In Berkeley We Don't Tell Kids "No"

When teachers of very young children say that one should never use "no" but instead redirect, I can't help but disagree adamantly. The 2 ideas are not mutually exclusive. A no can coexist with a redirection.

Young children can't understand that being told 'it's okay to pour sand' is supposed to mean 'don't throw sand'. We do them a disservice when we omit comment on the behavior we want to see them change. We confuse them when we blindly adhere to the Berkeley-hippie mode of parenting/teaching. Kids are much smarter than adults--they see through bullshit because they are not as polluted with PC crap as we are, especially the Berkeley-hippie-Volvo-Chez Panise set who fancy themselves the most enlightened and tolerant of city dwellers. No, you live in a tiny town where the rich live on one side of MLK and the rest on the other--like every other small college town. Get over yourselves.

Yes, I was recently somewhere in Berkeley where I witnessed this kind of pedagogy. The teachers seemed unable to tell a kid NOT to do something, be it climbing on the bookshelf, biting, pushing, grabbing, running inside, sand-throwing, water splashing or anything else that could prove dangerous or annoying to someone else.

I watched a teacher put a plugged-in toaster on a kid table with kids fresh from hand-washing, and then walk away. I sat there until she came back.

I watched the "biter" get shoved off a toy car by a child. I then watched the head teacher blame the biter for biting, and never said word one to the shover. That seemed to me to be terrible pedagogy. I don't advocate biting, but I don't advocate ignoring shovers either. Both little kids needed some talking to.

I am pretty sure parents have no idea about some of the stuff I saw, nor does the boss. Or, they are so Berkeleyed out that they can't seem to muster the integrity to do the right thing for the kids, and instead make the parents and each other happy by basically ignoring bad behavior. Nobody wants to make waves. Well, make some. Life isn't easy or smooth, and acting like it is seems counterproductive.

These kids are destined to grow up to be selfish Berkeley hippies, who are not actually hippies at all.

I have an old friend who called me a hippie Republican. Not because I was a Republican (I never was. Still aren't), but because I didn't adhere to the Berkeley-hippie mode of acting like there is nothing bad my child can do, but yours is a dick. Nor did I put up with the PC niceness that precludes actual dialog about difficult issues. No, I was a bit confrontational about the things I considered to be important and ignored due to political correctness.

I allow people to be who they are, not demand that they be who I wish them to be. Maybe there are just lots of damaged Berkeley folks who refuse to say a harsh or negative or authoritative word to a child because their parents sucked, or something. But, the Berkeley voters will put speed bumps everywhere and cut off access to streets all to keep out the riff-raff they are so tolerant of--as long as they can't be seen.

And the above is America's problem too. I mean, the grown ups in America are just too focused on how they feel, and not how others feel, or what might be right or wrong regardless of how some feel. We have turned into a nation of sniveling pussies, afraid to speak out, speak up, or fight for what is right. We only care about us and ours, not you and yours. And if our job is on the line--especially teachers who are taking the brunt of American vitriol these days--we will never say no to your precious! It makes me sad, and a little sick.

Well, I don't live that way. I work with kids and do what is right, not what pleases parents or lazy teachers. The lack of tolerance shown by these people is astounding. Their kid is perfect, and the little biters and shovers suck. But the teachers must never say no. Only positive words. Oh, and most of the books have been degenderized; the head teacher, I think, changed gendered pronouns in all the little books. And, Old McDonald is now a woman.

Look, Berkeley, you're not as tolerant as you think. Nor are you very accepting. You live in a bubble. Tell the biter to stop fucking biting, just don't call him "bad" for doing it. He's young. He needs your attention, not your vitriol and your milquetoast nonsense about no negatives--you're confusing the guy.

Oh, he can tell you're shadowing him, too. And he's 2.

By the way, in a conversation with the head teacher he told me that the room is bereft of color and pictures and posters and alphabets and number charts and other stuff for the walls because they have an "emergent curriculum" they use. I asked about it. It emerges from the kids, he said. I asked how he could get things to emerge without stimuli and direction or illumination. He looked at me sideways as if to say, "it emerges from the kids."

Perhaps. But nope. Teachers must provide the stimulation for things (ideas, thoughts, desires) to emerge. Very little emerges from a vacuum.

And this school is considered among the best. Folks have no idea what good or bad even are anymore.

Dave Russell On Students First, Remediation, And Textbooks

(Very slightly edited for clarity--it was just a comment at SF's Facebook page)

Dave Russell

Yesterday I was at a training for a "Response to Intervention" program for fractions. The program was full of animation and audible dialog and multiple representations and was built using the latest research and pedagogy about how kids learn fractions. It is all the stuff that research and best practices/lesson study advocates for. Honestly, I was pretty impressed.

Thinking about it later, I couldn't help but feel defeated knowing that this excellent tool existed, but is only being sold for remediation purposes. The truth, as I see it, is that the program would make an excellent curriculum component. If all kids, especially the youngest learners for whom fractions are new were taught using the program, more kids would have a solid conceptual and procedural understanding of fractions. Instead, kids are exposed to dry factoid textbooks that historically prove to have little success at reaching kids.

If it were truly about the kids and not about the profit, the resources and clever teaching tools that are now reserved for the high profit world of remediation would be instead infused into the mainstream curricula.

Reform efforts need to address the built in ineptitude of the textbooks that are created by publishers who then turn around and offer highly effective remedial programs for a few hundred dollars per child.

I continue to attest that, by and large, the classroom teacher does the best they can with the tools they are given. The tools don't work but, surprisingly, the remediation product from the same publisher does. Teacher evaluation under these circumstances is dead wrong and continuing on this StudentFirst path of only holding teachers accountable without addressing the issue of lousy curriculum/effective remediation is scapegoating teachers for a situation they have no control over and likely cant win in.

Techno-Chem

I am a big fan of appropriate pedagogy:

What China Wants Is What America Is Eager To Throw Away

Zhao’s book, due out in late September and published by ASCD, is called “Catching Up or Leading the Way: The Future of American Education.” He acknowledges his thesis is “diametrically opposed to the more popular view of what American education should be like in the 21st century.”

“Right now we seem to be stuck with the idea of standards as the panacea to fix all of America’s education problems,” said Zhao, University Distinguished Professor of education. “I don’t deny that the U.S. education system has problems, but I don’t feel the problems can be solved by standards and high-stakes testing. Rather, standards and high-stakes testing run the risk of ruining the advantages and great tradition of the system.”

Ironically, Zhao set out to write a book about the “repeated failures” of testing and standardization in his native China. But while Chinese officials are trying to “undo the damages” of that system, the Obama administration seems inclined to continue the limited standards-focused policy established by George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, Zhao said.

“I realized that what China wants is what America is eager to throw away,” Zhao writes in the book’s preface.

h/t Schools Matter

Mike Rose On Education "Miracles": They Don't Exist

Mike Rose is always smooth, kind, and level-headed. I think even he is nearing his wits' end with the reformers and their shallow fix-alls that are actually degrading education, not reforming it.

Of Classrooms and Miracles

Despite a childhood of incantations and incense, of holy cards and stories of crutches being tossed, I don’t believe in miracles. So it is with a mix of sadness and exasperation that I’ve witnessed a language of miracles – along with a search for academic cure-alls and magic bullets – infuse our educational discourse and policy.

We started off the new century with the Texas Miracle, the phenomenal closing of the achievement gap and reduction of dropout rates through a program of high-stakes standardized tests. (The Texas Miracle would then spawn the federal No Child Left Behind Act.) Politicians and media-savvy administrators have also found the miraculous; the governor of my state, Arnold Schwarzenegger, referred to an Oakland charter school as an “education miracle.” And the pundits have appropriated the lingo. A recent New York Times column by David Brooks on the charter school of the Harlem Children’s Zone was titled “The Harlem Miracle.” And so it goes.

Upon closer examination, some of these miracles turn out to be suspect, the result of questionable assessments and manipulated numbers. The Texas Miracle didn’t hold up under scrutiny. And some, like the Harlem Children’s Zone – which is a commendable place – gain their excellence through hard work along multiple dimensions, from teaching and mentoring to utilizing outside resources and fundraising. There’s nothing miraculous about their success. (See Diane Ravitch’s May 12, 2009 entry in “Bridging Differences” for more on this.)

Along with talk of miracles, we have the belief in educational wonder drugs and magic bullets: single-shot solutions to complicated problems: high-stakes testing standards, charter schools, small schools, alternative teacher recruitment, slash and burn CEO management, etc. Each of these solutions has potential merit. Standards can bring coherence to a curriculum; small schools can result in increased student contact; alternative recruitment and credentialing bring new blood into the teaching force; some districts need the serious administrative shake-up that managerial house-cleaning can provide. All good. But for these efforts to work, to increase the quality of education, other factors have to be present as well.

The structural change that leads to the small school needs to be accompanied by a robust philosophy of education, a set of beliefs about ability, learning, knowledge, and the purpose of education. As well, you’ll need a decent teaching force with opportunity built in for ongoing development. And what about curriculum? Or a set of ideas on how to connect school with community? The structural move of creating the small school may be central in all this, truly important, but, at its best, it will be a necessary but not sufficient condition for educational renewal. As Debbie Meier once said, you can have crappy small schools too.

Research on charter schools demonstrates the kind of variability you’d expect if you don’t believe in miracle cures: some charters are terrific, some are average and some are awful. The same set of issues I raise for small schools applies here: what you do within the new school structure matters immensely.

The kick-ass-and-take-names managerial clean-up that we’ve seen in places like Washington, DC and New Orleans has indeed disrupted the status quo, and I’ll leave it to those who know those districts well to judge the legitimacy of the shake-up. But what interests me is what happens once the new broom sweeps clean. Then the same weighty questions emerge, questions involving curriculum, teacher quality and development, remediation, school-community connections, etc. To address these crucial issues, the school manager will need knowledge of human development, of teaching and learning, of the wisdom of the classroom. Because few of the new CEO types possess such knowledge – might even consider it less important than structural changes – you have the rush to the magic bullet.

Let me consider one more magic bullet, since recently it’s been making its way through opinion pages and commentaries: alternative teacher recruitment, most notably Teach for America. (See, for example, Thomas Friedman’s April 22, 2009 New York Times column or the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer for July 7, 2009.)

I admire Teach for America and the public service spirit that drives its recruits. In the early 90s, I met with founder Wendy Kopp, participated in TFA summer training in Los Angeles, and I’ve taught students who have gone into the program or came out of it. And my own introduction to education came via an earlier alternative program, The Teacher Corps. So my concern is not with Teach for America itself but with the way it has been defined as yet another wonder drug, the ingredients of which are the idealistic energy of youth and an elite education. Sadly, Teach for America has become a weapon in the education wars, rather than a laudable vehicle through which young people can contribute to the education of a nation.

I’m all for idealistic, hardworking enthusiasm, and I welcome into the nation’s classrooms these graduates of fine schools. But most of them teach for two years (and possibly a third) and then move on to the careers they went to college to pursue.

I’m troubled by two more issues related to the magic bullet discourse here. First, many who champion TFA seem to affirm an idiosyncratic model of professional development: that these young people’s elite undergraduate educations and their energy trumps extended training and experience. There is no other kind of work, from styling hair to surgery to the pro football defensive backfield where experience is so discounted. No TFA booster, I’d wager, would choose a med student fresh out of a cardiology rotation over a cardiologist who has been in practice for fifteen years.

I also want to consider the assumptions about knowledge and teaching here – or more precisely the use of the status of one’s undergraduate institution as a proxy for being able to teach what one knows. Knowing history or chemistry or literature is essential to teach these subjects, but – again this is common sense – knowing something does not mean you are able to teach it…as countless undergraduates who have sat through bad lectures can verify.

Let’s consider this elite school proxy for expertise in teaching from one more perspective. I went through my Possible Lives and Karin Chenowith’s new How It’s Being Done, both of which contain a number of first-rate teachers. I also looked at the Council of Chief State School Officer’s National Teacher of the Year Program. Only a handful of these top-flight teachers got their bachelors degrees from institutions typically defined as elite. A number hail from state universities. And a considerable number come from small, local colleges with teacher education programs. Expertise in teaching is more than a function of one’s undergraduate pedigree.

What miracle talk and magic-bullet solutions share is the reduction of complexity, of the many levels of hard, creative work necessary to make schooling successful in the United States.

More so than many other domains of public policy, education is bedeviled by a binary polemics, a tendency to define an issue in either/or terms and then wage a pitched battle over the (exaggerated) differences. So we have the math wars, the whole language versus phonics explosion, the knowledge versus process clash, and so on. These are fierce battles in which each side reduces the other’s argument – often to the point of caricature – and then assails it.

The miracle/magic bullet discourse plays right into this state of affairs, both emerges from and contributes to it. Part of believing in this single-shot causality requires a simplification of difficult issues and a dismissal of other possible variables and remedies. If you have the single truth, then everything else is a target.

There’s one more concern, and that has to do with failure. What happens when the miracle fades, when the magic bullet doesn’t cure the disease? For some who are ideologically inclined there is despair, a throwing up of the hands and retreat to the dismissal of public education that we’ve witnessed over the past two or three decades.

I propose that we leave the holy cards at the schoolhouse door, that we admit that educational excellence is achieved through dedicated effort along multiple dimensions – structural, curricular, and pedagogical – and that we call a moratorium to the demonizing either/or polemics that create more heat than light. Unfortunately, that moratorium would probably require a miracle – but it’s one I’m ready to pray for.

Richard Feynman: Be Confusing!

He was a genius and Nobel Laureate as well as a bongo player and wildman. But fundamentally he was a teacher; yes, he was a perpetual student, but being so smart he had to teach himself much of what he learned, making him a teacher, mkay?

This video is a glimpse into his pedagogy, though I don't think that was the film's purpose. Feynman is so all-over-the-place in terms of curiosity that his pedagogy just slips out.

I find his notion of confusion as classroom practice refreshing, and right.

He's a joy to listen to, even for an hour!