Archive for November, 2008
Public schools
You owe it to your children and all the children of America to put your fabulous daughters in a public school. My daughters are close in age to yours and are in urban public schools (San Francisco). They are the better for it and so is their school. Just as you kept your home in your community and didn’t flee to a remote enclave you should do the same with your school choice. Your daughters are bright and well adjusted and their presence in a public school would raise all ships with the tide, not only locally but nationally. That’s huge. And they would be so proud of that as [Read more...]
If public schools are not good enough for the Obama kids…
President elect Obama has voted with his feet and is sending his girls to a private school. This should be viewed as an opportunity for public education leadership in DC and all over our country to work with Obama and the new administration to fast track public education reform. How many of our powerful politicians and education policy wonks send their kids to public school? I believe that public school reform must include a community conversation about what folks want from their public schools and that school and district leadership must be enabled to move FAST. Public education is not really public if it [Read more...]
Return the Teaching Profession to the Teaching Professionals
Historically, the federal government has played two distinct roles in public education: supporting people to go to college or to work and supporting students who live in poverty by providing funding for additional services. Both are considered as positive and supportive.
What teachers have experienced from the federal government since NCLB was enacted has been the opposite of support. Since 2002 we have been told that we cannot use our professional judgment. We have been told that we must teach with fidelity to programs, that we are not allowed to modify these programs by using our professional knowledge and the methods and materials we have at our disposal. [Read more...]
How Obama can fix reading
May 25, 2008
Maria Montessori wrote, almost a century ago, that three- and four-year-old preschoolers will learn to read spontaneously if they get \”sufficient\” practice forming alphabet letters. Although boldly claimed in her \”The Montessori Method\” this possibility has strangely never before been subjected to a scientific test.
In 2002-2004 I found five kindergarten teachers on the Internet who provided experimental data on 106 experimental kindergarten students as they practiced printing fluency and we monitored their reading ability (and also five other first-grade teachers who did NOT make the effort of inducing printing practice, but who only measured how much of the serial alphabet students could print in a timed, twenty-second [Read more...]
Start with the teachers
Advice for the new President
1. Transcend the debate over NCLB and its standardized testing regime by — asking our nation’s best teachers to help design and implement a new accountability system that promotes 21 century learning and draws on the successes already occurring in their classrooms;
2. Transcend the debate over who should be recruited to teaching and how much preparation they should have by — discarding the idea that one teacher is solely responsible for 25 students. Instead, create policies that promote our best teachers serving as supervisors, evaluators, and coaches of a wide range of novices, adjuncts, and teaching assistants who collectively work with large [Read more...]
Qualities for the next Secretary of Education
I support Colin Powell being the next Secretary of Education, especially since he has a strong connection to America’s Choice. www.americaschoice.org
Ten years ago, I taught ESL at a middle school that used the America’s Choice reform model and Colin Powell visited us quite frequently to ensure the program was running smoothly. With BRAC (Base Realignment And Closure) and a stronger lean towards school-family-community partnerships, Colin Powell would be able to marry the military-business-education components, and could focus on the parental involvement piece. Here is more data & research to support the DOD Model:
http://iume.tc.columbia.edu/reports/praxis5.html
http://www.ericdigests.org/2004-2/minority.html
http://www.dodea.edu/pubs/docs/csp2008.pdf
www.ccsso.org/content/PDFs/ClosingTheGap.pdfwww.ccsso.org/content/PDFs/ClosingTheGap.pdf
http://www.dodea.edu/pressroom/releasesDisplay.cfm?prId=20080408
We need someone that is respected internationally and can move this nation forward in producing globally competitive [Read more...]
NCLB Undermines Special Needs Child’s Rights & Undermines IEP
No Child Left Behind has been a nightmare for my child’s Special Education and a huge waste of money and resources. Parents need to be included in determining how and if the alternative testing procedures are appropriate for children with disabilities. Please understand that the testing for children with special needs in Maryland starts in October and goes through March! The tested material takes priority over the Individual Education Plan because teachers are forced to make the alternative tests, pre-test, train and post test the goals so the child passes. In reality, the IEP gets whatever time is leftover. Principals could excuse children but don’t because it is [Read more...]
Content in Mathematics
We’ve got to start focusing on CONTENT in our mathematics courses or we will continue to slip internationally. Discovery learning certainly has its place in other areas, but in mathematics we’ve got to focus on direct instruction of age appropriate content in order to catch ourselves up. Our children have really paid the price for our experiments in math ed over the last 20 years and are not prepared for global competition as a result.
Please stop the madness and just teach the math that students need to experience success in the future. I have confidence that our children can and will meet the challenge of a rigorous [Read more...]
One Size Never Fits All
Dear President Obama:
I am a community college English teacher at Oakland Community College in Metro Detroit. Previously, I’ve taught at most of the community colleges in the area, including Henry Ford Community College, Schoolcraft Community College and Washtenaw Community College. I even attended Santa Monica Community College, in California, though I was raised in southeastern Michigan, so I understand this important segment of the public school system.
Working with entry-level college students, many fresh out of high school, I teach the last required English classes most students (outside of journalism and English majors) need to take in their lives, Composition I and II, and as a result I have [Read more...]
NCLB
No child left behind, in theory, is a good pan. However, it does not work. Schools are losing their funding because they cannot fill get all subgroups to the proficient level. States refuse to raise their standards out of fear to lose funding. And most importantly, this act was not created by educators. There are many unreal expectations. Though the general public feels that education needs to reform into a new direction, which I agree to an extent, this is without doubt the wrong direction. Most creativity in the classroom has been watered down in the primary subjects due to the great stresses placed [Read more...]
