"He Is Not Normal"

Full inclusion requires that people actually practice the tolerance they preach:

Walking the Plank

This morning, when J took our boy onto the school yard for morning lineup, he noticed the other kindergartners pointing. He heard them talking about the Rooster as they entered campus. "He is not normal," they said. J held Roo's hand and approached the group, who continued to point and talk animatedly about our boy. "He is not a normal human being," a little girl said, "he spits." Another boy in the throng didn't like my husband telling the kids to back down, telling them to not say that any more. "He is not normal," the boy said, turning his back on my husband and my Roo.

Around 1:15, J called me. He told me what happened, how my son began his Monday morning after our first decent weekend in months. He told me my son did not even react, he simply held firmly to J's hand. "Why did you wait so long to tell me this?" I shouted, looking at the clock, torn between listening further and racing to call the principal before the school day ended. "That was 5 hours ago!" And then my resilient husband's voice broke.

I'm the kind of girl who compulsively asks people, "Are you okay?" I have asked J about a dozen times a day for a decade. It's a reflex; he gives the same honest answer every time except for today. Today he said, "No."

The teachers tell us this: It does not begin with the children. It comes from the parents. Parents who worry that No Child Left Behind means All Kids Left Behind, and think my son will keep their kids from a good education. Parents who know little or nothing about autism. Parents who think inclusion is like a tax they don't want to pay, a charity they don't wish to bestow. Parents who think "those kids" like mine should be in "other" places.

I have to end this post now even though I have so much more to say. I have 20 pirate birthday party invitations to fill out, address, and stuff with treasure maps to our house. I have 20 children to kill with kindness. I have almost 40 parents to think about, long and hard, so I can remember my empathy, my compassion. I have toy eye patches and other booty to buy for a six-year-old Matey who is very much a normal human being, a normal human being who has what is becoming an all too normal challenge: intolerance and discrimination because of his autism.

I have some experience with this kind of intolerance. Schools are not built (but could and should be) to deal with full inclusion. Most parents of autistic kids either get lucky and get a teacher who cares enough to do what's necessary, or end up spending time with their kid in school to make sure things go well. It's a sad commentary on the state of public schools and speaks volumes about how we treat kids generally.

Out Of School Factors

A public comment from Diane's newest at Bridging Differences:

tauna said:

All propaganda has a grain of truth in it, otherwise it would not be so successful. No doubt there are a small minority of incompetent teachers who should not be in the classroom. But molding the perception that bad teachers are the primary reason for the low achievement of poor and minority students is a gross and irresponsible distortion of the truth.

Such a narrative serves to divert national attention away from social and economic policy changes that are desperately needed to help these children. I do not mean to diminish the importance of quality teaching and quality schools. It's part of the needed mix. I believe the number one IN SCHOOL factor affecting academic achievement is the quality of the classroom teacher. It's critical. However, when it comes to factors impacting academic achievement, especially the achievement of our nation's most disadvantaged students, we know that circumstances outside the classroom over which educators have no control dwarf what takes place in the classroom.

Until our nation's leaders stop using our public schools and teachers as the national scapegoat for poverty and societal ills, until social and economic injustices are confronted and ameliorated directly, we will see little change in achieving a more just and equitable society for all of our nation's children. Can we please stop pretending?

Edudaddy pronounces that public education is failing, that this is beyond any doubt. Baloney. That false assumption lies at the very foundation of decades of misguided and destructive education "reforms".

It is quite amazing that America's public schools do as well as they do given decades of unrelenting, multi-pronged attacks, given the wildly unreasonable demands placed upon them, given the unprecedented challenges they face, given that reforms have served to literally manufacture failure and undermine public educatioin rather than strengthen and support it (consider the absurdity of NCLB's AYP requirements)

As Professor Stephen Krashen notes, US schools with few children living in poverty, less than 25 percent, outscore children in nearly all other countries in math and science. American children only score below the international average when 75 percent or more of the students in a school live in poverty. The US has the highest level of childhood poverty of all industrialized countries (25%, compared to Denmark's 2%).

Are incompetent teachers responsible for this?

When it comes to the shameful and hypocrisy-laden national narrative about America's public schools, the guiding principle has been to believe the very worst about them and accept any claim made about them as fact as long as it is bad.

And where has this merciless blame and punish game gotten us? Does the profound disrespect demonstrated toward our nation's teachers serve children well?

But remember, ed reform has been about tearing down, not building up.

Edudaddy, if you accept that public education is failing, consider that it is not teachers nor a well-informed public who have engineered more than twenty years of failed reforms - reforms that have done precious little for poor children while simultaneously undermining public education itself and diverting billions of taxpayer dollars into private hands.

Sunday Cartoon Fun: Accountability Edition

williamyard On Randi Weingarten, Or More Specifically, On American Parents

Randi Weingarten has apparently decided to give in to union busting by acquiescing to the nonsense that is teacher evaluation.  She is now for tying test scores to employment, a supremely stupid idea.  Here is her nonsense, and here are some reactions, as well as here and here.

I think williamyard responds well in this comment to the TNR post linked above:

As I've noted before, discussions about education-system fixes ignore the primary cause for student failure: their parents. One rarely even reads the words "parent" or "parents" in any such discussion. Student achievement is hugely determined before a kid ever walks into an elementary school classroom. Yet for a variety of reasons, parent accountability is rarely discussed.

Education reform needs to start before conception, when a future mother's intake of nutrients and poisons begins to enhance or limit the future brain of a human being who does not yet exist. The reform needs to continue by providing either aggressive preschool availability and standards, successful involvement of parents in early childhood intellectual development, or, ideally, both.

We've come to the place in this country where we think the primary responsibility to educate a child is the society's. It's not. It's the parents', which is one big reason why 30% of our students aren't finishing high school. Unfortunately, reinstating parents' responsibility and authority requires cultural shifts that at this point we seem unwilling to make.

Righting every wrong accrued by bigotry and poverty will do little unless Mom and/or Dad ensures that Junior walks into first grade with a basic respect for his peers, with an understanding of the alphabet, with many evenings of being read to sleep under his belt, with exposure to counting, with exposure to three-dimensional object relationships, with some practice in the hand/eye coordination needed to successfully manipulate a pencil, with exposure to artistic expression (e.g., finger painting, play-doh, beating drums), with the ability to share with peers, with nonviolent behavior, with the ability to practice basic hygiene and personal safety, with regular rest and adequate nutrition, with current vaccinations, with the ability to maintain attention and focus in an environment devoid of electronic stimulation, with hearing and vision tested as adequate and corrected as needed. Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Every parent should be held accountable for every single item on the above list, and more. We do not allow a parent to beat a kid with a baseball bat--that's child abuse. Failing to prepare a child for society is a softer form of abuse, but it is still abuse. Why is this tolerated?

We lack the courage to attack this problem at its core, so instead we play these little games of throwing good money after bad.

Of course williamyard is correct when he says parents need to do their job. I have said this many times, and any sane person realizes that parents have responsibilities and one of those responsibilities is to raise their children to be good, productive citizens. If they can't do it, it's not that someone else can or will--it's that we're fucked if parents don't start parenting.

ED.gov: It's Parents!

The "reformers" like Arne Duncan and Barack Obama would have you believe that schools and teachers are the biggest impediment to student success, right? Then why, on the ED.gov website, in the section for Tools for Student Success, are the vast majority of these tools ideas for parents to do with their children to help them with their education? Could it be that it's parents and families that need to make a stronger effort to help their struggling students? Could it be that those families need the rest of America to deal with poverty in a meaningful way, allowing families the resources they need to be able to help their children?

When the website is structured to meet the needs of students, you know, by making it obvious parents need to do their part, but the words and actions coming from those in charge seem to indicate that parents have little part to play, you know we are in for a rather difficult battle fraught with cognitive dissonance!

Teachers Teach. Students Learn (If They Choose To)

From a NYT article. Students are being asked to attend, and sometimes lead the parent/teacher conference. I don't think I have written much about conferences, but I have always allowed and encouraged my students to attend for exactly the reason this mom mentions in the following statement:

“My daughter is learning that the teacher is not responsible for her learning. Cierra knows that she is responsible for her own success.”

I know some of you are going to find that simple, wrong, or simply wrong, but its very right; teachers do the teaching, students do the learning. To put the responsibility for a student's learning onto the teacher is just backwards. That's of course what NCLB does though; it puts all of the responsibility for student outcomes on someone other than the student. A student takes a test, and a teacher gets graded. Sounds kind of backwards, no?

Kudos to Cierra's mom for raising a child to be responsible for her actions and outcomes. We definitely do not need more folks out there who think they can get bailed out by someone else.

The Achievement Gap: Blame The Parents

When will we address the achievement gap as it relates to, well, reality? Here is a start:

Study Cites Impact of “Low Quality Parenting” on Achievement
by Robert Pondiscio on December 23, 2008

“Low-quality parenting” can determine the ‘school readiness’ of children from low-income backgrounds,” according to a new report from Columbia University professor Jane Waldfogel.

Waldfogel and Elizabeth Washbrook of the University of Bristol in the U.K. analyzed data on 19,000 children born in the UK in 2000 and 10,000 children born in the United States in 2001. The children in both studies were followed from the age of nine months onwards, and completed tests in language, literacy and mathematics skills at ages three, four or five. The authors write:

During the crucial first few years of life, low-income children experience poorer environments in terms of factors that would promote their cognitive, social and health development.They are more likely to begin school with deficits in their learning ability and social behaviour – and, as a result, they progress more slowly than their more affluent peers and achieve fewer educational qualifications, even in circumstances in which schools serve all pupils equally.

The research also shows that “higher-income mothers interact more positively with their children” when they are as young as nine months old, show greater sensitivity to their needs, are less intrusive and provide more cognitive stimulation. These types of behaviors are then strongly related to children’s performance at the time of entry to school, and in particular to language development.

Our research identifies lower quality parenting behaviours as a key factor behind the deficits in school readiness of low-income children in the US. If that is indeed the case, the question naturally arises of what can be done to improve parenting skills in the poorest families.

A BBC report on the study carries the subhed, “Poor parenting is the key factor behind the significant gaps in readiness for school between children from low and middle income families.” It’s a testament to how deeply ingrained the idea that teachers and schools should be able to overcome all deficits that such a headline seems mildly shocking to American eyes.

The study appears in the University of Bristol’s Research in Public Policy; a podcast with Elizabeth Washbrook on the report is available here.

Tenure As Stupid As Parents

Parents For America
by Leo Casey

There is an old, tired trope of the education deformer crowd that fawns over Michelle Rhee like star struck 1960s teeny-boppers swooning at the feet of Paul McCartney: they care about the children, while everybody else [read: teachers and their unions] only care about the adults connected to education. Here is the latest rendition at The Quick and The Ed.

The Rhees and Kleins of the world cared so much about the children that they couldn’t wait to get out of the classroom, and as a consequence learned not a thing about the teaching craft.

Luke Laurie, Santa Barbara County Teacher of the Year in California and a science teacher, had a particularly witty response to this thinking on the listserv of the Teachers’ Network Leadership Institute:

To say that tenure only benefits adults and has no benefit for kids, is like saying that a stable home provides no benefit for children. Why don’t we just go into homes and take out those unqualified parents every few years and replace them with young, smart and motivated “Parents for America” who will raise these kids right?

Michelle Rhee: Self-Important Bitch

This Examiner story shows a couple things: First, that Michelle Rhee seems to realize that parents are a huge (79 pages worth) problem with the education of children, and second, that Ms. Rhee would like all parents to realize that it is the teachers/schools that are the problem. Rhee has 2 faces, the one that knows the truth, the other that wants a job. I hate her. She deserves my hate. She is worse than Hitler (almost!)

DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee proposes teaching parents ‘basic skills’

Mention the name Michelle Rhee in education circles and you will get a very mixed set of emotions. Her less than tactful methods of approaching school reform have brought about a variety of reactions from various members of the educational community.

Many welcome her methods and praise her no-nonsense approach towards ‘reforming’ the DC Public School system. She has affectionately been called "a maverick" and "the Ax" by those who see her methods as bringing about necessary change to the DC School system.

Critics, however, fear that her lack of experience and refusal to collaborate with educational stakeholders – parents, educators, community members - will create even bigger problems for the failing school system.

Most of her zealousness has been aimed at teachers and their unions and people tend to like a good old fashioned teacher-bash; but what happens when she starts to apply "the Ax" towards parents?

Bill Turque at The Washington Post reports that Rhee has presented a 79 page "action plan" which discusses proposals to address important issues in the DC school system. Among the issues discussed are security and discipline policies, more specialized schools and interestingly enough, the creation of a "Parent Academy". Turque reports:

The academy would be created as a part of other community outreach programs and proposes to :teach parents "the full set of basic skills necessary to be a successful participant" in their child's education.

The academy seems to have been proposed in response to the fact that Rhee does not feel that parents quite understand what is best for their children. Turque writes:

The report also addresses at length the issue of parent involvement and is at one point bluntly critical of families for accepting, even supporting, mediocre schools.

"Too many of our students' parents are uninformed consumers of public education who blindly support the District's public schools without full knowledge of the significant deficiencies of the schools," the document says.

Rhee has come under fire lately by some parent groups who feel that the chancellor has been ignoring their input and refusing to include their opinions.

Educators make the claim that Rhee fires individuals who oppose her methods, but what can be done with parents who do not agree?

I guess you can always send them to a "parent academy".

Parental Responsibility

Back To School Night

We had Back to School night Thursday. This is the night when I get to tell the parents of my students how I plan on running my classroom, what my expectations for their children--and them--will be, and answer questions.

My favorite part of my half-hour presentation (off the cuff, of course) is when I tell the parents I do not need them to volunteer in my classroom. I get some strange looks. Then I tell them it's because I was hired to do a job, and if I need their help, I should probably be fired so they can get a competent teacher in the classroom. Then I get even stranger looks. Then I remind them that they do not need me hanging out in their workplace, giving suggestions or volunteering. Then the looks turn to smiles, and the heads start to nod in agreement. It's my classroom (for now) and unless they have a problem with me, they should just let me run it the way I want (go ahead and tell me I'm wrong. But I'm not.)

I am serious about volunteers. The notion of volunteering has morphed into some meme that says "teachers can't do it alone. They need partners, and who better than the parents!", which is false. The partnership between families and schools is like the partnership between patients and doctors. Students (patients) follow the prescriptions of the teacher (doctor) in order to reach a desired goal. Yes, students (patients) must be actively engaged, but not engaged in doing my (or the doctor's) work; they need to be engaged in doing their work, like I am engaged in doing mine.

I find it insulting as a teacher, and scary as a parent, to think that teachers need parents to help. The only thing I need parents to do is raise their kids up right. If you want to donate a plant, or a refrigerator, or some field trip funds, great. Do it. You want to plan a Christmas party, no. This is a school, not your Christian living room.

So, I guess I tricked myself by posting the I Got Nuthin, cuz then I got the preceding!

First Day Back At School

No kids yet, but there are meetings! My favorite meeting today was when the second grade teachers went to listen to our literacy coach tell us about a NEW literacy program from Linda Dorn (of Reading Recovery fame (or infamy)). The new program is really just a list of spelling words that we are supposed to teach for 15 minutes a day. Because 15 is a magic number! No, because the word lists won't work unless they are taught for 15 minutes. No, wait. Maybe the minutes are not consecutive, allowing me to teach the best way I know how, given my class this year and their personalities, and how we interact with one another, and all that other stuff. No, that couldn't be it because that makes sense. I think the minutes are consecutive. I think there is some research to back up the 15 minute thing, but nobody believed it, so it never got published.

Anyway, the meeting included "energizers" that were like little skits we had to get involved in to get us energized (reminded me of those corporate get-togethers when the CEO thinks he can fire up the employees by cheering and putting a company logo t-shirt on over the dress shirt). It was embarrassing. I did not go to 10 years of college to be treated like a child. Maybe teachers should not be principals because they are prone to acting, well, stupid to get kids engaged. When they try to transfer that skill as a principal to teachers, it fails (plus the fact that we are fucking adults and don't respond to that shit, but, don't let common sense get in your way).

I am so NOT excited about coming back this year. We are aligning curriculum start-times within grade levels to do the same curriculum the same hour of the day so that our ULSS (intervention system) can better align with.....WHAT? I can't even follow what the hell we are talking about because it makes no sense! ULSS consists of 2 resource teachers who are supposed to help kids teachers identify as needing a little extra help. How fucking hard is it for me, the teacher, to tell ULSS "Hey, this kid needs help borrowing and carrying in math." They want to pull the kid out during my math time to remediate him. How about we leave him in my class during math, and remove him during, say, social studies, or art, or literacy, or music, or library? Or, how about after school? Or, how about whenever is best in terms of the child's willingness to go? I think there may be an easier way than requiring every class align with every other class in a grade on manufactured, written in stone times when certain curricula will be taught. That just seems a bit too rigid to work with the non-rigid nature of teaching small children. Oh, and it won't work; ULSS is an NCLB district sanction, and the euphemism we teachers use when describing ULSS is USELESS.

So, we were to plan our whole year, and put together a weekly schedule--aligned with each other--in 2 hours. Um, 2 hours you ask? Yes. Two hours for four 2nd grade teachers to talk about how we want our whole year to look, what will be taught from 10-11am, what homework will we be sending home, and the million other things we need to talk about. Except, of course, we could not complete the task. Aligning 4 teachers with one another is going to take more than 2 hours 2 days before school starts.

You want change in public schools? Give the teachers the power, remove principals, spread the extra dough around the faculty as a thank you, and get back to raising your kids. I teach 'em, you raise 'em!

What If There Were No Toys?

Kids used to play. Now they seem to compete with objects bought for them. It is disappointing. Here is a little ditty pointing out how kids morphed from imaginative to needy.

Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills

by Alix Spiegel

Morning Edition, February 21, 2008 ·

On October 3, 1955, the Mickey Mouse Club debuted on television. As we all now know, the show quickly became a cultural icon, one of those phenomena that helped define an era.

What is less remembered but equally, if not more, important, is that another transformative cultural event happened that day: The Mattel toy company began advertising a gun called the "Thunder Burp."

I know — who's ever heard of the Thunder Burp?

Well, no one.

The reason the advertisement is significant is because it marked the first time that any toy company had attempted to peddle merchandise on television outside of the Christmas season. Until 1955, ad budgets at toy companies were minuscule, so the only time they could afford to hawk their wares on TV was during Christmas. But then came Mattel and the Thunder Burp, which, according to Howard Chudacoff, a cultural historian at Brown University, was a kind of historical watershed. Almost overnight, children's play became focused, as never before, on things — the toys themselves.

"It's interesting to me that when we talk about play today, the first thing that comes to mind are toys," says Chudacoff. "Whereas when I would think of play in the 19th century, I would think of activity rather than an object."

Chudacoff's recently published history of child's play argues that for most of human history what children did when they played was roam in packs large or small, more or less unsupervised, and engage in freewheeling imaginative play. They were pirates and princesses, aristocrats and action heroes. Basically, says Chudacoff, they spent most of their time doing what looked like nothing much at all.

"They improvised play, whether it was in the outdoors… or whether it was on a street corner or somebody's back yard," Chudacoff says. "They improvised their own play; they regulated their play; they made up their own rules."

But during the second half of the 20th century, Chudacoff argues, play changed radically. Instead of spending their time in autonomous shifting make-believe, children were supplied with ever more specific toys for play and predetermined scripts. Essentially, instead of playing pirate with a tree branch they played Star Wars with a toy light saber. Chudacoff calls this the commercialization and co-optation of child's play — a trend which begins to shrink the size of children's imaginative space.

But commercialization isn't the only reason imagination comes under siege. In the second half of the 20th century, Chudacoff says, parents became increasingly concerned about safety, and were driven to create play environments that were secure and could not be penetrated by threats of the outside world. Karate classes, gymnastics, summer camps — these create safe environments for children, Chudacoff says. And they also do something more: for middle-class parents increasingly worried about achievement, they offer to enrich a child's mind.

Change in Play, Change in Kids

Clearly the way that children spend their time has changed. Here's the issue: A growing number of psychologists believe that these changes in what children do has also changed kids' cognitive and emotional development.

It turns out that all that time spent playing make-believe actually helped children develop a critical cognitive skill called executive function. Executive function has a number of different elements, but a central one is the ability to self-regulate. Kids with good self-regulation are able to control their emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-control and discipline.

We know that children's capacity for self-regulation has diminished. A recent study replicated a study of self-regulation first done in the late 1940s, in which psychological researchers asked kids ages 3, 5 and 7 to do a number of exercises. One of those exercises included standing perfectly still without moving. The 3-year-olds couldn't stand still at all, the 5-year-olds could do it for about three minutes, and the 7-year-olds could stand pretty much as long as the researchers asked. In 2001, researchers repeated this experiment. But, psychologist Elena Bodrova at Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning says, the results were very different.

"Today's 5-year-olds were acting at the level of 3-year-olds 60 years ago, and today's 7-year-olds were barely approaching the level of a 5-year-old 60 years ago," Bodrova explains. "So the results were very sad."

Sad because self-regulation is incredibly important. Poor executive function is associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime. In fact, good executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child's IQ. Children who are able to manage their feelings and pay attention are better able to learn. As executive function researcher Laura Berk explains, "Self-regulation predicts effective development in virtually every domain."

The Importance of Self-Regulation

According to Berk, one reason make-believe is such a powerful tool for building self-discipline is because during make-believe, children engage in what's called private speech: They talk to themselves about what they are going to do and how they are going to do it.

"In fact, if we compare preschoolers' activities and the amount of private speech that occurs across them, we find that this self-regulating language is highest during make-believe play," Berk says. "And this type of self-regulating language… has been shown in many studies to be predictive of executive functions."

And it's not just children who use private speech to control themselves. If we look at adult use of private speech, Berk says, "we're often using it to surmount obstacles, to master cognitive and social skills, and to manage our emotions."

Unfortunately, the more structured the play, the more children's private speech declines. Essentially, because children's play is so focused on lessons and leagues, and because kids' toys increasingly inhibit imaginative play, kids aren't getting a chance to practice policing themselves. When they have that opportunity, says Berk, the results are clear: Self-regulation improves.

"One index that researchers, including myself, have used… is the extent to which a child, for example, cleans up independently after a free-choice period in preschool," Berk says. "We find that children who are most effective at complex make-believe play take on that responsibility with… greater willingness, and even will assist others in doing so without teacher prompting."

Despite the evidence of the benefits of imaginative play, however, even in the context of preschool young children's play is in decline. According to Yale psychological researcher Dorothy Singer, teachers and school administrators just don't see the value.

"Because of the testing, and the emphasis now that you have to really pass these tests, teachers are starting earlier and earlier to drill the kids in their basic fundamentals. Play is viewed as unnecessary, a waste of time," Singer says. "I have so many articles that have documented the shortening of free play for children, where the teachers in these schools are using the time for cognitive skills."

It seems that in the rush to give children every advantage — to protect them, to stimulate them, to enrich them — our culture has unwittingly compromised one of the activities that helped children most. All that wasted time was not such a waste after all.

(And some suggestions:)

Your Questions on Kids & Play

Organizing play for kids has never seemed like more work. But researchers Adele Diamond and Deborah Leong have good news: The best kind of play costs nothing and really only has one main requirement — imagination.

Here, they answer your questions about play.

Better Ways to Play
Self-regulation is a critical skill for kids. Unfortunately, most kids today spend a lot of time doing three things: watching television, playing video games and taking lessons. None of these activities promote self-regulation.

We asked for alternatives from three researchers: Deborah Leong, professor of psychology at Metropolitan State College of Denver, Elena Bodrova, senior researcher with Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning, and Laura Berk, professor of psychology at Illinois State University.

Here are their suggestions:

Simon Says: Simon Says is a game that requires children to inhibit themselves. You have to think and not do something, which helps to build self-regulation.

Complex Imaginative Play: This is play where your child plans scenarios and enacts those scenarios for a fair amount of time, a half-hour at a minimum, though longer is better. Sustained play that last for hours is best. Realistic props are good for very young children, but otherwise encourage kids to use symbolic props that they create and make through their imaginations. For example, a stick becomes a sword.

Activities That Require Planning: Games with directions, patterns for construction, recipes for cooking, for instance.

Joint Storybook Reading: "Reading storybooks with preschoolers promotes self-regulation, not just because it fosters language development, but because children's stories are filled with characters who model effective self-regulatory strategies," says researcher Laura Berk.

She cites the classic example of Watty Piper's The Little Engine That Could, in which a little blue engine pulling a train of toys and food over a mountain breaks down and must find a way to complete its journey. The engine chants, "I think I can. I think I can. I think I can," and with persistence and effort, surmounts the challenge.

Encourage Children to Talk to Themselves: "Like adults, children spontaneously speak to themselves to guide and manage their own behavior," Berk says. "In fact, children often use self-guiding comments recently picked up from their interactions with adults, signaling that they are beginning to apply those strategies to themselves.

"Permitting and encouraging children to be verbally active — to speak to themselves while engaged in challenging tasks — fosters concentration, effort, problem-solving, and task success." — Alix Spiegel

NCLB: One Parent's View

Inspired, in part, by Jay P. Greene

I'm no NCLB expert. I'm not a professor of education, an education policy wonk or a teacher. I'm just a parent with a kid in a public elementary school that is in Program Improvement status. But I've seen the harm caused by NCLB, and I disagree with Greene's dismissiveness.

In his response to the Ohio principal's letter, Greene says, basically, "What are you worried about? Your school is doing great." Well, my kid's school is not, by NCLB standards. In the 2007 AYP report, my child's school made adequate yearly progress in every category except for the percentage of African-Americans scoring proficient or above in both English and math. (Students with disabilities also scored below the cut-off in English, but not math.) That's bad enough: Let the NCLB sanctions rain down.

Don't get me wrong: I am shocked and appalled by the discrepancies in the performance on these tests between white and African-American students. How can it be that 90+% of white students at my child's school scored proficient or higher in English and 85+% of white students scored proficient or higher in math, while the percentage for African-American students in both subjects hovered around 22%? Even given all the caveats about statistics, testing and scoring, with that large a gap, there must be something going on. And the gap does seem to be at least partially a racial, rather than socio-economic, one: a significantly greater percentage of socioeconomically disadvantaged students than African-Americans were scored proficient or above in both tests.

I give credit to NCLB for raising awareness (at least mine) of what seems to be an extreme racial disparity in, at least, test performance. But NCLB, with its extremely and increasingly stringent requirements and its package of sanctions, is not the answer.

On his blog, Mr. Greene says that NCLB sanctions are non-existent, and there are no real consequences for "failing" schools. That's bullshit. Or if it's not, NCLB is not being implemented the way it was intended to be: sanctions and "corrective action" are an integral part of the thing.

My kid's school, and school district, have not yet had the more serious sanctions kick in . . . yet. But I see the detrimental effects of NCLB nonetheless. It's had what we in the law might call a "chilling effect."

I've seen an explicit decision to focus educational efforts on the students who have scored just below proficient in hopes of bringing these students across the line. This strategy makes some sense, if your driving goal is to avoid further condemnation under NCLB. And given the structure and demands of NCLB, I'd have to say that this would not be an irrational choice -- sacrifice those at the bottom and the top for the greater good of getting out of Program Improvement status. If you want to educate all the kids in your school and district, however -- including those way below proficient and those well above it -- it's a very cold-blooded (at best) approach that runs counter to the public-school mission of educating all children.

I've seen heavy-handed pressure from the district on the school to use certain programs and enforce teachers' use of certain programs. I've seen a sort of administrative floundering about to find the magic bullet. A waste of time, energy and money in a district and school that don't have enough to spare of any of those.

I've seen parents who might have been interested in sending their kids to public school instead choose private school because they fear "teaching to the test." This is not what goes on at my school, as far as I have seen. But the perception is there, and I believe it has had a real effect. Maybe driving people away from public schools is what the NCLB supporters really want; I don't know. But parents who care about whether teachers at a school are or are not "teaching to the test" tend to be the kind of parents who care about and get involved in their children's education, the kind of parents that public schools really need. If just the specter of NCLB is driving them away from public school, it's done plenty of harm, in my view.

If not NCLB, then what? Tft's already done this routine: fix poverty, fix parents, fix society, pay teachers a lot more money. A few tests, a new curriculum or two and an annual shaming of the "failing" schools ain't gonna cut it.

And with that, I'm on vacation, too.

Shakesville: Most Hypocritical Site Ever? Updated!

(This is a re post of the other one. The comments are gone, though it was only 2 of us. I will try to recover them. Shouldn't blog with the kids.)comment recovered

Over at Shakesville they are ripping a movie promo about father's rights. Now, admittedly, the trailer is awful. The acting is bad, there's too much gratuitous sex and violence, and the whole thing just looks bad.

The problem, though, is not with the trailer. It is the non-nonchalance with which The Sister herself trivializes the very real problem facing parents who enter family court; especially stand-up fathers. Here is McEwan:

A word of warning to anyone considering the old "my cousin's best friend's brother's wife is a crazy bitch who won't let him see his kid and he's honestly a good guy I swear and his kid is dying to see him but she's totally a crazy bitch and did I mention she's a crazy bitch?" routine: Great. Good for him and shame on her, if it's true [emphasis mine].

Remember the shit Hillary got when she said Obama was not a Muslim, as far as she knew?
Well, here we have McEwan doing the same thing to good fathers. According to her post, McEwan seems to think the notion of a good father is nearly impossible; so nearly impossible that anyone claiming to know a good father (who is also the victim of a bat-shit crazy female partner) should be derided, blown-off, and doubted.

I have had the pleasure of commenting on the blog over there, and let me tell you, that is one intolerant community. I check them out weekly, and usually find something interesting. This one today though, struck a cord. Probably because I am one of those men who had to fight for every second I got with my son, who now lives mostly with me (not because his mom is a crazy bitch, but because the judge realized that my son deserved BOTH parents, and due to our schedules, that's how it worked out--which should be the default setting for conciliation/family courts, but it's not).

The courts are not family friendly. They deal with the worst of society, and that is how they are set up to run. The courts make assumptions about the population it serves, and, apparently, it serves a population of crappy fathers. The only problem is, we are not all crappy fathers. In fact, some of us good fathers, whose children have good mothers, are frequently sold short in court by requiring we pay for all attorney's fees (because we are men?), pay for a long-cause hearing, pay for psychological evaluations (to rule out "?") and be happy with visitation. VISITATION? You want me to VISIT my child?

Look shakers, you have your niche where you point out every misogynist, sexist, ...ist thing you can find. Great. How about you do a little digging into this father's rights thing and see, if just maybe, we are not all trying to get custody of our children so we can beat them. Douchebags!

(Maybe The Frustrated Lawyer will chime in?)

UPDATE: Here is what I think is a comment representative of Shakesville. It is from the thread about the above mentioned item:

Molly, NYC
" . . . she's totally a crazy bitch and did I mention she's a crazy bitch?" routine: Great. Good for him and shame on her, if it's true.

Rule of thumb: In any he-said-she-said argument, unless she's clearly in the aluminum-foil-hat brigade, if he starts impugning her sanity, he's lying through his teeth.

Then came a levelheaded comment that was met with derision:

closette
Bad acting, bad script from what I can tell, and I've no idea who the intended audience is meant to be (unless they're imprisoned in some kind of right-wing Christian compound and not allowed outside).

But it doesn't mean that there is no systemic bias against fathers in Family Court, unless you really believe that MOST fathers are undeserving of more than a few days a month with their children. Yes, that is the norm (otherwise why caution against too many anecdotes?). Also you'll find a selection effect in groups - more women screwed over among feminists, and more men screwed over among MRAs. No surprise there.

Conversely, the few cases where a real (i.e. not just alleged) 'bad dad" gets custody seem to be anomalies due to the system's incompetence, nepotism and cronyism. All the same, they are signs that the whole system needs to be reformed way from perpetuating itself by its "winner takes all" approach.

By the way, I suspect that its balding male judges, not "feminists", who are hardest on fathers, combining a toxic mix of political correctness and good old-fashioned chivalry to "help the [helpless, childlike] woman". It will be interesting to see how they handle lesbian custody battles in the future.

But Starfoxy couldn't agree with such sense-making gibberish:

Starfoxy

But it doesn't mean that there is no systemic bias against fathers in Family Court, unless you really believe that MOST fathers are undeserving of more than a few days a month with their children.

This assumes that custody is awarded based on what the parents 'deserve' which isn't and should not be the case. Custody should be awarded in ways that best meet the needs of the kids, and in a divorce kids do best with continuity. That means that if mom was doing 90% of the caregiving then she should get [emphasis mine] 90% of the custody because that is what the kid is used to. This is true even if dad is a great guy and totally deserves to spend time with his kids. If fathers want to spend time with their kids after a divorce then they should start the habit before a divorce.

Notice how Starfoxy phrases that; its as if there is some sort of competition, and therefore some handicapping should come into play, regardless of anything outside the time-I-spent-as-opposed-to-the-time-you-spent giving care. That is the only measure. Giving care. Dare I say how do we define that? I wonder how long it will take to bring up breast feeding? Lawn mowing? Money earning? Dish washing? Driving to school? Shall I go on? I think Starfoxy's rubric is a bit nebulous.

Kids deserve their parents. Up until a few years ago in California the law was such that a custodial parent could move to Timbuktu. They changed that and now the custodial parent has to do what the court says is in the best interest of the child. I think it changed in 2004, not sure though. But at least the court recognized that kids deserve their parents, and one parent could not do whatever he/she wants just because there is a custody arrangement. These arrangements are made for myriad reasons, having nothing to do with abuse, or neglect, or not giving the right/equitable amount of care in someone else's eyes. The court now assumes both parents, as opposed to assuming only the mother, will participate in the raising and care giving of their child. Over at Shakesville, they are of the mind that fathers suck, and probably wish the court had not set a new precedent a few years back. Well, my son just asked for dessert, and I don't have any. What do I do?

Here's hoping we get over our stereotypes!

Stephen Colbert Pussed Out On Spellings (updated)

Margaret Spellings, the Secretary of Education, and NCLB proponent went on The Colbert Report last night. Stephen, to his credit, asked about sanctions, but his follow-up was a bit lacking.

[this section updated to reflect the fact that prior to update it was a jumbled mess]Spellings said they shouldn't be called sanctions since what they do is help schools be accountable by giving them help! Schools are accountable to whom?-accountable to parents. Parents apparently are not accountable for the education of their children; teachers are. So, it would follow that: patients are not accountable; doctors are. Criminals are not accountable; lawyers are. Congress is not accountable; THE PEOPLE ARE!!!!!!!!

Accountability is something every citizen has. No-one is allowed to blame someone else if one has not taken action one's self to try to ameliorate the offending situation. If your kid ain't learnin', you try help the little fella. Maybe you need to do some learnin' in order to help, so, get on that. Don't expect someone else--a doctor, teacher, politician, lawyer--to fix your shit. Fix your own shit, then you can start to ask for assistance in fixing the shit that you cannot fix on your own. But please, don't expect anyone to fix your shit while you drink a beer.

Read my thoughts on a certain sanction: http://www.thefrustratedteacher.blogspot.com/2008/05/curriculum-of-sanction-lucy-calkins.html