Deborah Meier on Education

Out of the mouths of the experts designing our new expanded prekindergarten program.

“We’re trying to ensure all children are ready to learn when they get to school,” said Neera Tanden, the president and CEO of the think tank and a former top policy official in the Obama administration. “Investing in early learning and pre-K is the best investment that we can make. The return on investment is significant.”

What does Neera Tandeny think little children are doing from the time they leave the womb until they arrive in a 3 year old, 4 year old or 5 year old classroom??? We used to try and figure out how we could keep the miraculous learning that ALL children engage in from birth to 5 alive and well after they get to school. Make a list of everything they know and know how to do that they didn’t at the time of birth. Even the most backward “talkers” are developing a vocabulary (regardless of dialect, et al) that we’d think inconceivable if we tried to provide for it by direct instruction. We are a specie that has no choice but to be learners, except under the most extreme forms of sensory deprivation.

If we don’t acknowledge this, and appreciate it we can’t be effective allies if are not learners ourselves. We must meet children with pleasure and pride at what they HAVE accomplished, not a list of remedial tasks to compensate for what they haven’t. We must join with them as learners, as most mothers seem to know how to do instinctively. Joining with, learning alongside, partnering, enjoying–that’s the language of good early childhood interactions between adults and children.

Then–above and beyond–we need to address as a society the deprivations that poverty itself inflicts–in country of great wealth we have the most astounding percentage of children in deep poverty. We outdo the developed world in poverty, malnutrition and incarceration! That’s a huge and critical investment that shouldn’t get mindlessly “added to” a good classroom. It needs the collaboration of parents and teachers, but the expertise of a society that already knows what it means to have good housing, good medical care, and neighborhood safety–but that isn’t getting to about 25% of its children. Let’s not burden them or their teachers further by trying “to teach them to learn”.

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“Answer: so the kids have more time to learn and because they’ll have less time to get into mischief, hang out around with bad influences–like family and neighborhood.” Or somethng “comonsensical like tht. What we must do (see Ed Week, 12/12 by Nora Fleming.) is ensure that “every minute of the schoo day is well spent.” (Idle hands, et al) Oddly enough, our “competitors” abroad have shorter student work days and hours, and more time for professionals to gather and hone their craft. And all this on a shorter/lesser budget! And more money spent on testing. And…. How will we know if time is well-spent? That’s where more and more testing fits in well. So, you can guess what the extra time will be devoted to…. I knew you’d get it.

In Finland the teachers teach four hours a day–ditto for Japan, et al. We don’t count lawyer’s hours or doctor’s hours by the minutes spent with clients–and they generally have one client at a time! So why do we think teachers can make sense of many students at a time and virtually no paid professional back-up and planning time?

How do we get away with such nonsense? Possibly by actually having lower expectations for students than we pretend, and thus also for teachers, than we pretend. It’s cheaper to write one script and have a thousand para-professionals “teach IT” in groups of 35–or, coming soon, on-line with one well-trained performer for a thousand or more students?

For that small number who will be educated to be the real ruling class of the future, we can develop another stream once the requirements are met?

I’m just guessing.

Those making policy are either stupid or malign–or some combination of both. Like Ronald Stephens of the National School Safety Council (I’ll check this) reminds us in a great video–school security plans developed by people who know neither schools, teachers nor students well will always end up a total waste of money. And worse.

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Teachers as Learners

“Much have I learned from my teachers, more from my colleagues, and from my students most of all,” is the quote that prefaces this wonderful book, Teachers as Learners by Sharon Feinman-Nemser. It is taken from the Babylonian Talmud, Ta’anit.

We’ve all had somewhere between 16 and 20 years of teacher training of the most powerful kind–as the subjects of our teachers. What it might take to extend deepen or undermine those powerful lessons has always seemed to me magical. For some it may take almost as many years to unlearn what we learned in such a time-consuming way. And then only if we use our teaching experience to learn from. Fortunately we’ve had – nearly always – a few exceptional experiences with teachers who changed our lives and a few ordinary good ones in school, not to mention, hopefully, many more outside of school from which to draw when we confront teaching ourselves.

But after those first 6 years the training to be a teacher programs we attend (“the education of a teacher” is such a better way of saying it) is critical. Sharon Feinman-Nemser lays it out in a thoughtful and highly readable book that I just recently discovered. (It’s been out for half a year). Since she has always been a special friend and colleague, I read it with care and hoped my granddaughter (who like Sharon “goes to” Brandeis) stays on to see whether they have put into practice some of the wisdom contained in this book. It’s no surprise to me that in her very first chapter, Sharon quotes from the work of David Hawkins who would have shuddered at the current “idea” that experience doesn’t mater. (Note an Ed Week story about a new study that says kids scores are as good with non-experienced teachers as with the experienced ones they replaced!!!) That so clearly proves how little value we should attribute to those scores. If you use an inaccurate measuring tool–in medicine or education–it doesn’t much matter whether you listen to the advice of your cleaning woman or your doctor (based on a joke on whether to use hot or cold compresses. For more details on the joke, write me.)

Having found teaching to be the intellectually most stimulating experience of my life I naturally take to Sharon’s thoughts on the subject. Enough–go read it. Enjoy

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I love and learn from all Larry Cuban’s blogs. Thanks, Larry, for introducing me to the idea of “subsidiarity”

It’s at the heart of policy-making at Centrl Park East and Mission Hill and I’d argue, of democracy. I know that it makes change harder and slower–or so “change-agents” would have us believe. But we also know that “see! the data says x, therefore you must do y” is neither science nor art. First of all, the data rarely says just x, and what follows is rarely a simple y. We’re stuck with critiquing how the data was collected (which requires insight from those who know ‘the data’ from the ground), arguing over its interpretation, and then, most of the time, to persuading and influencing. The faster route of skipping all those steps often proves the slowest, especially in labor intensive fields (which may account for why “the reformers” want to get rid of experienced teachers, and eventually maybe to human teachers altogether. You don’t have to persuade a machine.)

So here it is in the words of California’ governor Jerry Brown, in his January speech to the legislature.

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Dear friends,

Please support the wonderful, historic, progressive Central Park East I and II elementary schools as they try to expand into a middle school to provide a much-needed progressive middle school alternative in upper Manhattan. Their proposal to open a middle school has been turned down by the DOE four years in a row, most recently because there was allegedly no space for the middle school. But at the same time a new charter school, the East Harlem Scholars’ Academy, was allowed to open on the third floor of CPE I’s building. It was supposed to be temporary, for two years only, but now they have applied for a three-year extension and in addition–on the basis of their “proven” year-and-a-half of excellence (!)– to start a second school, East Harlem Scholars’ Academy II, in the building as well. There will be a co-location hearing on February 27.

The two CPE schools are mounting a campaign to get their own middle school expansion approved and have started a Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/CentralParkEastMiddleSchoolCampaign

Please take a moment to like the page! This is a public relations campaign as much as anything.

Thanks, Anne

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When I was a child I went to an independent school that annually honored its founding fathers (maybe mothers?) It was a school that largely served upper middle class white New Yorkers–designed as a progressive school from K-12. The story was told about how the founders mission was to be a school for workingmen’s children so that they would learn to build a more democratic society, especially a more co-operative one. But year after year I wondered, why are we celebrating instead of grieving a lost opportunity. Because by the l940s, when I was a student, there were virtually no “workingmen’s” children and a few (very few) students from families of color.

I’m reminded time after time how easily we fall into such hypocrisies. Well-intended. As I visit schools these days I am reminded that while we still “celebrate” the Brown vs Board of Ed decision of 1954–we have abandoned the cause it was fought for long ago. We now design schools (not just charters either) to serve particular demographic groups, and develop for them what we think is what “they” need. It’s not just the Supreme Court’s fault–although they bear everlasting condemnation for their reversal of the Brown decision–but the fault of all those who have had a hand in designing local, state and federal policy. The very idea of Integration has become an old-fashioned “fad” that has long since been discarded.

Shame on us since we know that if we are to have a more democratic world we can’t live and learn in separate and unequal enclaves, with the message that our basic human needs can’t be met together.

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Before I forget. Once again Mike Rose opens my eyes and clears my mind of the nonsense that accumulates when I’m not looking!

“Giving Cognition a Bad Name”, Education Week, January 16, 2013–back cover!

The false distinction between “affect” and “cognitive”–”character” vs “academics” and on and on is more than foolish. It’s dangerous. Above all to those we’ve too long cheated in our schools under the name of “care” and “love” and “the whole child.” Strong character–feistiness, grit, or whatever the latest fad word may be–is not mindless. And if it is, mindless grit is not a virtue.

Children come out of the womb with minds – and they are working hard every day filling that mind with thoughts, feelings, ides, assumptions, concepts—even “critical thinking”. Ouch, that hurts.

Mike, as usual, in his gentle way takes these myths on, He acknowledges that some of the latest crowd of “character” fans are not only meaning but are trying wisely to stop the rush toward more and more mindless so-called achievement tests of academics. But in reconsidering the importance of the “whole child” he hopes for a “reclaiming of the full meaning of cognition–one that is robust and intellectual, intimately connected to character and social development, and directed toward the creation of a better world.”

Enough said!

Well, not quite. I urge folks to read the following paragraph printed in Dianne column today by an unnamed Illinois teacher–whose views I largely share. . What’s wrong with it? More later.

“I believe strongly that students need good, solid foundation skills and a wide range of experiences before they can think critically. “

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