on his many wives with porn stars is God’s chosen representative on Earth. A measure to make child kidnapping, imprisonment and wrongful death seem like a measured response to backward immigration policy. A measure to make collusion and fraternization with the world’s worst dictators and strongmen seem like global pragmatism.

To make matters even more galling, consider the timing of DeVos’ proposal.

In the beginning of February, Donald Trump Jr. criticized “loser teachers” who he said were indoctrinating school children into – gasp – socialism.

At the end of that same month, DeVos proposed funding Christian madrasas from sea-to-shinning-sea.

Apparently indoctrination is just fine for conservatives so long as it’s the right kind of indoctrination.

But even beyond the blatant hypocrisy, this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the differences between public and private schools.

Florida’s GOP Governor Ron DeSantis tweeted that if a school receives public funding – whether it be a charter or voucher institution – it is a public school.

To which DeVos tweeted her glowing approval.

This makes a few things strikingly clear: either (1) these folks have no idea what happens at authentic public schools or (2) they’re pretending not to know so as to further their political and financial ambitions.

Authentic public schools do not indoctrinate children into socialism or any other ideology.

They’ll teach what socialism is and how it has functioned historically without commenting on its merits or deficiencies. It’s up to individual students to decide whether it’s a good thing or not.

Public schools are supposed to be ideologically neutral.

At most, they teach children how to think. They teach media literacy, skepticism and critical thinking skills.

If that leads kids away from Republican orthodoxy, it’s not the fault of the teacher or the child. It’s a problem with your orthodoxy.

You can’t proclaim the benefits of a marketplace of ideas and then decry that too many ideas are on display.

Nor can you conflate the way a school is funded with what that school actually does and how it teaches.

There is a world of difference between authentic public schools and their market based alternatives – especially the parochial and religious variety.

It’s the difference between telling students the answer and getting them to think about the answer. It’s the difference between total certainty and doubt, between trite truths and useful skills that can help you arrive at deeper truths.

When you ask children to think, you never know what conclusions they’ll draw. When you tell children what to think, you know exactly what conclusions you want them to hold.

Authentic public schools do not indoctrinate. Conservatives graduate from these hallowed halls the same as liberals, moderates and the politically checked out. The difference is that in a world where facts are prized and logic is exercised, conservatism becomes less appealing.

I’m not saying liberalism or progressivism is guaranteed, but they are certainly more fact-based world views than their opposites.

The same cannot be said of the kinds of institutions DeVos wants to bankroll.

They educate kids behind closed doors with little to no transparency for the public about how their money is being spent. But word seeps out of the cracks in the system.

We’ve seen the textbooks they use to teach. Their graduates have returned to the public square to tell us about the instruction they received.

The American Christian Education (ACE) group provides fundamentalist school curriculum to thousands of religious schools throughout the country. Included in this curriculum is the A Beka Book and Bob Jones University Press textbooks. A Beka publishers, in particular, reported that about 9,000 schools nationwide purchase their textbooks.

In their pages you’ll find glowing descriptions of the Ku Klux Klan, how the massacre of Native Americans saved many souls, African slaves had really good lives, homosexuals are no better than rapists and child molesters, and progressive attempts at equal rights such as Brown vs. Board of Education were illegal and misguided. You know – all the greatest Trump campaign hits!

We should not be funding the spread of such ignorance.

Frankly, DeVos’ ambitions have little chance of coming to fruition.

Two years ago, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, she wanted to spend $20 billion on the same nonsense. Her party refused to back her.

Now with Democrats in control of the House, it seems even more unlikely that her plan will pass.

But sadly smaller scale versions of it have been allowed by state legislatures throughout the country – often with full support from Democrats.

My own state of Pennsylvania spends $125 million in taxpayer dollars on the Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) and Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC) programs to send children to private/religious schools. And every year legislators ask for more.

Why any Democrat would support conservative indoctrination programs is beyond me.

And this is true even though indoctrination is sometimes unavoidable.

To a limited degree, it may even be desirable. You might even say it’s a normal part of growing up.

Even the most fair-minded parents often want their children to hold at least some of the same values as they do. They want to be able to relate to their kids and view them as a continuation of the kinds of lives they lived.

But what’s okay for parents is not okay for governments.

If Mom and Dad want their kids to have a Biblical education, they should pay for it. The burden should not be shouldered by society since it’s not in society’s interest.

Governments have no right taking public money and using it to prop up private interests. And that’s exactly what this is.

It is political and religious interest. It is a way to circumvent skepticism and free thought.

It’s a way to ensure that in a time where information flows freely and dogmas crumble, people like Donald Trump continue to be elected.

gadflyonthewallblog

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

Students

Let Voters Fix Harrisburg School Board – Not State Takeover

Who’s Afraid of Public Schools?

I Assign my Students Homework Despite Scant Research It Does Any Good

Betsy DeVos’s Right Wing School Indoctrination Program