Search Results for: sold a story
I was supposed to be the expert. But when Covid-19 hit, I didn’t know what to say.
Hunter Gardner: Homer’s Iliad — what some consider the origin of European literature — begins with a plague. In the epic, which I was teaching as part of an upper-level Greek course just months ago, the destructive power of disease parallels that of war itself: Apollo, lord of the silver bow, sheds arrows of pestilence […]
Civics: Political groups use “deeply spooky” protester location data, report finds
Kate Cox: Surveillance is widespread at protests. Both local and federal authorities have broad authority to undertake both covert and overt intelligence-gathering and surveillance of demonstrations. Law enforcement uses location data for other kinds of investigations as well. Cops need to get a warrant to track a specific individual’s mobile phone. Doing it the other way around, though—picking a location, and […]
The Weaponization of Diversity
Ancerj: This is an unusually lengthy essay, because the issue is so complex and nuanced that it deserves an appropriate level of patience and attention. It includes my deeply honest, personal, and some would say risky perspective on the topic of diversity in high-performance careers, including tech entrepreneurship; and my concern that the decision by […]
The Rise of Reassurance Lit
Charlie Tyson: My life as an advertiser began at a firm that specialized in one of the oldest American industries: grift. Staffed almost entirely by interns earning minimum wage, the company sold ad space in phone directories that, once printed, were promptly dumped in desolate corners of campus student centers, next to stacks of greasy […]
When writer’s block strikes
Matthew Duffus: It didn’t happen all at once. I didn’t wake up one morning to find myself unable to write creatively. For months, I could eke out a story or group of poems, but all attempts at another novel arrived stillborn, exhausting themselves after a few thousand words. My father suggested I had a form of postpartum depression, that seeing my […]
Civics: For decades, the CIA read the encrypted communications of allies and adversaries.
Greg Miller: For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret. The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became […]
‘This work is so crucial’: Madison School District staff lead conversations about Black Lives Matter At School Week
Scott Girard: Every Madison Metropolitan School District site had staff participating in the Black Lives Matter At School Week of Action this year. The national movement to hold a week of support for black students ran Feb. 3-7 this year, culminating Thursday night in Madison with a sold-out staff showing of the movie “Just Mercy” and a […]
China’s growing threat to academic freedom
Shawn O’Dwyer: In “The Scholars,” the classic 18th century Chinese novel on the lives and misadventures of Ming Dynasty literati, there is an episode that departs unnervingly from the book’s satirical, moralizing tone. One day the Nanjing scholar Chuang reluctantly obeys a summons to consult with the emperor in Beijing. On the way to Beijing […]
2020 Madison School District Referendum Climate: city tax and spending increases
David Blaska: It was what we thought it was. Madison is 10 to 1 opposed to the city’s $40 wheel tax, judging from the 2,000 pages [CORRECTED] of e-mails that flooded city hall from 250 individuals. Kudos to Chris Rickert of the WI State Journal for filing the open records request to get that info. […]
The Provocations of Camille Paglia
Emily Eshfahania: The word “person” captures a concept so fundamental to Westerners that it can be jarring to discover that it once had a different meaning. Etymologically, “person” comes from the Latin word persona, which means “mask.” To be a person is to wear a mask, act out a role—what people today might call being […]
What The 1619 Project Leaves Out
Jim Geraghty: “The goal of The 1619 Project, a major initiative from The New York Times that this issue of the magazine inaugurates, is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year,” The New York Times Magazine editors declare. “Doing so requires us to place […]
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Economic stress and demographic change are weakening a symbiotic relationship
Economist: OF LATE THE world’s older democracies have begun to look more vulnerable than venerable. America seems destined for a constitutional showdown between the executive and the legislature. Brexit has mired Britain in a constitutional morass of its own. Such troubles could be mistaken for a comeuppance. In recent years political economists have argued that […]
Mystery, Manners, and the Rediscovery of Great Literature
Tod Worner: In many high school or college venues, the process of teaching literature has been reduced to performing cold and soulless vivisection on the most vibrant, engaging and instructive of stories. And what is the result? A corpse—a cold and soulless story—is left on the table, likely never to be approached again by the […]
Watching Harvard, My Alma Mater, Surrender to the Mob
Kaveh Shahrooz: On Saturday, Harvard University announced that it would not be permitting law professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. to stay on as faculty dean of Winthrop House, an undergraduate residence where he has served in that position since 2009 (along with his wife Stephanie R. Robinson, who also teaches at Harvard Law School). When […]
Hindsight 2070: We asked 15 experts, “What do we do now that will be considered unthinkable in 50 years?” Here’s what they told us.
Javier Zarracina: Some 50 years ago, in 1964, 42 percent of Americans smoked cigarettes. Smoking in bars and offices was normal and cigarettes were given to soldiers as part of military rations. Half of American physicians smoked. Ads for cigarettes bombarded the American public. That year, the surgeon general released a report outlining the health […]
Boredom and the British Empire
Erik Linstrum: Was the British Empire boring? As Jeffrey Auerbach notes in his irreverent new book, it’s an unexpected question, largely because imperial culture was so conspicuously saturated with a sense of adventure. The exploits of explorers, soldiers and proconsuls – dramatised in Boys’ Own-style narratives – captured the imagination of contemporaries and coloured views […]
“We know best”, continued
Ross Douthat: Over the last three years, since Brexit and the Trumpening and the general rise of disreputable forces in Western politics, there has been a steadily boiling elite panic about the power of the paranoid fringe, the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories, the pull of fake news and the danger of alternative realities. And yet […]
Germany’s Leading Magazine Published Falsehoods About American Life
James Kirchick: The word spiegel means “mirror” in German, and since its postwar founding, Der Spiegel has proudly held a mirror up to the world. When the magazine published top-secret information about the dire state of West Germany’s armed forces in 1962, the government accused it of treason, raided its offices, and arrested its editors. […]
Sears’s ‘radical’ past: How mail-order catalogues subverted the racial hierarchy of Jim Crow
Antonia Noori Farzan: Monday’s announcement that Sears would file for bankruptcy and close 142 stores came as little surprise to anyone who has followed the retail giant’s collapse in recent years. Still, the news inspired a wave of nostalgia for a company that sold an ideal of middle-class life to generations of Americans. A lesser-known […]
Howard Zinn’s Anti-Textbook
Sam Wineburg: History, for Zinn, is looked at from “the bottom up”: a view “of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army.” […]
Why Winners Keep Winning On Cumulative Advantage and How to Think About Luck
Nick Maggiulli: In the late 1970s the view in the publishing world was that an author should never produce more than one book a year. The thinking was that publishing more than one book a year would dilute the brand name of the author. However, this was a bit of a problem for Stephen King, […]
China bans Internet Bible sales
Ian Johnson: The Chinese government has banned online retailers from selling the Bible, moving in the wake of new rules to control the country’s burgeoning religious scene. The measures to limit Bible sales were announced over the weekend and began taking effect this week. By Thursday, internet searches for the Bible came up empty on […]
To Illustrate the Dangers of Cyberwarfare, the Army Is Turning to Sci-fi
Stephen Cass: At first glance, Dark Hammer [PDF] looks a lot like any other science fiction comic book: On the front cover, a drone flies over a river dividing a city with damaged and burning buildings. But this short story in graphic form comes from the Army Cyber Institute at West Point, in New York. […]
Crispr’d Food, Coming Soon to a Supermarket Near You
Megan Molteni: For years now, the US Department of Agriculture has been flirting with the latest and greatest DNA manipulation technologies. Since 2016, it has given free passes to at least a dozen gene-edited crops, ruling that they fall outside its regulatory purview. But on Wednesday, March 28, the agency made its relationship status official; […]
Like a generation of women, my unwed birth mother kept a lifelong secret: Me
Elizabeth (Betsy) Brenner: In spring 1954, Judith Ann Hiller, a bright, promising 20-year-old senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was terrified. She had grown up in a working-class, largely Jewish neighborhood on Milwaukee’s west side, where families valued academic achievement and wanted a better life for their children. At Madison, she was an active and […]
The life behind Little House on the Prairie
Susie Boyt: Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder is a subtle, intelligent and quietly explosive study not just of a woman whose Little House books have sold more than 60m copies in 45 languages, but of a very particular way of life, the life of the American pioneer. Looking deeply […]
Wikipedia’s Fate Shows How the Web Endangers Knowledge
Hossein Derakhshan: That happy news masks a more concerning problem—a flattening growth rate in the number of contributors to the website. It is another troubling sign of a general trend around the world: The very idea of knowledge itself is in danger. The idea behind Wikipedia—like all encyclopedias before it—has been to collect the entirety […]
When Data is Dangerous
Bob Hoffman: It has become an article of faith in the marketing business that the future of marketing is about data. “Data are to this century what oil was to the last one: a driver of growth and change,” says The Economist. Scientific American says, “The digital revolution is in full swing…in 2016 we produced as […]
Sandra Boynton’s whimsical animals have been delighting kids for 40 years –
Ellen McCarthy: Sandra Boynton lives on a farm in rural Connecticut. She works out of a converted barn, surrounded by pigs in overalls, frogs wearing cowboy hats, a clutch of bemused chickens and a few skeptical sock puppets. Standing there, you get the feeling that at any moment they might all come alive and break […]
America’s amnesia
Thomas Bass: Everything wrong with the new ten-part PBS documentary on the Vietnam War is apparent in the first five minutes. A voice from nowhere intones about a war “begun in good faith” that somehow ran off the rails and killed millions of people. We see a firefight and a dead soldier in a body […]
Report accuses Milwaukee of foot-dragging on mandate to sell vacant MPS buildings
Annysa Johnson: At least 40 Milwaukee Public Schools buildings are vacant or underused, according to a new report by a conservative law firm that wants to see them sold off to private and public charter schools that will compete with the state’s largest public school system. The study by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & […]
The FDA is stockpiling military weapons — and it’s not alone
Jeff Jacoby: A report issued this month by American Transparency, a nonpartisan watchdog that compiles data on public expenditures, chronicles the explosive — and expensive — trend toward militarizing federal agencies, most of which have no military responsibilities. Between 2006 and 2014, the report shows, 67 federal bureaus, departments, offices, and services spent at least […]
Obama’s Successor Inherits a Bond Market at Epic Turning Point
Eliza Ronald’s-Hannon & Liz McCormack: Barack Obama will go down in history as having sold more Treasuries and at lower rates than any U.S. president. He’s also leaving a debt burden that threatens to hamstring his successor. Obama’s administration benefited from some unprecedented advantages that helped it grapple with the longest recession since the 1930s. […]
Why We’re Post-Fact
Peter Pomerantsev: As his army blatantly annexed Crimea, Vladimir Putin went on TV and, with a smirk, told the world there were no Russian soldiers in Ukraine. He wasn’t lying so much as saying the truth doesn’t matter. And when Donald Trump makes up facts on a whim, claims that he saw thousands of Muslims […]
WikiLeaks reveals DNC holds unions in contempt
Jeremy Lott: Yet the emails that have been released highlight the rather one-way relationship between the Democratic Party and labor unions. DNC staffers see the unions as good soldiers in skirmishes with Republicans, as a pain when it comes to getting things done and, ultimately, as pushovers. When brainstorming what to do about last week’s […]
Why We’re Post-Fact
Peter Pomerantsev: As his army blatantly annexed Crimea, Vladimir Putin went on TV and, with a smirk, told the world there were no Russian soldiers in Ukraine. He wasn’t lying so much as saying the truth doesn’t matter. And when Donald Trump makes up facts on a whim, claims that he saw thousands of Muslims […]
It’s Time to Face the Whole Truth About the Atlantic Slave Trade
Sheldon M. Stern, via Will Fitzhugh:: The AMISTAD America website stresses the need to educate the public about the history of slavery “through common experiences and dialogue.” By “confronting the past” and promoting “reconciliation and social healing” the Amistad’s Atlantic Freedom Tour aims to help all people work toward “transforming the future.” However, confronting the […]
A Tale of Two (New) Schools
: the world today, there are two efforts to massively scale new school systems that are based on agile, technology focused learning systems. One has raised $133M and is currently educating about 750 students in six schools in three American cities; the other has raised $3M and is currently educating 7,500 students in 50 publicly […]
Assessment of Student Writing
Will Fitzhugh: There is a great deal of concern about the quality of student academic writing at the secondary level, but those who seek to assess it usually think in terms of large numbers and quick scoring. A few years ago, a vice-president of The College Board was happy to announce that they could assess […]
Learn Different
Rebecca Mead: entilla, AltSchool’s thirty-five-year-old founder, is a native New Yorker who attended Buckley, on the Upper East Side, and proceeded to Andover, the New England prep school. He went to Yale, where he majored in math and physics, and then earned an M.B.A. Ventilla worked briefly for Google, then launched a startup, Aardvark, which […]
The Electronic Panopticon
Neil Richards, via Will Fitzhugh: Is the web private enough for you? Maybe you’re OK with every search you’ve made, every site visited, every email sent all being stored in databases linked to your name or account by your service provider, your phone carrier, or Google. Maybe you’re OK with Amazon knowing not just what’s […]
Computer science & avoiding MIT
Lydia Dishman: For Ashu Desai, a cofounder of Make School, Bando’s story validates a long-held belief that computer-science degrees from traditional universities may not be the best path into a highly competitive job market in this sector. THE UNEMPLOYMENT RATE IN THE IT SECTOR IS ABOUT HALF THE NATIONAL AVERAGE, AT JUST 3%. Desai himself […]
Robert Meister Interview – pt. 2
Michael Shapira: In Uses of the University Clark Kerr talks about the multiversity combining the best of the German research university, the best of the English liberal arts model, and best aspects of American entrepreneurialism. Santa Cruz was meant to be part of the system as a beacon of UC’s commitment to undergraduate education, given […]
“People talk and laugh, which is our goal,” Ryan said.
Faiz Siddiqui Unpopular books flying off branch libraries’ shelves Some bridle as Boston trims collections in effort to update offerings. At the Dudley Branch of the Boston Public Library, clustered volumes fill only half of many long, red shelves; the rest stand empty. In the adult nonfiction section, some shelves are completely barren. The library, […]
For Sale: Student Profiles
Stephanie Simon: Each year, more than 2 million middle school and high school students fill out comprehensive surveys for the National Research Center for College & University Admissions detailing their academic records, their athletic skills, their religious leanings, their aspirations. In short, it’s “their hopes and dreams,” said Ryan Munce, the group’s vice president. He […]
In Pursuit of Knowledge, and Profit How universities aid and abet patent trolls
Daniel Engber: A few weeks ago, administrators at Penn State University did something they believed had never been attempted in American academia: The school put about 70 engineering patents up for auction and tried to sell them to the highest bidder. They weren’t so successful—not many patents sold—but the project has disturbing implications. What if […]
Social Studies Standards: “Doing” Common Core Social Studies: Promoting Radical Activism under the Obama Department of Education
“Were the Common Core authors serious about ‘college-readiness,’ they would have taken their cue from publisher Will Fitzhugh, who for decades has been swimming against the tide of downgraded writing standards (blogging, journal-writing, video-producing). To this end, he has been publishing impressive student history papers in his scholarly journal, The Concord Review. The new (CC) […]
Why Camden’s school turn-around plan is getting a better reception than the one in Newark
This is not Jersey’s best week. Revelations from Bridgegate, along with the peculiar backroom statecraft that spawned the scandal over the Hudson, seem to splatter daily across the front page. Jon Stewart and Jimmy Fallon get a second Christmas while Chris Christie appears pale and oddly flat.
As I’m writing this, the Bergen Record breaks the story that the Governor’s brother Todd bought and sold properties near the PATH station in Harrison which, coincidentally, had been just been awarded renovation funding to the tasty tune of $256 million.
And here’s another fresh Jersey lowlight: in Newark Tuesday night, state-appointed Superintendent Cami Anderson was booed off the stage during a rancorous meeting where 500 people, including the president of the American Federation of Teachers, reacted with disdain to her “One Newark” plan that would restructure the city’s school system. This plan includes universal enrollment procedures for both charters and traditional schools, expansion of charter schools, and closings of poorly-utilized school buildings.
the post-MOOC-hype landscape: what’s REALLY next?
The short version (see slide 4) is this: there are currently two solitudes in the MOOC conversation, and it’s not a cMOOC/xMOOC divide. One solitude – the mainstream media discourse – is essentially a unicorn, in the sense that its promises are fantasies of salvation and solutionism that have very little to do with the actual practice of higher education. The other – the practitioners’ discourse(s), broadly represented by the various interests around the table at #mri13 – is a Tower of Babel. Still, this solitude, loosely and cacophonously affiliated as it is, nonetheless leans towards discussing MOOCs in terms of learning. And in the wake of twenty-odd months of hype in which the dominant public narratives about higher ed have been all glorious revolution or ghastly spectre, I think it’s time to seize this (likely momentary) lull in unicorn sales and try to talk about MOOCs as learning. We need to make ourselves familiar with what the post-hype landscape of higher ed looks like, and address the issues and opportunities it’s left us with. In learning terms. On as many public platforms as we can. In stereo.
In other words, challenge the empty narratives that your administrators or your faculty have been sold. Find ways to talk about why what you’re doing matters. Change the narrative from unicorns back to what education is about: learning. End story.
Howard Zinn and the Art of Anti-Americanism
Upon the death of the Marxist-inspired historian Howard Zinn in 2010, eulogies rang out from coast to coast calling him a heroic champion of the unsung masses. In Indiana, then-Gov. Mitch Daniels refused to join the chorus and instead sent emails to his staff wondering if the historian’s “execrable” books were being force-fed to Hoosier students. The recent revelation of these emails provoked an angry backlash.
High-school teachers within Zinn’s vast network of admirers blogged their disapproval of the governor’s heresy, and leading professional organizations of historians denounced the supposed threat to academic freedom. At Purdue University, where Mr. Daniels now serves as president, 90 faculty members hailed Zinn as a strong scholarly voice for the powerless and cast the former governor as an enemy of free thought.
An activist historian relentlessly critical of alleged American imperialism, Zinn managed during his lifetime to build an impressive empire devoted to the spread of his ideas. Even after his death, a sprawling network of advocacy and educational groups has grown, giving his Marxist and self-described “utopian” vision a wider audience than ever before.
Zinn’s most influential work, A People’s History of the United States, was published in 1980 with an initial print run of 4,000 copies. His story line appealed to young and old alike, with the unshaded good-guy, bad-guy narrative capturing youthful imaginations, and his spirited takedown of “the Man” reminding middle-aged hippies of happier days. Hollywood’s love for Zinn and a movie tribute to his work has made him even more mainstream. As his acolytes have climbed the rungs of power, still seeking revolution, A People’s History has increased in popularity. To date, it has sold 2.2 million volumes, with more than half of those sales in the past decade.
In Zinn’s telling, America is synonymous with brute domination that goes back to Christopher Columbus. “The American system,” he writes in A People’s History, is “the most ingenious system of control in world history.” The founding fathers were self-serving elitists defined by “guns and greed.”
For Americans stuck in impoverished communities and failing schools, Zinn’s devotion to history as a “political act” can seem appealing. He names villains (capitalists), condemns their misdeeds, and calls for action to redistribute wealth so that, eventually, all of the following material goods will be “free–to everyone: food, housing, health care, education, transportation.” The study of history, Zinn taught, demands this sort of social justice.
Schools with social-justice instruction that draw explicitly on Zinn are becoming more common. From the Social Justice Academy outside of San Francisco to the four campuses of the Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy, in Washington, D.C., social-justice academies relate their mission mainly in terms of ideological activism. At UCLA’s Social Justice Academy, a program for high-school juniors, the goal is that students will “develop skills to take action that disrupts social justice injustices.”
While social-justice instruction may sound to some like it might be suited to conflict resolution, in practice it can end up creating more discord than it resolves. Several years ago, the Ann Arbor, Michigan, public schools faced complaints from the parents of minority students that the American history curriculum was alienating their children. At a meeting of the district’s social-studies department chairs, the superintendent thought that he had discovered the cure for the divisions plaguing the school system. Holding up a copy of A People’s History, he asked, “How many of you have heard of Howard Zinn?” The chairwoman of the social studies department at the district’s largest school responded, “Oh, we’re already using that.”
Zinn’s arguments tend to divide, not unite, embitter rather than heal. The patron saint of Occupy Wall Street, Zinn left behind a legacy of prepackaged answers for every problem–a methodology that progressive historian Michael Kazin characterized as “better suited to a conspiracy-monger’s website than to a work of scholarship.”
Yet despite the lack of hard evidence in three-plus decades that using A People’s History produces positive classroom results, a number of well-coordinated groups recently have been set up to train teachers in the art of Zinn. Founded five years ago out of a partnership between Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, the Zinn Education Project offers more than 100 lesson plans and teachers’ guides to Zinn’s books, among a variety of other materials, including “Beyond Heroes and Holidays: A Practice Guide to K-12 Anti-Racist, Multicultural Education and Staff Development.” Already, the project claims to have enlisted 20,000 teachers in its efforts.
Before Zinn launched his own teaching career, he became a member of the Communist Party in 1949 (according to FBI reports released three years ago), and worked in various front groups in New York City. Having started his academic career at Spelman College, Zinn spent the bulk of it at Boston University, where on the last day before his retirement in 1988 he led his students into the street to participate in a campus protest.
Today, Boston University hosts the Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture Series, and New York University (Zinn’s undergraduate alma mater) proudly houses his academic papers. In 2004 Zinn was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Havana, an occasion he took to excoriate the lack of academic freedom in America. As recently as 2007, A People’s History was even required reading at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy for a class on “Leaders in America.”
Thanks in part to an endorsement from the character played by Matt Damon in 1997’s “Good Will Hunting,” Zinn’s magnum opus has also turned into a multimedia juggernaut. Actor Ben Affleck (like Mr. Damon, a family friend of Zinn’s), and musicians Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Eddie Vedder and John Legend all have publicly praised Zinn. A History Channel documentary produced by Mr. Damon, “The People Speak,” featured Hollywood A-listers Morgan Freeman, Viggo Mortensen, Kerry Washington and others reading from Zinn’s books. There are “People’s Histories” on topics including the American Revolution, Civil War, Vietnam and even science. Zinn die-hards can purchase a graphic novel, A People’s History of American Empire, while kids can pick up a two-volume set, A Young People’s History of the United States (wall chart sold separately).
In 2005, as a guest on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” Zinn delivered his standard wholesale condemnation of America. Surprised by the unrelenting attack, host Jon Stewart gave the historian an opportunity to soften his criticism. “We have made some improvements,” the comedian asked, “in our barbarity over three hundred years, I would say, no?” Zinn denied there was any improvement.
As classes resume again this fall, it is difficult not to think that despite the late historian’s popularity, our students deserve better than the divisive pessimism of Howard Zinn.
Mr. Bobb, director of the Hillsdale College Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship, in Washington, D.C., is author of Humility: An Unlikely Biography of America’s Greatest Virtue, forthcoming from Thomas Nelson.
A version of this article appeared August 12, 2013, on page A17 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: “Howard Zinn and the Art of Anti-Americanism.”
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Detroit, tip of a vast pensions liability iceberg
Detroit’s filing of the biggest municipal bankruptcy in US historycaps three decades of the city’s steady decline, characterized by crime, shrinkage of auto manufacturing industry, and a population all too eager to leave for the more hospitable suburbs.
Detroit’s bankruptcy is, primarily, a lesson in how cities and states cannot avoid their pension responsibilities without a backlash of biblical proportions. In 2006, Detroit, like many other cities and states, was facing a $1.5bn gap in its pension payments to its public employees. As Quartz noted:
The city converted them into debt called “certificates of participation”, or COPs, which it sold through a legally separate financial vehicle at a floating interest rate. Then it entered into a swap with UBS that converted those to fixed rates. This swap became very expensive when rates dropped after the financial crisis. A very similar arrangement led to the Jefferson County bankruptcy, and a massive scandal that sent several financiers to jail.
Should we let wunderkinds drop out of high school?
Thomas Sohmers, 17, of Hudson, Mass., has been working at a research lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since he was 13, developing projects ranging from augmented reality eyewear to laser communications systems. This spring, his mom, Penny Mills, let him drop out of 11th grade. She says she “could see how much of the work he was doing at school wasn’t relevant to what he wanted to learn.”
On Monday, Thomas and his mom learned that he is in esteemed company as a high-school dropout with a knack for computers: David Karp, 26, sold Tumblr, the online blogging forum he created, to Yahoo for $1.1 billion.
Examples of tech geniuses who lack college degrees are well-known — Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg among them. But Karp left high school after his freshman year, with his mother’s blessing, at the tender age of 14.
Critics say dropping out of school to pursue a dream is a terrible idea. Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at Stanford Law School who teaches and advises startup companies, says it’s like “buying a lottery ticket — that’s how good your odds are here. More likely than not, you will become unemployed. For every success, there are 100,000 failures.”
But what about kids who are so good at computer programming that schools can’t teach them what they need to know? “That’s what internships are for; that’s what extracurricular activities are for,” says Wadhwa, who has founded two companies.
Unmentionable
Since the disaster of the Marxist/Victims-history standards produced by UCLA in 1996, which were censured by a vote of 99-1 in the United States Senate, (the one negative voter thought the “standards” were even worse), History has become, in the comment this year of David Steiner, former Commissioner of Education in New York State, “so politically toxic that no one wants to touch it.”
This situation has developed in part because every tiny little multicultural group in the country is outraged if their history does not receive equal (or better) treatment in any history textbook, and in part because the late Howard Zinn’s proudly Marxist textbook of United States History has sold more than 2 million copies (not bad for an anti-capitalist who believed “private property is theft”).
Most of those who write about the dashing new nonfiction reading suggestions of the Common Core lament the altered and unreasonable burdens on English teachers, and they all seem to have forgotten that most of our high schools have both History departments and History teachers as well. But it seems to be inconceivable and unmentionable that our History teachers might dare to assign history books (nonfiction) and history research papers (nonfiction writing).
The story of how all reading and writing became the complete monopoly of the English Departments is surely a long and complicated one, but however it developed, it seems clear that our History departments have given away any responsibility for assigning books and research papers they may once have owned to the English teachers.
In an October 24, 2012 article in the Wall Street Journal, Michael S. Malone argues that even tech company CEOs are now looking for people who can tell stories (about their enterprise, their product, etc.), and so Mr. Malone of course looks to the English departments to offer the needed expertise in storytelling:
“Could the humanities rebuild the shattered bridge between C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” and find a place at the heart of the modern world’s virtual institutions? We assume that this will be a century of technology. But if the competition in tech moves to this new battlefield, the edge will go to those institutions that can effectively employ imagination, metaphor, and most of all, storytelling. And not just creative writing, but every discipline in the humanities, from the classics to rhetoric to philosophy. Twenty-first-century storytelling: multimedia, mass customizable, portable and scalable, drawing upon the myths and archetypes of the ancient world, on ethics, and upon a deep understanding of human nature and even religious faith.
The demand is there, but the question is whether the traditional humanities can furnish the supply. If they can’t or won’t, they will continue to wither away. But surely there are risk-takers out there in those English and classics departments, ready to leap on this opportunity. They’d better hurry, because the other culture won’t wait.”
Where did we lose the understanding that History is all storytelling, with the additional benefit that it is based on evidence, which is not always so important with fiction? Mr. Malone mentions English and classics departments (“classics to rhetoric to philosophy”), but perhaps for him History has lost its membership in the Humanities? He wants “imagination, metaphor and most of all, storytelling…and myths and archetypes of the ancient world,” but he leaves unmentioned the sources of the greatest true stories (nonfiction) ever told in the world–our Historians.
Nevertheless, he is in the mainstream of those who, when asked to think, talk and write about reading and writing in the schools, faithfully and regularly default to the work of the English department and its wonderful world of fiction as the only place to introduce nonfiction!
When did the ideas of having our high school students read an actual complete history book or two and write an actual history research paper or two disappear into the woodwork? The result is that our students arrive in college poorly prepared to read nonfiction books and to write the required term papers, not to mention their inability to do any research.
Neil Postman tells us that “Cicero remarked that the purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present.” That freedom seems more and more out of reach among those who cannot even think about History, which has made History the most unmentionable among all the necessary academic subjects in our schools.
Gifted 5-year-old’s family moves from Oahu to East Coast for new school
The parents of a Kalama Valley kindergartner said they reluctantly sold their house, are looking for new jobs and moving to the East Coast to enroll their gifted son in a special school. And they fault the state for not offering enough support for extraordinarily talented students in Hawaii public schools.
Parents who believe they have a gifted child should seek help from school officials, conduct plenty of online research and get deeply involved in their child’s education inside and outside of the classroom, according to a local expert and the parents of a gifted Oahu boy whose family moved to the East Coast to go to a special school for gifted students.
“Work with the principal to see what can be done at the school that your student attends,” said Anna Viggiano, the educational specialist in charge of gifted and talented programs for the state of Hawaii Department of Education.
Most public schools have a period during which you can nominate your child to be designated gifted, she said. Parents can nominate their children for screening and testing by school officials who will evaluate the students to see if they are eligible for special classes.
“As a parent, you can’t depend totally on the school,” Viggiano said. The DOE does not have the money for any statewide initiatives for gifted students, she said. The state gives each public school $914 per gifted student, money that every principal decides how to use.
Viggiano said parents should ask, “What can I do on my parent time to make my child love learning and feel happy?”m
Teachers unions’ alliance with Democratic Party frays
Teachers unions have been the Democratic Party’s foot soldiers for more than half a century, providing not only generous financial backing but an army of volunteers in return for support of their entrenched power in the nation’s public schools.
But this relationship is fraying, and the deterioration was evident Monday as Democrats gathered here for their national convention.
A handful of teachers and parents, carrying large inflated pencils, picketed a screening of “Won’t Back Down,” a movie to be released this month starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis as mothers, one a teacher, who try to take over a failing inner-city school.David Dayen has more.
Madison’s Superintendent Search Service Contenders
Proact Services: [1MB PDF Presentation]
Gary Solomon, Chief Executive Officer
Gary Solomon was elevated to CEO of PROACT Search in 2009. Previously, Mr. Solomon had founded Synesi Associates and worked in Education for the past twenty years, starting as a high school teacher and administrator in the Chicago suburbs. Gary transitioned from the public to the private sector taking on a position as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for The Princeton Review, and was responsible for rebuilding the sales organization into a senior consultative team focused on creating custom solutions in the areas of assessment, professional development and academic intervention. During his six years with The Princeton Review, where annual revenue goals were exceeded by and average 150%, Solomon was fortunate to do significant business in many of the top 50 urban districts in the country, and work with some of the best and brightest reformers in the K12 space. A graduate of the University of Illinois, Solomon holds a Masters in Education Arts from Northeastern University.
Thomas Vranas, President
Thomas brings an extensive background in educational management in the private sector, as well as numerous start-ups across various industries. He recently served as Vice President at one of the largest publicly traded test preparation companies where he was directly responsible for their sales teams as well as online learning division. Previously Thomas built an urban tutoring program in Chicago to service over 8,000 students with recognition for a quality program from the local and national government. Thomas has also started-up a Wireless Internet company, a Sales and Marketing company as well as a boutique Venture Capital firm. Thomas has been published by the Northwestern Press for his work in political economics and is and active volunteer at many organizations including Habitat for Humanity, Northwestern University and Steppenwolf Theatre. He’s been a guest lecturer at Northwestern University, where he earned his B.A. in Economics and Slavic Languages.
Phil Hansen, Chief Operations Officer
Phil Hansen is a seasoned educator with an impeccable record rooted in Accountability. For fifteen years Phil taught history, before moving on to five years as assistant principal for the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), and then Director of Special Education in the southern suburbs of Chicago. In 1991 Phil took on the role of Principal at Clissold Elementary, a Chicago Public school. In 1995 he became the CPS Director of School Intervention, before moving on in 1997 to take on the position of Chief Accountability Officer, where he served until 2002. At this time Phil was offered a position working as an assistant to the Illinois State Superintendent where he was the liaison between CPS and the Illinois State Board of Education specifically focused on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) implementation throughout the state.
Upon his retirement Phil joined The Princeton Review and managed a turnaround project in Philadelphia, transitioning four middle schools to new small high schools. He also separately did consulting work for the School District of Philadelphia, the St Louis Schools Office of Accountability, and the Recovery School District of New Orleans. In the Recovery School District he served as the Interim Chief Academic Officer during the transition of leadership. Upon joining Synesi Associates, as Vice President of Policy and Development he has worked with the State Board of Louisiana and the East Baton Rouge Parish School District. His primary work has been in completing school and district quality reviews followed up by long term support as an external partner. Through Synesi he also continues to work in New Orleans, assisting with the High School Redesign efforts
As an active member of his community, Phil has also served as President and Secretary of the Beverly Area Planning Association, and has received rewards for service from both the local community as well as the greater city of Chicago. Most recently Phil was honored as an outstanding City of Chicago Employee and Outstanding Educator from the National Conference for Community and Justice.
Stephen Kupfer, Regional President
Steve Kupfer serves as Northeast Regional President for PROACT Search and is responsible for executing talent management and support strategies in K-12 education institutions and organizations. He was previously a Senior Consultant in the education practice at Public Consulting Group where he worked alongside district leadership to implement web-based special education and response to intervention (RtI) case management modules in some of the largest school districts in the country, including Miami Dade County Public Schools, The School District of Philadelphia, and the Louisiana Recovery School District.
Steve brings practical, district-level experience in organizational development to challenges in K-12 human capital management and support. In his most recent role, he leveraged local leadership to build operational and financial capacity through Medicaid reimbursement programs, mitigating budget shortfalls and sustaining critical student services. Steve has also developed and implemented comprehensive strategies to engage and communicate with key internal and external stakeholders across districts, and has front line experience with the urgency and complexity of the problems school leaders face today.
Steve is a proud product of the K-12 public school system. He went on to receive a B.A. in political economy from Skidmore College, where he played baseball and was a member of various chamber music groups. He continued on to receive an M.B.A. from Clark University.
Kristin Osborn, Director of Operations
Krissi Osborn runs all Operations and Recruitment for PROACT Search. In her role with the company, she has additionally established an award winning internship program exclusively with Northwestern University. Krissi is an active member in her Chicago community, volunteering as an ESL Tutor in Albany Park, as well as on the executive board for a community outreach group. Krissi graduated from Northwestern with a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and History from the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.Ray and Associates: [2.6MB PDF Presentation]
Gary L. Ray, President
Christine Kingery, Vice-President
William Newman, National Executive Director
Ryan Ray, Corporate Director
Heidi Cordes, Corporate Associate
HeidiAnn Long, Executive Search Assistant
Carrie Gray, Executive Search AssistantNotes, links, audio and video from the 2008 Madison Superintendent Search: Steve Gallon, James McIntyre and Dan Nerad.
Notes and links on Madison Superintendent hires since 1992.
TJ Mertz comments.
Digital Football
Now that the College Board and the Deeper Learning Project have shown us the way to save time and money in the schools by assessing student writing by computer at the rate, as the College Board has reported, of 16,000 samples in 20 seconds, it is surely time to look for new ways to save money and time with exciting new digital technology.
School sports presently take hundreds of hours out of the academic year, not just in matches and games, but in the countless hours of practice demanded, not only out of student time, but of faculty time as well.
Finland has solved this particular problem by having no sports offered in its educational institutions. If students want to play some sport, they can join a club in the community. This saves an enormous amount of time for both students and faculty in the academic calendar year.
Of course, the Finnish approach is out of the question for high schools in the United States for many reasons, but that does not mean that exciting new 21st Century technology cannot make an exciting new contribution.
Here the United States military has shown us the way. Instead of using up oceans of jet fuel, of the sort now needed not only for aircraft but for Abrams tanks as well, much of the student/soldier/airman training time is now spent in computer simulators.
Just think what simulators could do for high school sports! It would still be necessary to put time aside for actual football, basketball, soccer, baseball and other games and matches, but the time now absorbed on the practice fields could perhaps, with the right new software and computers, be transferred to computer simulators for each activity.
The initial cost would be enormous, of course, and great news for the technology companies who now seem so interested in education, and demands on student time might not be diminished that much, but just think of the former coaching time saved for our teachers!
At last they might be able to assign those serious academic research papers they have had to avoid for so long because they simply did not have the time to devote to guide students in writing them.
The great majority of our public high school students now graduate without ever having read a complete nonfiction book or written one serious research paper, and so they continue to go off to further education greatly unprepared for the reading and writing requirements they encounter.
But with these new computer sports simulators, that can be remedied. Teachers will once again have the time, saved for them by the computer simulations, to assign and discuss actual history books and to work with students on their academic expository writing, which has been so sadly neglected because of other demands, such as coaching, that have traditionally been placed on teacher time.
It is very exciting to realize that modern 21st Century technology might be able to do as much good for academic reading and writing as it is apparently doing with the blindingly swift, superficial, and moronic “assessment” it is now employed to offer with those tens of thousands of formulaic meaningless samples of student writing!
www.tcr.org
Kids & Cars
A question asked in numerous stories a week ago was put best in a headline at the Atlantic: “Why Don’t Young Americans Buy Cars?” A year or so ago, of course, the question was why young people don’t read a newspaper; and before that it was something else young people don’t do that we seem to expect them to. While it’s been a great while since I sat inside dealerships to see exactly what the demographical makeup of their buyers was in any given month, it was fairly obvious decades ago that the makeup of car buyers was changing dramatically.
The Atlantic story gave out a few important facts, including that only half of kids 19 or younger now hold a driver’s license, down from “nearly two-thirds in 1998.” Following that statistic the magazine covered CNW Marketing Research’s study, which showed that young adults “between the ages of 21 and 34 buy just 27 percent of all new vehicles sold in America.” And that was down by 11 percentage points from 1985.
The Automotive News, in a similar story, pointed out that in 1983 fully 94 percent of persons in their 20s held a driver’s license as compared to just 84 percent today.y
The Headless Horseman (Teacher-Proof Rides Again)
The high school English department in which I work recently spent a day looking at what is called an “exemplar” from the new Common Core State Standards, and then working together to create our own lessons linked to that curriculum. An exemplar is a prepackaged lesson which is supposed to align with the standards of the Common Core. The one we looked at was a lesson on “The Gettysburg Address.”
The process of implementing the Common Core Standards is under way in districts across the country as almost every state has now signed onto the Common Core, (some of them agreeing to do in hopes of winning Race to the Top money from Washington D.C.). The initiative is intended to ensure that students in all parts of the country are learning from the same supposedly high standards.
As we looked through the exemplar, examined a lesson previously created by some of our colleagues, and then began working on our own Core-related lessons, I was struck by how out of sync the Common Core is with what I consider to be good teaching. I have not yet gotten to the “core” of the Core, but I have scratched the surface, and I am not encouraged.
Here are some of the problems that the group of veteran teachers with whom I was with at the workshop encountered using the exemplar unit on “The Gettysburg Address.”
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Each teacher read individually through the exemplar lesson on Lincoln’s speech. When we began discussing it, we all expressed the same conclusion: Most of it was too scripted. It spelled out what types of questions to ask, what types of questions not to ask, and essentially narrowed any discussion to obvious facts and ideas from the speech.
In some schools, mostly in large urban districts, teachers are forced by school policy to read from scripted lessons, every day in every class. For example, all third-grade teachers do the same exact lessons on the same day and say exactly the same things. (These districts often purchase these curriculum packages from the same companies who make the standardized tests given to students.)
Scripting lessons is based on several false assumptions about teaching. They include:
- That anyone who can read a lesson aloud to a class can teach just as well as experienced teachers;
- That teaching is simply the transference of information from one person to another;
- That students should not be trusted to direct any of their own learning;
- That testing is the best measure of learning.
Put together, this presents a narrow and shallow view of teaching and learning.
Most teachers will tell you that there is a difference between having a plan and having a script. Teachers know that in any lesson there needs to be some wiggle room, some space for discovery and spontaneity. But scripted cookie-cutter lessons aren’t interested in that; the idea is that they will help students learn enough to raise their standardized test scores.
Yet study after study has shown that even intense test preparation does not significantly raise test scores, and often causes stress and boredom in students. Studies have also shown that after a period of time, test scores plateau, and it is useless, even counter-productive educationally, to try to raise test scores beyond that plateau.
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Another problem we found relates to the pedagogical method used in the Gettysburg Address exemplar that the Common Core calls “cold reading.”
This gives students a text they have never seen and asks them to read it with no preliminary introduction. This mimics the conditions of a standardized test on which students are asked to read material they have never seen and answer multiple choice questions about the passage.
Such pedagogy makes school wildly boring. Students are not asked to connect what they read yesterday to what they are reading today, or what they read in English to what they read in science.
The exemplar, in fact, forbids teachers from asking students if they have ever been to a funeral because such questions rely “on individual experience and opinion,” and answering them “will not move students closer to understanding the Gettysburg Address.”
(This is baffling, as if Lincoln delivered the speech in an intellectual vacuum; as if the speech wasn’t delivered at a funeral and meant to be heard in the context of a funeral; as if we must not think about memorials when we read words that memorialize. Rather, it is impossible to have any deep understanding of Lincoln’s speech without thinking about the context of the speech: a memorial service.)
The exemplar instructs teachers to “avoid giving any background context” because the Common Core’s close reading strategy “forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge, and levels the playing field for all.” What sense does this make?
Teachers cannot create such a “level playing field” because we cannot rob any of the students of the background knowledge they already possess. Nor can we force students who have background knowledge not to think about that while they read. A student who has read a biography of Lincoln, or watched documentaries about the Civil War on PBS or the History Channel, will have the “privilege” of background knowledge beyond the control of the teacher. Attempting to create a shallow and false “equality” between students will in no way help any of them understand Lincoln’s speech.
(As a side note, the exemplar does encourage teachers to have students “do the math:” subtract four score and seven from 1863 to arrive at 1776. What is that if not asking them to access background knowledge?)
Asking questions about, for example, the causes of the Civil War, are also forbidden. Why? These questions go “outside the text,” a cardinal sin in Common Core-land.
According to the exemplar, the text of the speech is about equality and self-government, and not about picking sides. It is true that Lincoln did not want to dishonor the memory of the Southern soldiers who fought and died valiantly. But does any rational person read “The Gettysburg Address” and not know that Lincoln desperately believed that the North must win the war? Does anyone think that he could speak about equality without everyone in his audience knowing he was talking about slavery and the causes of the war? How can anyone try to disconnect this profoundly meaningful speech from its historical context and hope to “deeply” understand it in any way, shape, or form?
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Here’s another problem we found with the exemplar: The teacher is instructed in the exemplar to read the speech aloud after the students have read it to themselves; but, it says, “Do not attempt to ‘deliver’ Lincoln’s text as if giving the speech yourself but rather carefully speak Lincoln’s words clearly to the class.”
English teachers love Shakespeare; when we read to our classes from his plays, we do not do so in a dry monotone. I doubt Lincoln delivered his address in as boring a manner as the Common Core exemplar asks. In fact, when I read this instruction, I thought that an interesting lesson could be developed by asking students to deliver the speech themselves and compare different deliveries in terms of emphasis, tone, etc.
The exemplar says, “Listening to the Gettysburg Address is another way to initially acquaint students with Lincoln’s powerful and stirring words.” How, then, if the teacher is not to read it in a powerful and stirring way? The most passionate speech in Romeo and Juliet, delivered poorly by a bad actor, will fall flat despite the author’s skill.
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Several years ago, our district, at the demand of our state education department, hired a consultant to train teachers to develop literacy skills in students. This consultant and his team spent three years conducting workshops and visiting the district. Much of this work was very fruitful, but it does not “align” well with the Common Core.
The consultant encouraged us to help students make connections between what they were reading and their own experience, but as you’ve seen, the Common Core exemplar we studied says not to.
Was all that work with the consultant wasted?
At one point during the workshop, we worked with a lesson previously created by some teachers. It had all the hallmarks of what I consider good teaching, including allowing students to make connections beyond the text.
And when it came time to create our own lessons around the exemplar, three colleagues and I found ourselves using techniques that we know have worked to engage students — not what the exemplar puts forth.
The bottom line: The Common Core exemplar we worked with was intellectually limiting, shallow in scope, and uninteresting. I don’t want my lessons to be any of those things.
Recipe for a revolution in school lunches Healthful offerings like saffron rice, Jerusalem salad and free-range chicken are a low-cost hit with low-income students.
For lunch, Josh Rivera chose a plate of saffron rice, Jerusalem salad and a Greek-marinated kebab of free-range chicken raised without antibiotics.
“Last year I used to get a burger and pizza, but they were really greasy,” the high school sophomore said. “This is a lot tastier than before.”
Lynn Vo, a sophomore who was eating organic fruit salad along with penne in a Bolognese sauce made with grass-fed beef, agreed. “Last year the pasta tasted like sweat,” she said. “But this year it’s really good.”
It’s astonishing enough that notoriously picky high schoolers would have something nice to say about their cafeteria, in this case the one at Niles North High School in Skokie, Ill., just north of Chicago. But these meals containing premium ingredients are provided free to low-income students or sold for $2.25 at most.
The typewriter lives on in India
It’s a stultifying afternoon outside the Delhi District Court as Arun Yadav slides a sheet of paper into his decades-old Remington and revs up his daily 30-word-a-minute tap dance.
Nearby, hundreds of other workers clatter away on manual typewriters amid a sea of broken chairs and wobbly tables as the occasional wildlife thumps on the leaky tin roof above.
“Sometimes the monkeys steal the affidavits,” Yadav said. “That can be a real nuisance.”
The factories that make the machines may be going silent, but India’s typewriter culture remains defiantly alive, fighting on bravely against that omnipresent upstart, the computer. (In fact, if India had its own version of “Mad Men,” with its perfumed typing pools and swaggering execs, it might not be set in the 1960s but the early 1990s, India’s peak typewriter years, when 150,000 machines were sold annually.)
We Can’t Teach Students to Love Reading
While virtually anyone who wants to do so can train his or her brain to the habits of long-form reading, in any given culture, few people will want to. And that’s to be expected. Serious “deep attention” reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit, a fact that has been obscured in the past half-century, especially in the United States, by the dramatic increase in the percentage of the population attending college, and by the idea (only about 150 years old) that modern literature in vernacular languages should be taught at the university level.
At the beginning of the 20th century, perhaps 2 percent of Americans attended a university; now the number is closer to 70 percent (though only about 30 percent get bachelor’s degrees). A particularly sharp acceleration occurred in the years after 1945, when the GI Bill enabled soldiers returning from World War II to attend college for free, thus leading universities across the country to throw up quonset huts for classrooms, and English professors to figure out how to teach 40 students at a time, rather than 11, how to read sonnets. (And those GI’s wanted their children to have the same educational opportunities they had, or better ones.) These changes have had enormous social consequences, but for our purposes here, the one that matters is this: From 1945 to 2000, or thereabouts, far more people than ever before in human history were expected to read, understand, appreciate, and even enjoy books.
Student Loan Debt: What’s the Worst That Could Happen?
As I’ve mentioned before, I graduated from law school over $150,000 in debt. As many of you know, I haven’t exactly paid all of that money back. Not making payments that first year was all my fault. I wanted to get married, didn’t have a credit card, and was using money that should have been going to my loans to finance my wedding.
After that first year, things got a little out of hand. My debt was being sold, the monthly payments were outrageous, and I wasn’t really paying a lot of attention to the situation during the few times when I was both awake and not billing hours. Then I quit my law firm job, hilarity ensued, and I woke up one day with a credit rating below 550.
I’ve been paying the minimum balances to various collection agencies since 2007 or so. Whatever. My hopes for paying it off or owning property pretty much rest on my ability to hit the lotto. Most likely, I’ll die still owing money for law school. And that will be the story of me.
Teachers Swap Recipes
In every school in America, in three-ring binders and file folders, sit lesson plans–the recipes that guide everyday teaching in the classroom. Like the secrets of talented cooks, the instructional plans of the best teachers have much to offer their creators’ colleagues. But while the plans are increasingly digital, they are still not easily shared across classrooms, nor, especially, across districts or states. Even when these plans are accessible, they are often not organized in a way that makes them easy to use, understand, or customize.
Now, a host of new web sites, from A to Z Teacher Stuff to Lesson Planet to Lessonopoly, are trying to solve that problem and make it easier for teachers to share, find, and make better use of lesson plans and accompanying materials. One, TeachersPayTeachers, a sort of Craigslist for educators, says it has paid more than $1 million in commissions to teachers, who have sold everything from classroom hand puppets to lesson plans on the Civil War. The site even hosts a “lesson plan on demand” auction, in which teachers advertise for, say, 4th-grade materials on Texas history and other teachers bid to fulfill the request.
Education Pioneers are creating new ways to promote learning
“Life is difficult.” I read the first line in The Road Less Traveled on my first day off after my first year as a superintendent and thought to myself, “M. Scott Peck should try being a school superintendent.” Peck describes love as, “extending yourself to benefit another.” At that point, I turned the book sideways and wrote “teaching” in big letters in the margin. Helping another person learn is the greatest gift a person can give. Becoming a school teacher is still the best way to give the gift of learning, but there is an expanding array of learning professions where skill and passion can unite to make a difference.
Jay Kimmelman is a serial edupreneur. After graduating from Harvard in 1999, Jay founded Edusoft to bring simple scanning technology to education assessment. The simple step automated data collection at a time when nearly every state was planning to implement standards and assessments. By 2003, EduSoft had achieved revenues of $20 million and Jay sold the company to Houghton Mifflin. That launched a worldwide journey to study the obstacles faced by people living in poverty. Jay spent 18 months studying subsistence farming in a remote Chinese village. In 2007, Jay moved to Kenya and launched Bridge International Academies, an affordable network of schools serving families in the slums of Nairobi for less than $40 per year. Jay built a scalable “school in a box’ model by relentlessly driving down the cost of each component and pushing up the quality. Jay was not trained as an educator, but may do more to improve access to quality education in Africa than anyone in history.
Quest to reform education in Oklahoma leads Barresi into state superintendent’s post
Sixteen years ago, Janet Barresi wanted to find a better middle school for her two sons. Eventually, she landed at the front of Oklahoma’s charter school movement and took up education reform as a full-time job.
Barresi starts Monday as the new state superintendent of schools, succeeding Sandy Garrett.
In the 1990s, Barresi and other parents persuaded the Oklahoma City school board to create a parent-run “enterprise” middle school, which became one of the state’s charter schools after the Legislature authorized them. She eventually started two charter schools and became president of the Oklahoma Association of Charter Schools.
Barresi spent more time on educational issues and sold her dental practice.
War veteran barred from CCBC campus for frank words on killing
After publishing essay on addiction to war, Charles Whittington must obtain psychological evaluation before returning to classes
By writing the paper, Charles Whittington thought he would confront the anxieties that had tormented him since he returned from war.
He knew it wasn’t normal to dwell on the pleasure of sticking his knife between an enemy soldier’s ribs. But by recording his words, maybe he’d begin to purge the fixation.
So Whittington, an Iraq veteran, submitted an essay on the allure of combat for his English class at the Community College of Baltimore County in Catonsville. He called war a drug and wrote that killing “is something that I do not just want but something I really need so I can feel like myself.”
Kaplan University: A For-Profit Take On Education
The Washington Post Co. announced Wednesday that it’s putting Newsweek up for sale. The magazine is losing money, and its paid weekly subscriptions have dropped below 2 million.
But although the Washington Post Co.’s flagship newspaper is also losing money, the company is surprisingly profitable because of a shrewd acquisition it made more than 20 years ago in a growing sector of the economy: for-profit higher education.
What Is Kaplan University?
In 1984, Stanley Kaplan – who pioneered standardized test prep courses — sold his business to The Washington Post Co. In 2000, Kaplan Higher Education bought a company called Quest. One of Quest’s properties was Hagerstown Business College in Hagerstown, Md., which then became Kaplan College and later part of Kaplan University.
“Anything But Knowledge”: “Why Johnny’s Teacher Can’t Teach”
from The Burden of Bad Ideas Heather Mac Donald, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000, pp. 82ff.
America’s nearly last-place finish in the Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study of student achievement caused widespread consternation this February, except in the one place it should have mattered most: the nation’s teacher education schools. Those schools have far more important things to do than worrying about test scores–things like stamping out racism in aspiring teachers. “Let’s be honest,” darkly commanded Professor Valerie Henning-Piedmont to a lecture hall of education students at Columbia University’s Teachers College last February. “What labels do you place on young people based on your biases?” It would be difficult to imagine a less likely group of bigots than these idealistic young people, happily toting around their handbooks of multicultural education and their exposés of sexism in the classroom. But Teachers College knows better. It knows that most of its students, by virtue of being white, are complicitous in an unjust power structure.
The crusade against racism is just the latest irrelevancy to seize the nation’s teacher education schools. For over eighty years, teacher education in America has been in the grip of an immutable dogma, responsible for endless educational nonsense. That dogma may be summed up in the phrase: Anything But Knowledge. Schools are about many things, teacher educators say (depending on the decade)–self-actualization, following one’s joy, social adjustment, or multicultural sensitivity–but the one thing they are not about is knowledge. Oh, sure, educators will occasionally allow the word to pass their lips, but it is always in a compromised position, as in “constructing one’s own knowledge,” or “contextualized knowledge.” Plain old knowledge, the kind passed down in books, the kind for which Faust sold his soul, that is out.
The education profession currently stands ready to tighten its already viselike grip on teacher credentialing, persuading both the federal government and the states to “professionalize” teaching further. In New York, as elsewhere, that means closing off routes to the classroom that do not pass through an education school. But before caving in to the educrats’ pressure, we had better take a hard look at what education schools teach.
The course in “Curriculum and Teaching in Elementary Education” that Professor Anne Nelson (a pseudonym) teaches at the City College of New York is a good place to start. Dressed in a tailored brown suit, and with close-cropped hair, Nelson is a charismatic teacher, with a commanding repertoire of voices and personae. And yet, for all her obvious experience and common sense, her course is a remarkable exercise in vacuousness.
As with most education classes, the title of Professor Nelson’s course doesn’t give a clear sense of what it is about. Unfortunately, Professor Nelson doesn’t either. The semester began, she said in a pre-class interview, by “building a community, rich of talk, in which students look at what they themselves are doing by in-class writing.” On this, the third meeting of the semester, Professor Nelson said that she would be “getting the students to develop the subtext of what they’re doing.” I would soon discover why Professor Nelson was so vague.
“Developing the subtext” turns out to involve a chain reaction of solipsistic moments. After taking attendance and–most admirably–quickly checking the students’ weekly handwriting practice, Professor Nelson begins the main work of the day: generating feather-light “texts,” both written and oral, for immediate group analysis. She asks the students to write for seven minutes on each of three questions; “What excites me about teaching?” “What concerns me about teaching?” and then, the moment that brands this class as hopelessly steeped in the Anything But Knowledge credo: “What was it like to do this writing?”
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate Obama (US Government) Pays More Than Buffett as U.S. Risks AAA Rating
The bond market is saying that it’s safer to lend to Warren Buffett than Barack Obama.
Two-year notes sold by the billionaire’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. in February yield 3.5 basis points less than Treasuries of similar maturity, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Procter & Gamble Co., Johnson & Johnson and Lowe’s Cos. debt also traded at lower yields in recent weeks, a situation former Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. chief fixed-income strategist Jack Malvey calls an “exceedingly rare” event in the history of the bond market.
The $2.59 trillion of Treasury Department sales since the start of 2009 have created a glut as the budget deficit swelled to a post-World War II-record 10 percent of the economy and raised concerns whether the U.S. deserves its AAA credit rating. The increased borrowing may also undermine the first-quarter rally in Treasuries as the economy improves.
“It’s a slap upside the head of the government,” said Mitchell Stapley, the chief fixed-income officer in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at Fifth Third Asset Management, which oversees $22 billion. “It could be the moment where hopefully you realize that risk is beginning to creep into your credit profile and the costs associated with that can be pretty scary.”
Meaningful Academic Work
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
22 March 2010
In Outliers [2008], Malcolm Gladwell writes [p. 149-159] that: “…three things–autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward–are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying…Work that fulfills these three criteria is meaningful.” (emphasis in the original)
One of the perennial complaints of students in our schools is that they will never make use of what they are learning, and as for the work they are asked to do, they often say: “Why do we have to learn/do/put up with this?” In short, they often see the homework/schoolwork they are given to do as not very fulfilling or meaningful.
In this article I will argue that reading good history books and writing serious history research papers provide the sort of work which students do find meaningful, worth doing, and not as hard to imagine as having some future use.
In a June 3, 1990 column in The New York Times, Albert Shanker, President of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote:
“…It is also worth thinking about as we consider how to reform our education system. As we’ve known for a long time, factory workers who never saw the completed product and worked on only a small part of it soon became bored and demoralized, But when they were allowed to see the whole process–or better yet become involved in it–productivity and morale improved. Students are no different. When we chop up the work they do into little bits–history facts and vocabulary and grammar rules to be learned–it’s no wonder that they are bored and disengaged. The achievement of The Concord Review’s authors offers a different model of learning. Maybe it’s time for us to take it seriously.”His point has value twenty years later. Even the current CCSSO National Standards recommend merely snippets of readings, called “informational texts,” and “literacy skills” for our students, which, if that is all they get, will likely bore them and disengage them for the reasons that Mr. Shanker pointed out.
Students who read “little bits” of history books have nothing like the engagement and interest that comes from reading the whole book, just as students who “find the main idea” and write little “personal essays,” or five-paragraph essays, or short “college” essays, will have nothing comparable to the satisfaction that comes from working on and completing a serious history research paper.
Barbara McClay, a homescholar from Tennessee, while she was in high school, wrote a paper on the “Winter War” between Finland and the Soviet Union. In an interview she was asked why she chose that topic:“I’ve been interested in Finland for four years or so, and I had read a book (William Trotter’s A Frozen Hell) that interested me greatly on the Winter War; after reading the book, I often asked people if they had ever heard of the Winter War. To my surprise, not only had few of them heard about it, but their whole impression of Finnish-Soviet relations was almost completely different from the one I had received from the book. So there was a sense of indignation alongside my interest in Finland in general and the Winter War in particular: here was this truly magnificent story, and no one cared about it. Or knew about it, at least.
“And it is a magnificent story, whether anyone cares about it or not; it’s the stuff legends are made of, really, even down to the fact that Finland lost. And a sad one, too, both for Finland and for the Soviet soldiers destroyed by Soviet incompetence. And there’s so much my paper couldn’t even begin to go into; the whole political angle, for instance, which is very interesting, but not really what I wanted to write about. But the story as a whole, with all of its heroes and villains and absurdities–it’s amazing. Even if it were as famous as Thermopylae, and not as relatively obscure an event as it is, it would still be worth writing about.
“So what interested me, really, was the drama, the pathos, the heroism, all from this little ignored country in Northern Europe. What keeps a country fighting against an enemy it has no hope of defeating? What makes us instantly feel a connection with it?”Perhaps this will give a feeling for the degree of engagement a young student can find in reading a good nonfiction history book and writing a serious [8,500-word, plus endnotes and bibliography] history research paper. [The Concord Review, 17/3 Spring 2007]
Now, before I get a lot of messages informing me that our American public high school students, even Seniors, are incapable of reading nonfiction books and writing 8,500 words on any topic, allow me to suggest that, if true, it may be because we need to put in place our “Page Per Year Plan,” which would give students practice, every year in school, in writing about something other than themselves. Thus, a first grader could assemble a one-page paper with one source, a fifth grader a five-page paper with five sources, a ninth grade student a nine-page with nine sources, and so on, and in that way, each and every Senior in our high schools could write a twelve-page paper [or better] with twelve sources [or better] about some historical topic.
By the time that Senior finished that paper, she/he would probably know more about that topic than anyone else in the building, and that would indeed be a source of engagement and satisfaction, in addition to providing great “readiness” for college and career writing tasks.
As one of our authors wrote:…Yet of all my assignments in high school, none has been so academically and intellectually rewarding as my research papers for history. As young mathematicians and scientists, we cannot hope to comprehend any material that approaches the cutting edge. As young literary scholars, we know that our interpretations will almost never be original. But as young historians, we see a scope of inquiry so vast that somewhere, we must be able to find an idea all our own.
In writing this paper, I read almanacs until my head hurt. I read journal articles and books. I thought and debated and analyzed my notes. And finally, I had a synthesis that I could call my own. That experience–extracting a polished, original work from a heap of history–is one without which no student should leave high school.”
This paper [5,500 words with endnotes and bibliography; Daniel Winik, The Concord Review, 12/4 Summer 2002] seems to have allowed this student to take a break from the boredom and disengagement which comes to so many whose school work is broken up into little bits and pieces and “informational texts” rather than actual books and term papers.
If I were made the U.S. Reading and Writing Czar at the Department of Education, I would ask students to read one complete history book [i.e. “cover-to-cover” as it was called back in the day] each year, too. When Jay Mathews of The Washington Post recently called for nonfiction book ideas for high school students, I suggested David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback, for Freshmen, David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing for Sophomores, James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom for Juniors, and David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas for all Seniors. Naturally there could be big fights over titles even if we decided to have our high schools students read nonfiction books, but it would be tragic if the result was that they continue to read none of them. Remember the high school English teacher in New York state who insisted that her students read a nonfiction book chosen from the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, and a big group of her female students chose The Autobiography of Paris Hilton…
When I was teaching United States History to Sophomores at the public high school in Concord, Massachusetts in the 1980s, I used to assign a 5-7-page paper (at the time I did not know what high schools students could actually accomplish, if they were allowed to work hard) on the Presidents. My reasoning was that every President has just about every problem of the day arrive on his desk, and a paper on a President would be a way of learning about the history of that day. Students drew names, and one boy was lucky enough to draw John F. Kennedy, a real coup. He was quite bright, so, on a whim, I gave him my copy of Arthur Schleshinger, Jr.’s A Thousand Days. He looked at it, and said, “I can’t read this.” But, he took it with him and wrote a very good paper and gave the book back to me. Several years later, when he was a Junior at Yale, he wrote to thank me. He said he was very glad I had made him read that first complete history book, because it helped his confidence, etc. Now, I didn’t make him read it, he made himself read it. I would never have known if he read it or not. I didn’t ask him.
But it made me think about the possibility of assigning complete history books to our high school students.
After I began The Concord Review in 1987, I had occasion to write an article now and then, for Education Week and others, in which I argued for the value of having high school students read complete nonfiction books and write real history research papers, both for the intrinsic value of such efforts and for their contribution to the student’s preparation for “college and career.”
Then, in 2004, The National Endowment for the Arts spent $300,000 on a survey of the reading of fiction by Americans, including young Americans. They concluded that it was declining, but it made me wonder if anyone would fund a much smaller study of the reading of nonfiction by students in our high schools, and I wrote a Commentary in Education Week [“Bibliophobia” October 4, 2006] asking about that.
No funding was forthcoming and still no one seems to know (or care much) whether our students typically leave with their high school diploma in hand but never having read a single complete history book. We don’t know how many of our students have never had the chance to make themselves read such a book, so that when they get to college they can be glad they had that preparation, like my old student.
As E.D. Hirsch and Daniel Willingham have pointed out so often, it takes knowledge to enrich understanding and the less knowledge a student has the more difficult it is for her/him to understand what she/he is reading in school. Complete history books are a great source of knowledge, of course, and they naturally provide more background to help our students understand more and more difficult reading material as they are asked to become “college and career ready.”
Reading a complete history book is a challenge for a student who has never read one before, just as writing a history research paper is a challenge to a student who has never been asked to do one, but we might consider why we put off such challenges until students find themselves (more than one million a year now, according to the Diploma to Nowhere report) pushed into remedial courses when they arrive at college.
It may be argued that not every student will respond to such an academic challenge, and of course no student will if never given the challenge, but I have found several thousand high school students, from 44 states and 36 other countries, who did:“Before, I had never been much of a history student, and I did not have much more than a passing interest for the subject. However, as I began writing the paper, the myriad of facts, the entanglement of human relations, and the general excitement of the subject fired my imagination and my mind. Knowing that to submit to The Concord Review, I would have to work towards an extremely high standard, I tried to channel my newly found interest into the paper. I deliberately chose a more fiery, contentious, and generally more engaging style of writing than I was normally used to, so that my paper would better suit my thesis. The draft, however, lacked proper flow and consistency, and so when I wrote the final copy, I restructured the entire paper, reordering the points, writing an entirely new introduction, refining the conclusion, and doing more research to cover areas of the paper that seemed lacking. I replaced almost half of the content with new writing, and managed to focus the thesis into a more sustained, more forceful argument. You received that final result, which was far better than the draft had been.
In the end, working on that history paper, [“Political Machines,” Erich Suh, The Concord Review, 12/4, Summer 2002, 5,800 words] inspired by the high standard set by The Concord Review, reinvigorated my interest not only in history, but also in writing, reading and the rest of the humanities. I am now more confident in my writing ability, and I do not shy from difficult academic challenges. My academic and intellectual life was truly altered by my experience with that paper, and the Review played no small role! Without the Review, I would not have put so much work into the paper. I would not have had the heart to revise so thoroughly; instead I would have altered my paper only slightly, enough to make the final paper a low ‘A’, but nothing very great. Your Concord Review set forth a goal towards which I toiled, and it was a very fulfilling, life-changing experience.”If this is such a great idea, and does so much good for students’ engagement and academic preparation, why don’t we do it? When I was teaching–again, back in the day 26 years ago–I noticed in one classroom a set of Profiles in Courage, and I asked my colleagues about them. They said they had bought the set and handed them out, but the students never read them, so they stopped handing them out.
This is a reminder of the death of the book report. If we do not require our students to read real books and write about them (with consequences for a failure to do so), they will not do that reading and writing, and, as a result, their learning will be diminished, their historical knowledge will be a topic for jokes, and they will not be able to write well enough either to handle college work or hold down a demanding new job.
As teachers and edupundits surrender on those requirements, students suffer. There is a saying outside the training facility for United States Marine Corps drill instructors, which says, in effect, “I will train my recruits with such diligence that if they are killed in combat, it will not be because I failed to prepare them.”
I do realize that college and good jobs are not combat (of course there are now many combat jobs too) but they do provide challenges for which too many of our high school graduates are clearly not ready.
Some teachers complain, with good reason, that they don’t have the time to monitor students as they read books, write book reports and work on serious history research papers, and that is why they can’t ask students to do those essential (and meaningful) tasks. Even after they realize that the great bulk of the time spent on complete nonfiction books and good long term papers is the student’s time, they still have a point about the demands on their time.
Many (with five classes) now do not have the time to guide such work and to assess it carefully for all their students, but I would ask them (and their administrators) to look at the time put aside each week at their high school for tackling and blocking practice in football or layup drills in basketball or for band rehearsal, etc., etc., and I suggest that perhaps reading books and writing serious term papers are worth some extra time as well, and that the administrators of the system, if they have an interest in the competence of our students in reading and writing, should consider making teacher time available during the school day, week, and year, for work on these tasks, which have to be almost as essential as blocking and tackling for our students’ futures.
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“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
A Gangland Bus Tour, With Lunch and a Waiver
Randal Archibold:
The tour organizer received assurances, he says, from four gangs that they would not harass the bus when it passed through their turf. Paying customers must sign releases warning of potential danger. And after careful consideration, it was decided not to have residents shoot water guns at the bus and sell “I Got Shot in South Central” T-shirts.
Borrowing a bit from the Hollywood star tours, the grit of the streets and a dash of hype, LA Gang Tours is making its debut on Saturday, a 12-stop, two-hour journey through what its organizer calls “the history and origin of high-profile gang areas and the top crime-scene locations” of South Los Angeles. By Friday afternoon, the 56-seat coach was nearly sold out.
On the right, Los Angeles’s biggest jail, “the unofficial home to 20,000 gang members in L.A.,” as the tour Web site puts it. Over there, the police station that in 1965 served as the National Guard’s command post in the Watts riots. Visit the large swath of concrete riverbed taken over by graffiti taggers, and later, drop in at a graffiti workshop where, for the right price, a souvenir T-shirt or painting can be yours.
“A Throwback” Review keeps light shining on high school scholars
Adam Sell:
The Concord Review is a one-man outfit run from a cluttered office on Route 20 in Sudbury.
Back issues of the academic journal featuring research by high school history students sit in stacks, and editor Will Fitzhugh keeps his computer in the corner so he can leave even more room for books.
Fitzhugh, 73, has been running the quarterly publication for 22 years in an effort to keep old-fashioned term papers alive and well. He thinks scholarly research at the high school level has declined, and students are arriving at college unprepared.
“I think we’re doing the majority of public high school students a disservice,” said Fitzhugh. “They get to college and are assigned these nonfiction books and term papers, and they flame out. The equivalent is sending kids to college math classes with only fractions and decimals.”
Yet Fitzhugh, who started the journal while on sabbatical from his teaching job in Concord (hence the name), can’t find anybody to take over when he retires. He took no salary from the journal for 14 years, and even now averages only $10,000 a year.
“It’s going to be really hard, there’s no job security. But most people don’t want to work for nothing, and they don’t want to leave the classroom,” Fitzhugh said. “I don’t know how long I can keep going.”
Despite a perpetual lack of funding for his project–Fitzhugh said he’s been turned down by 154 foundations–The Concord Review has persevered.
N.Y. Harbor School Seeks Sea Change In Education
Murray Fisher had a dream: Take the 600 miles of New York City’s coastline and all the water surrounding it, and start a maritime high school that would teach inner-city kids about their watery world — everything from boat building and ocean ecology to oyster growing.
Next year, the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School will open its doors on Governors Island, a tree-covered jewel sold to the Dutch for two axes and a necklace, 800 yards off the coast of Manhattan. But for now, the Harbor School is in Bushwick, in the heart of Brooklyn.
Urban Environment Meets Natural World
At the Harbor School, each student wears a T-shirt emblazoned with the school’s name. Tanks burble with classroom-grown fish.
Brendan Malone teaches maritime technology — his classroom is big enough to build wooden boats in.
Education in America and Britain: Learning Lessons from Private Schools
The right and wrong ways to get more poor youngsters into the world’s great universities
LOTS of rich people and crummy state schools, especially in the big cities where well-off folk tend to live: these common features of America and Britain help explain the prominence in both countries of an elite tier of private schools. Mostly old, some with fat endowments, places like Eton, Harrow and Phillips Exeter have done extraordinarily well. Fees at independent schools have doubled in real terms over the past 25 years and waiting lists have lengthened. Even in the recession, they are proving surprisingly resilient (see article). A few parents are pulling out, but most are soldiering on and plenty more are clamouring to get their children in.
Row, row together
All sorts of class-based conspiracy theories exist to explain the success of such institutions, but the main reason why they thrive in a more meritocratic world is something much more pragmatic: their ability to get people into elite universities. For Britain and America also have the world’s best universities. Look at any of the global rankings and not only do the Ivy League and Oxbridge monopolise the top of the tree, British and (especially) American colleges dominate most of the leading 100 places. This summer graduates will struggle to find jobs, so a degree from a world-famous name like Berkeley or the London School of Economics will be even more valuable than usual. The main asset of the private schools is their reputation for getting children into those good universities.
A Semantic Hijacking”
Charles J. Sykes, Dumbing Down Our Kids
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995, pp. 245-247Ironically, “outcomes” were first raised to prominence by leaders of the conservative educational reform movement of the 1980s. Championed by Chester E. Finn, Jr. among others, reformers argued that the obsession with inputs (dollars spent, books bought, staff hired) focused on the wrong end of the educational pipeline. Reformers insisted that schools could be made more effective and accountable by shifting emphasis to outcomes (what children actually learned). Finn’s emphasis on outcomes was designed explicitly to make schools more accountable by creating specific and verifiable educational objectives in subjects like math, science, history, geography, and English. In retrospect, the intellectual debate over accountability was won by the conservatives. Indeed, conservatives were so successful in advancing their case that the term “outcomes” has become a virtually irresistible tool for academic reform.
The irony is that, in practice, the educational philosophies known as Outcome Based Education have little if anything in common with those original goals. To the contrary, OBE–with its hostility to competition, traditional measures of progress, and to academic disciplines in general–can more accurately be described as part of a counterreformation, a reaction against those attempts to make schools more accountable and effective. The OBE being sold to schools represents, in effect, a semantic hijacking.
“The conservative education reform of the 1980s wanted to focus on outcomes (i.e. knowledge gained) instead of inputs (i.e. dollars spent),” notes former Education Secretary William Bennett. “The aim was to ensure greater accountability. What the education establishment has done is to appropriate the term but change the intent.” [emphasis added] Central to this semantic hijacking is OBE’s shift of outcomes from cognitive knowledge to goals centering on values, beliefs, attitudes, and feelings. As an example of a rigorous cognitive outcome (the sort the original reformers had in mind), Bennett cites the Advanced Placement Examinations, which give students credit for courses based on their knowledge and proficiency in a subject area, rather than on their accumulated “seat-time” in a classroom.
In contrast, OBE programs are less interested in whether students know the origins of the Civil War or the author of The Tempest than whether students have met such outcomes as “establishing priorities to balance multiple life roles” (a goal in Pennsylvania) or “positive self-concept” (a goal in Kentucky). Where the original reformers aimed at accountability, OBE makes it difficult if not impossible to objectively measure and compare educational progress. In large part, this is because instead of clearly stated, verifiable outcomes, OBE goals are often diffuse, fuzzy, and ill-defined–loaded with educationist jargon like “holistic learning,” “whole-child development,” and “interpersonal competencies.”
Where original reformers emphasized schools that work, OBE is experimental. Despite the enthusiasm of educationists and policymakers for OBE, researchers from the University of Minnesota concluded that “research documenting its effects is fairly rare.” At the state level, it was difficult to find any documentation of whether OBE worked or not and the information that was available was largely subjective. Professor Jean King of the University of Minnesota’s College of Education describes support for the implementation of OBE as being “almost like a religion–that you believe in this and if you believe in it hard enough, it will be true.” And finally, where the original reformers saw an emphasis on outcomes as a way to return to educational basics, OBE has become, in Bennett’s words, “a Trojan Horse for social engineering, an elementary and secondary school version of the kind of ‘politically correct’ thinking that has infected our colleges and universities.”
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“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Teenage readers are gravitating toward even grimmer fiction; suicide notes and death matches
Until recently, the young-adult fiction section at your local bookstore was a sea of nubile midriffs set against pink and turquoise backgrounds. Today’s landscape features haunted girls staring out from dark or washed-out covers. Current young-adult best sellers include one suicide, one deadly car wreck, one life-threatening case of anorexia and one dystopian universe in which children fight to the death. Somewhere along the line our teenagers have become connoisseurs of disaster.
Jay Asher’s “Thirteen Reasons Why,” which is narrated by a dead girl, came out in March 2007 and remains on the bestseller list in hardcover. The book is the account of a fragile freshman named Hannah Baker who kills herself by overdosing on pills and sends audiotapes to the 13 people she holds responsible for making her miserable in the last year of her life. There may be parents who are alarmed that their 12-year-olds are reading about suicide, or librarians who want to keep the book off the shelves, but the story is clearly connecting with its audience–the book has sold over 200,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan.
For those young readers who find death by pill overdose inadequately gruesome, there’s Gayle Forman’s “If I Stay,” which takes as its subject a disfiguring car wreck. The book has sold a robust 17,000 copies in its first two months on sale, and was optioned by Catherine Hardwicke, the director of the film “Twilight.” The story follows an appealing cellist named Mia who goes on a drive to a bookstore with her unusually sympathetic ex-punk-rocker parents. When a truck barrels into their Buick, Mia hovers ghost-like over the scene. She sees her family’s bodies crushed, then watches on as her own mangled body is bagged and rushed to the hospital. Lingering somewhere between this world and the next, Mia must decide whether to join her parents in the afterlife or go it alone in the real world. The brilliance of the book is the simplicity with which it captures the fundamental dilemma of adolescence: How does one separate from one’s parents and forge an independent identity?
Get Lit Players bring poetry’s emotions to other L.A. teenagers
For as long as he can remember, Dario Serrano’s life was all screeching tires and echoing gunshots, babies’ cries and barking dogs, a symphony, as he puts it, of “hood rats and gangsters,” of “vatos and payasos” — dudes and numskulls, loosely translated.
By high school, he’d pretty much given up on himself. He bounced around between three schools. He started selling pot, though he always seemed to smoke more than he sold. His GPA fell to 0.67, which is about as bad as you can get and still be showing up.
Literature, it is fair to say, was not resonating. “I mean, ‘The Great Gatsby’?” he says incredulously, and when he puts it like that, Lincoln Heights does feel pretty far from Long Island.
When a friend suggested that poetry might be his thing, Serrano scoffed. Grudgingly, he started tagging along to a poetry club, and one day last year he took his lunch break in a classroom where a teen troupe called Get Lit was holding auditions.
Get Lit’s artistic director, an African American artist named Azure Antoinette, performed an original composition called “Box,” a denunciation of anyone who would define her by the color of her skin, who would lump together, thoughtlessly, faces of color:
February 1994: Now They Call it 21st Century Skills
Charles J. Sykes:
“Dumbing Down Our Kids–What’s Really Wrong With Outcome Based Education”
Charles J. Sykes, Wisconsin Interest, reprinted in Network News & Views 2/94, pp. 9-18
Joan Wittig is not an expert, nor is she an activist. She just didn’t understand why her children weren’t learning to write, spell, or read very well. She didn’t understand why they kept coming home with sloppy papers filled with spelling mistakes and bad grammar and why teachers never corrected them or demanded better work. Nor could she fathom why her child’s fourth-grade teacher would write, “I love your story, especially the spelling,” on a story jammed with misspelled words. (It began: “Once a pona time I visited a tropical rian forist.”)
While Wittig did not have a degree in education, she did have some college-level credits in education and a “background of training others to perform accurately and competently in my numerous job positions, beginning in my high school years.” That experience was enough for her to sense something was wrong. She was not easily brushed off by assurances that her children were being taught “whole language skills.” For two years, she agonized before transferring her children from New Berlin’s public schools to private schools.
After only a semester at the private schools, her children were writing and reading at a markedly higher level. Their papers were neatly written, grammatical, and their spelling was systematically corrected.
Earlier this year, she decided to take her story to her local school board.
Anything but Knowledge
“Why Johnny’s Teacher Can’t Teach” (1998)
from The Burden of Bad Ideas
Heather Mac Donald
Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000, pp. 82ff.
America’s nearly last-place finish in the Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study of student achievement caused widespread consternation this February, except in the one place it should have mattered most: the nation’s teacher education schools. Those schools have far more important things to do than worrying about test scores–things like stamping out racism in aspiring teachers. “Let’s be honest,” darkly commanded Professor Valerie Henning-Piedmont to a lecture hall of education students at Columbia University’s Teachers College last February. “What labels do you place on young people based on your biases?” It would be difficult to imagine a less likely group of bigots than these idealistic young people, happily toting around their handbooks of multicultural education and their exposés of sexism in the classroom. But Teachers College knows better. It knows that most of its students, by virtue of being white, are complicitous in an unjust power structure.
The crusade against racism is just the latest irrelevancy to seize the nation’s teacher education schools. For over eighty years, teacher education in America has been in the grip of an immutable dogma, responsible for endless educational nonsense. That dogma may be summed up in the phrase: Anything But Knowledge. Schools are about many things, teacher educators say (depending on the decade)–self-actualization, following one’s joy, social adjustment, or multicultural sensitivity–but the one thing they are not about is knowledge. Oh, sure, educators will occasionally allow the word to pass their lips, but it is always in a compromised position, as in “constructing one’s own knowledge,” or “contextualized knowledge.” Plain old knowledge, the kind passed down in books, the kind for which Faust sold his soul, that is out.
The education profession currently stands ready to tighten its already viselike grip on teacher credentialing, persuading both the federal government and the states to “professionalize” teaching further. In New York, as elsewhere, that means closing off routes to the classroom that do not pass through an education school. But before caving in to the educrats’ pressure, we had better take a hard look at what education schools teach.
The course in “Curriculum and Teaching in Elementary Education” that Professor Anne Nelson (a pseudonym) teaches at the City College of New York is a good place to start. Dressed in a tailored brown suit, and with close-cropped hair, Nelson is a charismatic teacher, with a commanding repertoire of voices and personae. And yet, for all her obvious experience and common sense, her course is a remarkable exercise in vacuousness.
Plans to reform the Italian school system run into criticism
TALY may be facing recession, but for Siggi, a textile firm near Vicenza in the north-east of the country, 2009 offers the promise of unprecedented growth. Siggi is the biggest producer of grembiuli, or school smocks. Once universal in Italian primary schools, they were becoming as outdated as ink-wells. But in July the education minister, Mariastella Gelmini, backed the reintroduction of grembiuli to combat brand- and class-consciousness among schoolchildren. Siggi’s output this year has almost sold out and its chairman, Gino Marta, says that “next year could see an out-and-out boom.”
The decision on whether pupils should wear the grembiule has been left to head teachers. It does not figure in either of the two education bills that have been introduced by Ms Gelmini. But it has become a symbol of her efforts to shake up Italian education. Her critics argue that these are a vain attempt to turn back the clock; her supporters see them as a necessary first step to a more equitable, efficient system.
On October 30th the opposition she has aroused will culminate in a one-day teachers’ strike. The union’s main complaint is a programme of cuts aimed at saving almost €8 billion ($11 billion). It includes the loss by natural wastage of 87,000 teachers’ jobs over the three academic years to 2012 and the return to a system in which just one teacher is allotted to each year of elementary school.
Wisconsin School districts were told of investments’ risks, firm says
Five Wisconsin school districts suing over investments made two years ago were given “significant disclosure” of what was in those deals and represented themselves as sophisticated investors, an official with a financial institution targeted by the lawsuit said Tuesday.
“We made full disclosure of the merits and the risks associated with these transactions, and we were never guarantors in any fashion of the performance of those investments,” said David DeYoung, senior vice president and managing director of the Wisconsin public finance unit for St. Louis-based Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. Inc.
Stifel acted as no more than a placement agent in the transactions, DeYoung said. In that capacity, the firm connected the five districts to Royal Bank of Canada, which sold them complex financial products as a way to help fund retiree benefits, and DEPFA Bank in Ireland, which lent the districts most of the money to buy the investments, he said.
“We had a very limited role in this,” DeYoung said.
Referendum Climate: Stupid Budget Tricks
STATE governments across the country are reeling from the effects of the current economic downturn. New York, facing a $26.2 billion deficit over the next three years, is particularly hard hit. Like most other states, it is looking to balance its budget mainly by cutting spending.
But if history is a guide, governors and legislators across the country will seek to avoid the difficult choices that are required. Instead, they will likely pass the costs of the services that we enjoy today on to our children and grandchildren, through creatively deceptive budgeting.
This is a time-honored practice. In 1991, the State of New York sold Attica prison to none other than itself. The buyer was a state agency that financed the $200 million purchase price by issuing bonds. The agency then leased the prison back to the state, with the lease payments being equal to the debt service on the bonds.
In substance, of course, the transaction was nothing more than a borrowing arrangement — the equivalent of borrowing $200 million from the buyers of the bonds. Nevertheless, the state booked the entire sale price as revenue for the year. The previous year, the state sold the Cross Westchester Expressway to the New York Thruway Authority — in other words, to itself.
Latest Author Letter……
Mr. William Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776
Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,
I am happy to tell you that I was admitted early action to Yale and will be going there this fall. I also want to thank you again for including my [10,453-word] paper on the Philippine War in the Winter 2007 issue of The Concord Review. I was honored to have my work included among so many impressive pieces.
Writing my essay gave me a chance to learn something not only about a specific historical event, but also about the nature of scholarship. Throughout high school I have been an inquisitive and capable history student, but my papers did little more than synthesize the views of other historians. When I decided to submit a paper to you for consideration, I started from one I had written for my tenth-grade American history class. As I edited the essay, I became motivated to steep myself in primary materials—from soldiers’ accounts to congressional testimony to newspaper articles, many of them conflicting—in an attempt to piece together some sort of orderly narrative from these fragmented and contradictory stories. I then turned to secondary sources, considering the views of different historians, assessing their sources, and always trying to draw my own conclusions.
This process of revision was challenging and exciting. I enjoyed reading the stories and first-person narratives. But I also learned to think more critically, and to draw parallels between past events and the present. In the words of H.G. Wells, “History is a race between education and catastrophe.” Perhaps through careful study of the past, we can glean insight as to how to approach the future.
Even if the Review had not accepted my paper for publication, doing this research and writing would still remain one of the most intellectually rewarding experiences of my high school years. I am deeply honored that you chose to publish it and I thank you again.
Sincerely,
Benjamin Loffredo
Fieldston School
Bronx, New York
Eighth Grade Vocabulary List: 1978
Well worth reading [1.2MB PDF]:
rivulet: A small stream or brook. The ancient rivulet was conducted according to customs that were centuries old. The children enjoyed wading in the rivulet. The manuscript needed only minor rivulets before publication. A pleasant rivulet trickled through the fields.
firth: A narrow inlet or arm of the sea. (A firth may refer to any narrow arm of the sea or more particular to the opening of a river into the sea. Because the coast of Scotland is dotted with so many firths, the word has come to be associated with that country.) The soldier explored the firths that cut into the coastline. The young child was severely reprimanded for having committed the firth. After swimming across the firth, he was completely exhausted. The coast was cut with many narrow firths, which were ideal hideouts for smugglers.Related: Dick Askey: Content Knowledge Examinations for Teachers Past and Present and NAEP writing scores – 2007 along with an article by Alan Borsuk. A Touch of Greatness:
You won’t find ten-year old children reciting Shakespeare soliloquies, acting out the Cuban Missile Crisis or performing Sophocles plays in most American classrooms today. But Albert Cullum’s elementary school students did all this and more. Combining interviews with Cullum and his former students with stunning archival footage filmed by director Robert Downey, Sr., A TOUCH OF GREATNESS documents the extraordinary work of this maverick public school teacher who embraced creativity, motivation and self-esteem in the classroom through the use of poetry, drama and imaginative play.
Regarded by academics as one of the most influential educators of the 1960s and ‘70s, Cullum championed what is, by today’s standards, an unorthodox educational philosophy: the belief that the only way teachers can be successful with children is to speak directly to their hearts and to their instinctive and largely ignored capacity to quickly understand and identify with the great personalities, ideas and emotions found in classical literature. To that end, Cullum regularly taught his elementary school children literary masterpieces, exposed them to great works of art and engaged them in the events of world history. Without leaving the classroom, his students visited King Tut’s tomb, attended joint sessions of the U.S. Congress, operated on “bleeding” nouns in his “grammar hospital,” and clamored to play the timeless roles of Julius Caesar, Lady Macbeth and Hamlet.
When Cullum was an elementary school teacher in the New York City suburbs during the 1960s, his friend Robert Downey helped film several student plays and classroom events. In A TOUCH OF GREATNESS, these lush black and white films, with original music created by Tom O’Horgan, capture the work of this radical teacher and his students’ love of learning.
The Marketing of High School Sports
If you think high school sports are too slick, too big-time, or too professional, just wait. When this Ohio transplant has his way—and he will—they’re going to get slicker, bigger, and much more pro. Stephenson, the former president of Dave Campbell’s Texas Football, founded Titus Sports Marketing in 2003. The company’s first major deal came a year later, when it sold naming rights for the Tyler Independent School District’s stadium to Trinity Mother Frances Health System for $1.92 million, the largest such contract for a high school ever. In September 2007 Titus also put together the Clash of Champions, a game televised on ESPNU between the best high school football team in Florida, Miami Northwestern, and the best in Texas, Southlake Carroll. Northwestern won the game (hyped as “the biggest game in the history of high school football”) 29—21, but the real winner may have been Stephenson.
Where did you get the idea for Titus?
I knew high schools were looking at ways of maximizing revenue. A lot of districts are looking to give their stadiums a face-lift—to add parking, double the concessions and restrooms, redo the field house. High schools are where colleges were fifteen years ago, and there’s a lot of lost advertising revenue because there’s nobody there to capture it. We’re pioneers. We work with the school district; we sell the assets that they direct us to sell.
Van Zandt rolls out plan for rock in schools
WASHINGTON — Steven Van Zandt says rock ‘n’ roll saved his life. Now he wants to return the favor.
The E Street Band guitarist and Sopranos star began sowing the seeds five years ago with the launch of Little Steven’s Underground Garage, an internationally broadcast weekly radio show that celebrates his favorite genre — garage rock, a sound that evokes images of teens practicing in somebody’s parents’ suburban garage.
Last year, he created the non-profit Rock and Roll Forever Foundation as a vehicle to preserve the music that so shaped his life.
Monday, he will unveil the foundation’s first project: a middle- and high-school curriculum designed to introduce a new generation of teens to the music. He planned to make the announcement in the nation’s capital, where he is playing two concerts with Bruce Springsteen and the other E Streeters.
Anyone attending the sold-out Springsteen shows might question the notion that rock ‘n’ roll is endangered. And never mind that The Sopranos skillfully wove rock music into its story line, right down to the last moments of the final episode.
How Do Parents Handle Legal Drugs?
Sarah Viren: A couple weeks back I wrote a story about the drug Salvia divinorum, a legal hallucinogen that is sold over the Internet and at area smoke shops. The DEA and some states are considering banning it, but only a few have (Texas lawmakers tried, but didn’t succeed last session). So far schools say […]
Helping students become ‘responsible citizens’?
Vin Suprynowicz: John Taylor Gatto, honored on several occasions as New York City and New York state teacher of the year, has made it the second part of his life’s work to determine why our government schools are so ineffective — why he always had to fight the bureaucracy above him in order to empower […]
Vang Pao Elementary: Rewriting the Past
Marc Eisen: In the 1970s, Dmitri Yurasov was a precocious Moscow schoolboy obsessed with Russian history. He began reading the imposing 16-volume Soviet Historical Encyclopedia, which put the official Communist Party stamp to the glorious advances of the Lenin and Stalin years. Only when Yurasov came across the odd description of a dead scholar as […]
How can we help poor students achieve more?
Jason Shephard: As a teacher-centered lesson ended the other morning at Midvale Elementary School, about 15 first-graders jumped up from their places on the carpeted rug and dashed to their personal bins of books. Most students quickly settled into two assigned groups. One read a story about a fox in a henhouse with the classroom […]
“No, My Son Doesn’t ‘Act Black.’ There’s No Such Thing.”
This powerful first-person account by Aleta Payne first appeared in the Washington Post earlier this month. It brought tears to my eyes as I read it in our own Cap Times last night. The piece drives home the multifaceted nature of the achievement gap, underscoring the fact that the search for a single solution is […]
A Few More 11/7/2006 Referendum Links
Support Smart Management: Wisconsin State Journal Editorial Board: Taxpayers in the Madison School District should demand that the School Board be smarter about managing the district’s money and resources. On Tuesday’s ballot is a school referendum containing three smart proposals. That’s why the referendum deserves voters’ support. More important than the referendum, however, is what […]
A Cry in the Streets of Brooklyn is Answered by a Prep School
Pete Thamel: In looping printed letters, which looked like the handwriting of a young girl, Thomas wrote a one-page cry for help: “I cannot read or write. I need all you people’s help. Please do not turn your back on me.” Thomas’s note was not that clear, however. Riddled with spelling mistakes, it had clear […]
“Keep Option To Recount Ballots By Hand”
Paul Malischke: Because of Madison’s close School Board election, you may be witnessing the last manual recount of election results in Wisconsin for some time to come. A bill in the Legislature, poised to become law, will outlaw manual recounts for municipalities that use machine-readable ballots. Under current law, the board of canvassers may use […]
Property-Tax Rise Triggers
Ray Smith’s article on the growing property tax backlash is one of many excellent examples of why Ruth Robart’s ongoing efforts to create a more strategic & transparent Madison Schools budget process is vital. The district’s plans for 2005 referendums simply increases the urgency for a well thought out process – rather than throwing hot […]
