Fact: Chris Christie "failed to carry [his] burden."

New Jersey Superior Court judge Peter Doyne (acting as an appointed special master) issued his report on how the Christie $1 billion budget cut will hurt the most at-risk students.

"The difficulty in addressing New Jersey's fiscal crisis and its constitutionally mandated obligation to educate our children requires an exquisite balance not easily attained," wrote Doyne, according to the Star-Ledger. "Something need be done to equitably address these competing imperatives. That answer, though, is beyond the purview of this report. For the limited question posed to the Master, it is clear the State has failed to carry its burden."

HuffPo

"Despite spending levels that meet or exceed virtually every state in the country, and that saw a significant increase in spending levels from 2000 to 2008, our 'at risk' children are now moving further from proficiency," he said.

NJ.com

It Gets Better (Or, F*ck Those Guys!)

How Do I Get To School If Mom's In Jail?

I am not sure how good an idea this is:

California may jail parents if kids are truant

Talk about parental responsibility. The California Senate just passed a bill that could send parents to jail for up to a year if their kids -- from kindergarten through eighth grade -- miss too much school.

Senate Bill 1317 is actually a public safety measure, according to State Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), because children who don’t attend school regularly or drop out early are more likely to turn to crime.

"Three-quarters of our state inmate population are high school dropouts," Leno was quoted as saying by the Fresno Bee.

According to the Associated Press, parents whose kids miss too much school could be subject to up to a year in jail and a $2,000 fine, though judges could put the punishment on hold to give parents a chance to get their kids to class.

The Fresno Bee reported that the bill would apply to parents or guardians of children age 6 or older in kindergarten through eighth grade.

The rest at the link.

Oakland Education Association Scaring Parents For Profit

I am not a teacher basher, or a union basher. I am a teacher and a union member!

But Oakland, California's union, the OEA, has put out a letter to parents regarding a one-day strike that teachers hope will bring about negotiations that were ended when the school board decided to impose a contract on the teachers, as districts are allowed to do under certain circumstances.

The letter, below, starts out fine. It's the last paragraph. Go read it...

Strike Letter to Parents 0410 _1

So, what do you think? They are using fear. They are claiming that the substitutes are ill-prepared, or worse. And it's all implicit, nothing concrete. Just be afraid of the grownups in the school, they might hurt/neglect/abuse/whatever your kid.

There is a thread going on at The Education Report, a local blog by a local reporter. I made some comments there, and folks responded.

I think the letter is outrageous and they should be ashamed of themselves and retract it. What do you all think?

"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.

Good Schools Have Good Art Programs

Arts Education and Graduation Rates
Compiled by RACHEL LEE HARRIS

In a report to be released on Monday the nonprofit Center for Arts Education found that New York City high schools with the highest graduation rates also offered students the most access to arts education. The report, which analyzed data collected by the city’s Education Department from more than 200 schools over two years, reported that schools ranked in the top third by graduation rates offered students the most access to arts education and resources, while schools in the bottom third offered the least access and fewest resources. Among other findings, schools in the top third typically hired 40 percent more certified arts teachers and offered 40 percent more classrooms dedicated to coursework in the arts than bottom-ranked schools. They were also more likely to offer students a chance to participate in or attend arts activities and performances. The full report is at caenyc.org.

Project Censored: Schools More Segregated Now

Here is more evidence that what we are doing today to attempt to close the achievement gap is actually making things worse, as so many have said for so long.

We know that poverty is the biggest roadblock to achievement, yet all the education reformers seem to be able to do is blame teachers and find ways to further segregate kids while the reformers themselves make millions. Disgusting.

US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s


The Civil Rights Project, UCLA, January 2009
Title: “Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge”
Author: Gary Orfield


Student Researchers: Melissa Robinson and Rena Hawkins
Faculty Evaluator: Sangeeta Sinha, PhD
Southwest Minnesota State University

Schools in the United States are more segregated today than they have been in more than four decades. Millions of non-white students are locked into “dropout factory” high schools, where huge percentages do not graduate, and few are well prepared for college or a future in the US economy.

According to a new Civil Rights report published at the University of California, Los Angeles, schools in the US are 44 percent non-white, and minorities are rapidly emerging as the majority of public school students in the US. Latinos and blacks, the two largest minority groups, attend schools more segregated today than during the civil rights movement forty years ago. In Latino and African American populations, two of every five students attend intensely segregated schools. For Latinos this increase in segregation reflects growing residential segregation. For blacks a significant part of the reversal reflects the ending of desegregation plans in public schools throughout the nation. In the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, the US Supreme Court concluded that the Southern standard of “separate but equal” was “inherently unequal,” and did “irreversible” harm to black students. It later extended that ruling to Latinos.

The Civil Rights Study shows that most severe segregation in public schools is in the Western states, including California—not in the South, as many people believe. Unequal education leads to diminished access to college and future jobs. Most non-white schools are segregated by poverty as well as race. Most of the nation’s dropouts occur in non-white public schools, leading to large numbers of virtually unemployable young people of color.

Schools in low-income communities remain highly unequal in terms of funding, qualified teachers, and curriculum. The report indicates that schools with high levels of poverty have weaker staffs, fewer high-achieving peers, health and nutrition problems, residential instability, single-parent households, high exposure to crime and gangs, and many other conditions that strongly affect student performance levels. Low-income campuses are more likely to be ignored by college and job market recruiters. The impact of funding cuts in welfare and social programs since the 1990s was partially masked by the economic boom that suddenly ended in the fall of 2008. As a consequence, conditions are likely to get even worse in the immediate future.

In California and Texas segregation is spreading into large sections of suburbia as well. This is the social effect of years of neglect to civil rights policies that stressed equal educational opportunity for all. In California, the nation’s most multiracial state, half of blacks and Asians attend segregated schools, as do one quarter of Latino and Native American students. While many cities came under desegregation court orders during the civil rights era, most suburbs, because they had few minority students at that time, did not. When minority families began to move to the suburbs in large numbers, there was no plan in place to attain or maintain desegregation, appropriately train teachers and staff, or recruit non-white teachers to help deal with new groups of students. Eighty-five percent of the nation’s teachers are white, and little progress is being made toward diversifying the nation’s teaching force.

In states that now have a substantial majority of non-white students, failure to provide quality education to that majority through high school and college is a direct threat to the economic and social future of the general population. In a world economy, success is linked to formal education. Major sections of the US face the threat of declining education levels as the proportion of children attending inferior segregated schools continues to increase.

Rural schools also face severe segregation. In the days of civil rights struggles, small towns and rural areas were seen as the heart of the most intense racism. Of 8.3 million rural white students, 73 percent attend schools that are 80 to100 percent white.

Our nation’s segregated schools result from decades of systematic neglect of civil rights policy and related educational and community reforms.

According to the UCLA report, what is needed are leaders who recognize that we have a common destiny in an America where our children grow up together, knowing and respecting each other, and are all given the educational tools that prepare them for success in our society. The author maintains that if we are to continue along a path of deepening separation and entrenched inequality it will only diminish our common potential.

Arianna Fights For Kids

Arianna Huffington understands that what ails education is what ails society--poverty, the original gateway calamity.

The Story That Made Me Tear Up My Prepared Speech at a Big Education Conference

I was scheduled to give a speech at the Get Schooled conference on education reform yesterday, sponsored by the Gates Foundation and Viacom. My speech had been perfectly trimmed to fit the allotted time, and already loaded in the teleprompter.

Then I read Erik Eckholm's moving story in the New York Times on the surge of homeless schoolchildren caused by the epidemic of home foreclosures. The story was accompanied by a photo that haunted me.

It showed 9-year-old Charity Crowell, of Asheville, North Carolina whose family's home had been foreclosed on. As recounted by Eckholm, Charity had picked out the green and purple outfit she would wear on the first day of school, while vowing to bring her grades back up from the Cs she got last spring when her parents lost their jobs and car and the family was evicted and forced to move into a series of friends' houses and then a motel -- and now a trailer, from which they are also facing eviction.

I've already been thinking a lot about the human cost of the millions of foreclosures taking place across America. But after I read this article, I dug deeper into the impact of foreclosures on schoolchildren. And I wanted to communicate the sense of urgency I felt to the thousand people gathered at the conference, including Bill and Melinda Gates, Deputy Secretary of Education Tony Miller, New York City School Chancellor Joel Klein, and Stephen Colbert, who emceed the event. So I decided to scrap my planned speech and talk about the crisis.

We don't have the current numbers of homeless school children. The latest national data we have is from last spring, when there were over one million schoolchildren who were homeless. But since last spring, two million more jobs have been lost, and home foreclosures have continued to rise at an epidemic pace. How many of the million homes that have received foreclosure filings in the last six months included school age children?

We have anecdotal evidence from school districts like San Antonio, which has enrolled 1,000 homeless students in the first two weeks of school -- double the amount as at the same point last year.

We live in a country that, one year ago this month, came together with a sense of national emergency, and bailed out banks that were "too big to fail."

Shouldn't we also be living in a country that can come together right now and bail out schoolchildren that are too small to be allowed to fail before they have been allowed to succeed?

"I couldn't go to sleep," 9-year-old Charity said of her last semester. "I was worried about all the stuff." As a result, she often fell asleep in class.

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

Obama = Bush On NCLB

From William Mathis, via Schools Matter:

Unfulfilled Promises: Obama's Education Initiatives

Educators endured the Bush administration's harsh criticism of public schools and fervently prayed that the new administration would develop a reform agenda that moved away from condemnation, criticism and privatization. Giddy hopes were raised with Obama’s pre-election promises that "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) would be less test-based, less federally dictated and properly funded.

Eclipsed by health care, the economy, and two wars, education policy has received little national attention. Meanwhile, NCLB remains the law of the land even though deeply unpopular across the political spectrum. House education chairman and NCLB architect George Miller (D-CA), pronounced the law the most hated brand in the nation. Consequently, it has become "the law that shall not be named." Unfortunately, rather than fulfilling campaign promises, Obama and education secretary Arne Duncan, have piled on more federal impositions. Historian Diane Ravitch, an education official in the first Bush administration, said Obama has given George W. Bush a third term on education.

Mike Petrilli of the conservative Fordham Institute labeled the Obama initiatives, "NCLB2: The Carrot that Feels Like a Stick." To receive funds, the administration has asked for "assurances" that the stimulus money will be used to advance its agenda. "Assurances" means more mandates on schools. What prompted Petrilli's comment was the requirement that states wanting discretionary money must adopt policies facilitating the of use test scores in teacher evaluations.

The Bush parallel is perhaps most discouraging due to the unfulfilled campaign promise to adequately fund NCLB. Once the temporary bump of stimulus money is gone, funds for economically deprived children are actually reduced. Historically underfunded special education is stagnant. When the money runs out, Vermont and other states that raided the stimulus money to balance the books will face fiscal crises far greater than today’s troubles.

In language startlingly similar to Bush's former secretary, Rod Paige, the administration says they have put "unprecedented funds" behind their initiatives. In their "Race to the Top," they have set aside $4 billion in discretionary spending, which sounds like a lot of money. As a percentage of total education spending, however, it is less than one percent. With over 70 different state-level studies showing that addressing the needs of our neediest children would cost 40% to 60% more per student, that's a very small tail wagging a very big dog.

What are the innovations being hawked by Obama and Duncan? Oddly, they are mostly carry-overs from Republican administrations. A center-piece is to ask states to lift caps on minimally regulated, free-market charter schools. Less regulation caused serious damage to the economy and the research consensus fails to support its growth in the education sector. The federal government's own studies do not show charters as promising reform avenues. Some major studies actually show charter schools producing lower test scores. For example, a 14 state study out of a Stanford research center reported that 17% of charters did better than public schools, while 37% did worse. The reason that charters do no better, and frequently do worse, than public schools is that they do not provide the promised innovations, have higher turnover and less qualified staff. Also clearly emerging from the findings is that charter schools segregate by wealth and race. It is troublesome that our leaders who promised to be "evidence-based" have not based their initiatives on the evidence.

Another administration idea is to eliminate local school boards in favor of mayoral control of schools. The idea is that a strong leader, given sufficient power, will turn schools around. But since there is little positive evidence supporting this idea, and since it has the disadvantage of eliminating democratically elected governance, it is immensely controversial. In Chicago, where education secretary Arne Duncan was the mayoral appointed "CEO" (rather than superintendent), the Commercial Club's study concluded that any improvements registered were due to changes in the state test and even these gains dissipated by high school.

Parents, citizens and educators get it. They look at their local school and know that basic skills are being taught, children learn to work with each other, and that education is a far broader and richer thing than test scores. They know, too, that meaningful reform requires dedication and investment, not quick-fix, bumper-sticker solutions. Unfortunately the new administration seems to have learned little from the past, buying into the educational equivalent of get-rich-quick schemes whose primary support comes from pseudo-research propagated by ideological think tanks. That is not what candidate Obama promised.

William J. Mathis is managing director of the Education and the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He resides in Goshen, VT.

What Should Education In America Be Like?

Educating for Individuality

by Lynn Stoddard

What will happen if our schools give up trying to standardize students, but instead, decide to help students develop their unique sets of talents, gifts, interests and abilities? Why not have high standards for nurturing positive human individuality?

What will happen if we do it?

Some of the following things are already happening in a few private schools like the one the Obama girls attend, but should be available for all of America’s children:

Teaching is restored as an honored and highly sought profession. Student and teacher drop-outs decrease. School will be interesting, challenging and exciting again. Parents will become meaningfully involved as partners to help children develop as individuals. Crime rates will decrease. Self-chosen, home study will replace teacher-assigned home work. Individual achievement and knowledge will soar as students investigate their own interests and develop their own talents. Cooperation and collaboration replaces most competition. Portfolios and presentations will replace all but teacher and student-made assessments. Hands-on investigations replace busywork sheets. Teachers will nurture curiosity, creativity and problem-solving. Students will fall in love with reading and increase in their zest for truth and knowledge.

A huge mistake is about to be made under the banner, “National Standards.” The National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) are unveiling a plan to develop common English-language Arts and Mathematics standards across the nation. They call it the “Common Core State Standards Initiative.”

The plan is for subject matter specialists to decide what all students should know and be able to do at each grade level. It is a call to develop student uniformity at a higher level. Achievement tests will be administered to track and compare progress across the states. Standards for uniformity? Is this an oxymoron?

Is it possible to have high standards for doing the wrong things? It makes sense for factories that produce products to have standards for uniformity, but what about schools? Should they be operated like factories, with quality controls (achievement tests) to make sure each “product” is the same?

Why do so many people believe it is the main business of schools to develop human uniformity? The current push for uniformity shows that large numbers of people have developed a false belief about what education is for. They are exhibiting what George Odiorne calls, “the activity trap.”

In 1974 he said, “Most people get caught in the (curriculum) trap. They get so enmeshed in (curriculum) they lose sight of why they are doing it and the (curriculum) becomes a false goal, and end in itself.”

This may be the reason our society holds uniform student achievement in curriculum as the main goal and purpose of schooling. Evidence for this is the courses students are required to take (such as algebra) for graduation from high school. Achievement in curriculum is what policymakers try to assess. By so doing it dictates to teachers, with false goals, the methods they use. Standardized tests force teachers to ignore the vast differences in students and try to make them all alike in the knowledge and skills that are assessed.

Victor Weisskopf said “People cannot learn by having information pressed into their brains. Knowledge has to be sucked into the brain, not pushed in.”

If “national standards for student uniformity” get installed in schools across the nation, it will force teachers to press information into the brains of students as fast as possible. They will not be able to wait for the “urge to know” to develop in each child. They will “teach” the prescribed curriculum in a direct manner and accept the illusion that significant learning has occurred. In reality the knowledge will only be shallow and temporary as it has always been in a standardized, test-based school system.

Now you have a choice. Do nothing and get national standards for student uniformity imposed on your schools. OR ….. Write or call newspapers, legislators, the president, school board members, neighbors, teachers, your governor and others to help stop national standards for uniformity from becoming a reality. Ask them to start a movement toward educating for student individuality. If we develop high standards that nurture human diversity, standards that nurture and address our talents and our infinite variety, we will dignify not only our children and our profession but indeed, all of us.

Lynn Stoddard is a founding member of the Educating for Human Greatness Alliance. He lives in Farmington, Utah and can be reached at lstrd@yahoo.com.
Lynn Stoddard, 793 S. 200 E., Farmington, UT 84025 (801) 451-2554

h/t PK

Happy Anniversary

Brown v Board of Education after 55 years

Fifty-five years ago today the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously issued Earl Warren's opinion in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, in which it stated unequivocally that

Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

And yet even after 55 years the promise of the Brown decision we still have not overcome what is effectively a system of educational apartheid.

Below the fold I am offering the text of a piece by Sam Chaltain, the National Director of The Forum for Education and Democracy. I am going to urge you to read carefully his words. I will offer a few additional comments of my own, but the primary purpose of this diary is to make Sam's statement more widely known.

Doesn’t Every Child Deserve a High Quality Education?
By Sam Chaltain


On May 17, America will mark the 55th anniversary of Thurgood Marshall’s historic victory in Brown v. Board of Education. If Marshall were alive, however, he would urge us to stop celebrating 1954 and start accepting responsibility for our complicity in the creation of a “separate but equal” education apartheid system – with one method of instruction for the poor, and another for the privileged.

In theory, the Brown decision represents the most hopeful strains of the American narrative: working within a system of laws to extend the promise of freedom, more fairly and fully, to each succeeding generation. “In the field of public education,” the unanimous Court wrote, “the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” and the opportunity to learn “is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.” The Chicago Defender proclaimed May 17, 1954 as “the beginning of the end of the dual society in American life and the system of segregation that supports it.” Marshall himself remembered feeling “so happy I was numb.”

In practice, integrated schools today are as much of a dream now as they were then, and the subject of segregation has all but disappeared from the national conversation about education reform. Worse still, many of the newest and most promising schools in our nation’s cities are actually increasing the racial stratification of young people and communities – not lessening it.

Providing ‘separate but equal’ facilities, it seems, has once again become an acceptable justification for allowing an inequitable schooling system to exist. In this system, some schools receive ample funding, while others scrape by. Some schools are filled with passionate, experienced educators, while others are flooded with passionate, inexperienced rookies. And while one child is being taught that the key to success is finding the right (multiple-choice) answer to other people’s questions, another is learning that success comes from finding his voice and discovering his rightful place in the world.

Which child is more likely to do well in life, and in a democratic society?

Ostensibly, this inequity was what the Court ended in 1954. But legal changes tend to outpace social changes, and so in 1973 the Court was again asked to intervene, this time when a group of poor Texas parents claimed that their state’s reliance on local taxes to determine per-pupil expenditures violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. A state court agreed, but the U.S. Supreme Court, in a narrow 5-4 decision, reversed.

The unfair distribution of resources, Justice Potter Stewart conceded, “has resulted in a system of public education that can fairly be described as chaotic and unjust. It does not follow, however, that this system violates the Constitution.”

Justice Lewis Powell agreed. “Though education is one of the most important services performed by the state, it is not within the limited category of rights recognized by this Court as guaranteed by the Constitution.” If it were, Powell conceded, “virtually every State will not pass muster.”

For Justice Marshall, a sitting member of the Court he had stood before two decades prior, that was precisely the point. “The Court concludes that public education is not constitutionally guaranteed,” he wrote, even though “no other state function is so uniformly recognized as an essential element of our society’s well being.”

Marshall understood that without equal access to a high-quality public education, democracy doesn’t work. “Education directly affects the ability of a child to exercise his First Amendment rights,” he explained. “Education prepares individuals to be self-reliant and self-sufficient participants in society. Both facets of this observation are suggestive of the substantial relationship which education bears to guarantees of our Constitution.”

After so many years and so little real change, something new – perhaps even something drastic – needs to be done.

What if Powell and Stewart were wrong? What if we made the guarantee of a high-quality public education our nation’s 28th Constitutional Amendment? Is that the game-changer we need to make the promise of Brown a reality, 55 years later?

Sam Chaltain is the National Director of The Forum for Education & Democracy, a national education “action tank” committed to the public, democratic role of public education — the preparation of engaged and thoughtful democratic citizens.

(follow Sam on Twitter)

Let me start by noting again the words of Justice Powell, that Though education is one of the most important services performed by the state, it is not within the limited category of rights recognized by this Court as guaranteed by the Constitution. And still today, more than a quarter century after that opinion in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, it is still true, as Powell wrote in 1972, that virtually every State will not pass muster.

Some states guarantee a free and appropriate public education in their state constitution, although such guarantees were often from a time when such education was only through the 8th grade.

We have come out of a two-term presidency where the focus on No Child Left Behind as the supposed means of addressing the inequity that is still pervasive in America's schools has had the unfortunate effect of narrowing the educational opportunities for many children of color. The recent scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) show that while scores at the elementary level have risen somewhat (albeit less than in the previous periodic assessment covering a time when NCLB had only briefly been in effect), the gap between white and black had not closed and at the high school level there had been no significant change in performance. In short, we are still leaving many children behind. And in the meantime we are robbing them of access to the arts, which are not tested, and incredibly to history and civic education, which also are not part of the calculation of Adequate Yearly Progress under NCLB, and hence get ignored inr restricted in favor of more time to raise scores on those tests whose results do get included.

I teach government. Thus the words of Thurgood Marshall in dissent are to me quite relevant: Education directly affects the ability of a child to exercise his First Amendment rights. Our students need to understand those writes to be fully participating citizens helping shape their own future and the future of this nation. Marshall recognized this: Education prepares individuals to be self-reliant and self-sufficient participants in society. Both facets of this observation are suggestive of the substantial relationship which education bears to guarantees of our Constitution.

But these ideas are not new now, nor were they when Marshall expressed them in 1972. Let me offer a selection from Warren's opinion in Brown that remains as relevant today as it was 55 years ago:

Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.

We must remember that despite the unanimity of the Brown decision there was strong resistance. I write these words from the Commonwealth of Virginia, which after the succeeding Brown 2 decision of 1955, which said that segregated school systems must be integrated with all deliberate speed chose a path of "massive resistance" repeatedly articulated in the editorial pages of a major newspaper, the Richmond News Leader, penned by the very articulate editor James Jackson Kilpatrick. We often forget that Topeka was only one of 5 districts involved in the Brown case. There were two parallel decisions, because one case came from our national capital which since it was note a state had to be decided on somewhat different legal grounds as it was in Bolling v Sharpe. The other states, besides Virginia, included South Carolina and Delaware. The Virginia situation is illustrative of how difficult it has been to achieve racial equity in public schools. The General Assembly had allowed the closing of public schools that were to be integrated, but this was ruled unconstitutional in 1959, whereupon the General Assembly repealed compulsory school attendance and left it to local option. That meant either integrated public schools or no public schools. Prince Edward County, which had been the subject of the Virginia case combined into Brown, chose to be the sole Virginia district that abandoned public education. From May 1, 1959 until in 1964 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled unconstitutional governments making grants to private (segregated) schools, Prince Edward County had no public schools.

Too many do not know the history of that time. The decision 55 years ago today did not magically erase an era of racial discrimination in education. While it might no longer be de jure on racial grounds today, the inequity of schools serving primarily or exclusively minority populations is not so much better, despite the various federal and state efforts that have been made. The process of of addressing the failures of such schools has inextricably become a political football used by some to advance causes that have little to do with the meaningful education of children whose economic situations give them less access to educationally related activities outside of school, and whose in-school education has increasingly been narrowed to preparation for tests to "prove" we are offering an education, even if the unstated purposes on the part of many advocates are things like destroying the legitimacy of (and hence the support for) public education and destruction of teachers unions as a force both in educational policy and in politics.

Education is essential if we are to remain a liberal democracy. It is one of the few ways we can empower all of our citizens to something beyond a dependence on the whims of corporations whose sole purpose is maximizing their profits. Education should prepare people for a future that is more than merely for the workforce, but also for civil society, for the body politic, for the future of America.

We have come 55 years since the Brown decision was issued. We have not yet come close to fulfilling the promise contained in Warren's sweeping opinion. Despite the unanimity of the Court in 1954, we have never achieved a consensus on the purposes of public education, nor do we have a willingness to make the commitment necessary to achieve the promise of the right to a high quality public education.

Perhaps pursuing a federal Constitutional Amendment is the only way of refocusing our attention as a nation to what Brown was supposed to help us achieve. Certainly the public discussion that would ensue from exploring that option would benefit the nation, whether or not we ever ratify such a proposal.

Warren wrote in Brown that

To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.

Allowing clearly inferior educational opportunities, even if nominally not done specifically on racial grounds, nevertheless still has the same impact. Students are not idiots - they quickly realize that the inferiority of their facilities, in some cases teachers, and in many cases quality of instruction indicates that society does not truly care about them despite the rhetoric about leaving no child behind, of overcoming the disparity that is apparent when we look even at gross indicators like test scores. Their hearts and minds are still battered by the inequity a continuing part of the experience of far too many children of lesser economic circumstances. They may be children of color in inner cities. They may be whites in economically distressed rural communities. They are often children in schools on the reservations in which many Native Americans still grow up.

Regardless of race or location, when we do not offer them a high quality education, we betray the basic principles of our Constitutional system and give lie to the promise of the Brown decision.

Fifty-five years. We have come somewhat. We have not come far enough.

Peace.

Low-Performing Schools: What Works (Change the students?)

How to turn around a low-performing school, from What Works Clearinghouse:

Looks like most interventions don't work very well. Maybe we should focus on the underlying factors of low performance? Let's start with poverty, eh?

Growth Models Debunked, By God!

THOMPSON: God Does Not Play Dice

The Education Sector's "Are We There Yet?" offers a number of caveats in its analysis of Tennessee's growth model, as well as a refresher course on Zeno. But unless you are irrevocably committed to NCLB-type accountability, I'd skip the discussion of educational issues and enjoy the review of ancient Greek philosophy.

Tennessee's growth model measures student progress against benchmarks based on predicted or "expected" scores needed to attain proficiency in three years. This is an analytical construct, however. It can offer no insight into what should be expected of a teacher in a high poverty neighborhood school.

In a real world setting, what growth can be expected during a year when a student buried his grandparents, was incarcerated, was a victim of domestic abuse, was shot or stabbed, saw his mental illness spin out of control, or just gave into the peer pressure of the gang? How should expectations for teachers be adjusted for a class which brings so many social pathologies into a classroom that the "tipping point" is crossed, in comparison to teachers in charters or lower poverty schools? How should a teacher be held accountable under such a model for a principal who is not allowed or refuses to enforce the disciplinary code of conduct. Can the model be adjusted for the effect of a critical mass of special education students, i.e. are expectations adjusted when the percentages of students on IEPS passes 20% or 30% or 50%? (and does it matter if your students on IEPs are sweet kids with a reading disabilities or Seriously Emotionally Disturbed and on parole for violent offenses?)

Of course, none of my objections would be major if the model was used for purposes of diagnosis, science, or a "consumers’ report." We should pursue social science fearlessly, but we must not play dice with the lives of teachers by evaluating them with some theoretical work in progress.

At the risk of sounding too argumentative, I would especially like adjustments in the expectations for incoming students who can decode but not comprehend and whose education has been stunted by test prep, narrowed curriculum, and the other sins of NCLB.

My favorite passage of the report was "The Tennessee growth model will also reduce the number of schools identified by NCLB as falling short academically. This could be a positive change if it allows the state to focus more intensely on the lowest-performing schools." No! Models do not reduce or increase the number of failing schools. People do that.

If we want to focus more intensely on the lowest performing schools, which we should, then we should focus more intensely on the lowest performing schools. If we conclude, as we should, that both the status models and the safe harbor models of NCLB are incompetent, we do not need to embrace another statistical construct just because it is less primitive. We should use our judgments, buttressed by data, and not devise an elaborate set of algorithms that have no relation to the facts of school life. - John Thompson

Looks Like We Are On Our Way To Private Public Schools!

Jim Horn digs up some more craziness. Here we see how money will influence education policy.

Following the money is usually a good way to see what is really motivating an education policy decision. Money and whiteness. The sad thing is these folks don't seem to realize how their policy ideas effect those inside the schools.

There is no quick fix because the problem, whatever the problem is, is not the fault of public education; it's the fault of society to adequately take care of those in need. I think its pretty clear that the "haves" have been having at the expense of the "have-nots" for so long that we are where we are now; a rich/poor society; very little in the middle.

The "poor" don't need better schools and teachers, they need better lives! Obama's tax plan, and health plan are a start. Not his education plan, or his punish the war criminals plan.

Anyway, follow some money...

NEA Joins Corporate Raiding Party on Public Education

Did I say something about union sellouts earlier today? Bracey just posted at ARN the Ed Week link below that announces the NEA, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers have split the spoils from the corporate charter school blitzkrieg that is now being unleashed against public education. They have agreed to support the Tucker Plan (Tough Choices or Tough Times) that was pumped out of the sludge tanks in 2006. See here and here and here for reviews of the plan. Here is the beginning of the evaluation by Miller and Gerson:

The "Tough Choices or Tough Times" report of the National Commission on Skills in the Workplace, funded in large part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and signed by a bipartisan collection of prominent politicians, businesspeople, and urban school superintendents, called for a series of measures including:

(a) replacing public schools with what the report called "contract schools", which would be charter schools writ large;

(b) eliminating nearly all the powers of local school boards - their role would be to write and sign the authorizing agreements for the "contract schools;

(c) eliminating teacher pensions and slashing health benefits; and

(d) forcing all 10th graders to take a high school exit examination based on 12th grade skills, and terminating the education of those who failed (i.e., throwing millions of students out into the streets as they turn 16). . . . .

The hounds are loose. Here is the news from Ed Week:

By Catherine Gewertz
Washington

The nation’s largest teachers’ union and two leading business groups said today they have become partners in the work of a blue-ribbon commission trying to revolutionize American education.

The announcement by the 3.2 million-member National Education Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers marks the next step in taking the ideas in a high-profile December 2006 report, “Tough Choices or Tough Times,” from proposals to practice. The report, by the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, called for sweeping, systemic changes in education funding, assessment, school management, and teacher pay and training. ( "U.S. Urged to Reinvent Its Schools," Dec. 20, 2006.)
At a news conference here, leaders of the National Center on Education and the Economy , which sponsored the commission, also said that Arizona, Delaware, and New Mexico would begin the planning required to rework aspects of their education systems to reflect the commission’s framework. In doing so, the new states join Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Utah, which signed on to do likewise in October. . . .

The Noise My Class Endures, Like The One Obama Mentioned

One of the things Obama mentioned last night was about a school that had to stop instruction 6 times a day to wait for a noisy train to pass.

In my school, my room (bungalow) is next to the street, and pretty much ON the playground. I have to stop 400 times a day to let the screaming kids at recess finish screaming so I can finish reading a story to my students. Or I have to wait for the gardener (district or neighborhood) to finish whacking weeds so I can continue to explain "small moments" and "how-to's".

So, these problems of "Learning Environment" exist all over the country, and not just in poor districts. It is a concern of mine that schools don't regulate children during recess, and administrators have no clue that one of their jobs is to see to it that the learning environment at their school is conducive to, well, learning!

Hey, Arne Duncan! Be Progressive!

A comment from Jean at Bridging Differences. Well done!

Everyone who thinks that more testing is the answer, or more testing tied to even more serious consequences for more people, should read this report from the National Center on Performance Incentives authored by Richard Rothstein. Apparently, economists (!), business management theorists (!), sociologists and historians have known for decades what teachers and other educators have been saying about the use of quantitative output performance measures for accountability and performance incentive plans. (Merit pay is the latter--it has nothing to do with accountability.)

Specifically, there are negative consequences to 1) exclusive reliance on quantitative measures because they cannot accurately capture the complexity of human endeavors and 2) making the quantitative measures high-stakes for the people whose performance is being measured. At the very least, these negative consequences have to be weighed against the benefits in formulating policy. Preferably, the quantitative measures have to be balanced with the use of qualitative measures in order to mitigate the negative consequences of each.

To simply ignore this reality--pretend we don't know about the downside of, in our case, exclusive reliance on high-stakes testing for accountability and performance incentives--only guarantees that those negative consequences will have full sway and will play out until they bring the system down, or at least become so obvious that the most determined can't ignore them.

Rothstein cites three problems, with much supporting evidence extending back to the early 20th century. All three are familiar to those of us living daily with the testing-and-accountability craze and its consequences. They are:

1) conventional definitions and measurements of educational outputs are so oversimplified that they cannot support valid accountability or performance incentive systems. Goal distortion results, . . . .
2) Adjusting expectations of performance for the characteristics of inputs has proven more difficult than anticipated. With students at different risks of failure because of the varied background characteristics, accountability and incentive systems can be credible only if sanctions and rewards can be adjusted for these variations. . . . .
3) Untrustworthy statistics undermine the credibility of accountability and incentive systems. They would do so even if measurement of outputs and inputs could be defined more precisely. Inadequate data reliability is one impediment: . . . . Because standardized test items are too few to fully represent the curriculum, sampling corruption results. . . . . explicit gaming can manipulate accountability data:. . . .

Rothstein goes on to say

These challenges--in defining outputs and inputs and in the accuracy of data themselves--surprise many education policy makers. Some conclude that the problems stem only from the inadequacy of publich educators. {emphasis added; sound familiar?} For example, one critic argues, good teachers "can and should" integrate subject matter so that raising mathe and reading scores need not result in diminished attention to other curricular areas. But this expectation denies the intent and power of incentives which, if successful, should redirect attention and resources to those outputs that are rewarded.

The corruption of performance incentive systems stimulated by a too-heavy reliance on quantitative measurement is not peculiar to public education. It has been extensively documented in other fields by economists, business management theorists, sociologists, and historians.

The bulk of the report documents these claims, not only from the public sphere but also from private enterprise.

The thing that gripes me about this is that all these economists and business experts that have been weighing in so heavily on education policy lately either do or should know about all this already, since so much of the research is from economists and business.

I urge everyone to read the whole report, and maybe send copies to Duncan and Obama by special delivery. Maybe if several humdred landed on their doorsteps, they'd actually read it also, and take the results seriously.

Git Up In My Shit!

I was looking over my 11 year old son's poetry packet today for his 6th grade English class. Among the poems, copied from very old, 12th generation handouts, were some poems and song lyrics. My favorites were the lyrics from Ghostface Killah's joint, Black Eyed Peas rant, and the lyrics to some other song talking about shit and poppin' caps was very enlightening as well.

I also appreciated the exposure to gang vernacular and the seedy side of life in poverty, glorified, as it so often is in rap, to the confusion of children who don't yet understand the subtleties of life in a racist country.

I suppose I should thank my son's teacher for keeping it real, but I feel more like she is polluting their young minds as opposed to exposing them to controversial, yet aesthetically important works. I am not sure the Black Eyed Peas and Ghostface Killahs are works that deserve study, at least not in 6th grade.

Now, is it just the protective father in me, or are these types of offerings from an English Teacher to her 6th grade charges just waaaayyy out of line?

Give Teachers The Autonomy They Need

The New Teacher Network always has a tasty post up. This one hits home:

Blogs and Wikis: Changing Professional Development?
Posted February 22nd, 2009 by Peter Henry

Well, looks like the rest of the world is starting to figure out what some of us have been saying--and doing--for awhile now: the Internet has the power to transform learning, not only for students, but especially for teachers.

Here is a great quote from Richard Elmore of Harvard University's educational leadership department:

As expectations for increased student performance mount and the measurement and publication of evidence about performance becomes part of the public discourse about schools, there are few portals through which new knowledge about teaching and learning can enter schools; few structures or processes in which teachers and administrators can assimilate, adapt, and polish new ideas and practices; and few sources of assistance for those who are struggling to understand the connection between the academic performance of their students and the practices in which they engage.

So the brutal irony of our present circumstance is that schools are hostile and inhospitable places for learning. They are hostile to the learning of adults and, because of this, they are necessarily hostile to the learning of students. (pp. 4–5)

Schools are, or should be, primarily "learning institutions"; that is, at every point in the organization, learning is held up as the basis and very "raison d'etre" for the schools' existence.

Yet, as we all know, there is no one more isolated, more in the dark, more out of the loop in education than the classroom teacher. Why? Because their head is in the task of teaching kids for 5 hours a day, and that is totally engrossing work that keeps that teacher from being able to learn, explore, reflect on other aspects of the profession, their own life, reality, you name it.

So, that is the problem, and one that we have been aware of for a long time. Believe it or not, this website is an attempt to combat the isolation of teaching by connecting, especially new teachers, across time, geography, experience, departments, etc. I'm not sure how successful it has been, but then again, never a week goes by without someone signing up at this website.

Yet, I wish--it's my hope really--that more teachers, more people, begin to post blogs, comments and generally use the connectivity of this site to feed the movement of greater learning, sharing and collaboration. You certainly can't compel that, but only invite. And the invitation is out there.

I say: Come on in, the water is fine. Where are you? What is your story? What questions do you have? How can this large, diverse, amorphous community help you become a better teacher?

Teach Them To Read When They're Ready!

I had to post this because it rings so true, especially for those of us who have been in a classroom full of the kids Dr. Johnson describes. I can't help but think Dr. Johnson is completely correct.

Teaching our children to write, read & spell
A DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACH

Susan R. Johnson MD, FAAP, 5/7/2007


Part I— The Proprioceptive System

There is a widely-held belief that if we just start teaching children to write, read, and spell in preschool, they will become better writers, readers, and spellers by the time they reach the first and second grades. This is, however, not true. The truth is that children only should be taught to write, read, and spell when their neurological pathways for writing, reading, and spelling have fully formed. There are many neuropsychologists, developmental specialists, occupational therapists and teachers who are concerned that our current trend in this country of pushing “academics” in preschool and kindergarten will result in even greater increases in the number of children, particularly boys, diagnosed with attentional problems and visual processing types of learning disabilities.

In order for children to be able to sit still, pay attention, and remember abstract shapes, like letters and numbers, they first need to have developed their proprioceptive system. In my clinical practice I see children who are being asked to sit still at a desk who can’t yet “feel” where they are in space. They have to keep their muscles and body moving all the time or sit on their feet or wrap their feet around the legs of their chair in order for their mind to locate the position of their body. They also have difficulty balancing on one foot while their eyes are closed. Their drawing of a person is more like that of a younger child, being stick-like in form and lacking hands and feet. These children are often given the label of Attention Deficit Disorder because they appear fidgety in their movements, have difficulty paying attention, and have poorly developed fine-motor skills. In addition, these same children are often labeled as having learning disabilities in visual processing (for example, dyslexia or other types of non-verbal learning disabilities). They have difficulty recalling letters, numbers, and shapes that are shown to them, and they are unable to recognize letters, numbers, and shapes that are drawn with a finger on their back. These children have difficulty remembering the orientation and direction of letters and numbers when writing, reading, or spelling. They often will confuse the letter “b” with the letter “d” and may write the number 2 or number 3 backwards and not even notice.

The proprioceptive system is strengthened by physical movements, like sweeping with a broom, pushing a wheelbarrow, carrying groceries, emptying the trash, pulling weeds, or hanging from monkey bars. When children do these types of activities they stimulate pressure receptors within their muscles, tendons, and joints, thereby allowing their minds to make a map of the location of these various pressure receptors within the body. A connection is made between the mind of children and the various parts of their physical body. In this way children develop a sense of where their body is in space (proprioception), and even if their eyes are closed, the children will be able to feel or sense the location of muscles, joints and tendons within their trunk, arms, legs, fingers, and toes. In addition, as the children move their arms, legs, hands, and feet forwards, backwards, up, down, left and right, they will start to gain a sense of the spaces around them. Now, when these children look at the shapes of letters and numbers, their eyes will follow and track the lines and curves. The memory of these movements will then imprint upon their mind. They will have the capacity to make mental pictures or images of these numbers and letters. They will easily remember the correct orientation of numbers like 2 and 3 when they are writing. There will be no more confusion between the letter “b” and the letter “d”. The correct orientation of the letter or number will be seen within the mind before it is written.

This proprioceptive system impacts other areas in children’s life beyond being able to sit still and having a visual memory for abstract forms. It also affects their ability to fall asleep by themselves at night and to stay asleep throughout the night. When the proprioceptive system is not fully developed, children will have difficulties falling asleep at night by themselves. They will frequently wake up during the night and then need physical contact with their parents in order to fall back to sleep. Since their own proprioceptive system is not yet developed, lying next to their parent will activate their pressure receptors and allow them to feel their body, relax, and fall back to sleep. For these children, closing their eyes at night makes their body disappear because their mind has not made a connection to the pressure receptors within their muscles, tendons, and joints. This is why so many children want the light on at night when they go to bed. They need to see their body and the spaces around them since they can not “feel” their body when in darkness.

Part II— Reading, Spelling, and Writing

Our current educational system is teaching children to read in a way that doesn’t make sense developmentally. Children in preschool and kindergarten are expected to memorize letters and words before their minds have developed the necessary pathways to identify letters, easily read words, and comprehend what they are reading. We are asking these young children to read, when the only part of their brain that is developed and available for reading words is the right hemisphere.

The right hemisphere first develops for reading, usually around four to seven years of age. This right part of the brain allows children to recognize words by sight. It enables children to focus on the first and last letters in a word and the overall length and shape of the word. It allows children to guess at words without paying much attention to spelling or matching sounds to letters (phonics). In contrast, the reading center in the left brain and the connecting bridge-like pathway between the left and the right brain don’t start developing until seven to nine years of age (girls may develop these pathways a little earlier, while some boys won’t develop these pathways until ten or eleven years of age). It is this reading center in the left brain that allows children to match sounds to letters and enables them to sound out words phonetically. Now they can remember more accurately how words are spelled.

Because the reading center in the right brain sees abstract forms like letters and numbers as pictures, it makes sense to first teach children to read by relating the shapes of letters to actual pictures that children can relate to and draw. For example, the letter “M” can be represented by two mountain peaks with a valley in between. As teachers we can tell children that the sound “M” is the first sound one hears when saying the word “mountains”. Other examples might include drawing a king out of the letter “K”, a bunny out of the letter “B” or waves out of a “W”. What doesn’t make developmental sense is expecting children to just memorize the abstract shape of the letter “F” or memorize phrases like “F” as in the word FOX, “B” as in the word BOY, or “C” as in the word CROCODILE. These words do not make any visual sense to the reading center in the right brain. The letter “F” doesn’t look like a FOX, the letter “B” doesn’t look like a BOY, and the letter “C” does not look like a CROCODILE.

When we push young children to read and they only have access to their right hemisphere for reading, we create learning problems for them in the future. Since children using the reading center of the right hemisphere look at the first and last letters of a word, the length of that word, and then make a guess, they will look at a word like “STAMP” and may guess that the word is “STOP’ or “STUMP”. If you show them the word, “TGOEHTER” they may read the word as “TOGETHER” but will not realize that the word is mis-spelled. Words like “FRIEND, FIND, and FOUND’’ as well as ‘’FILLED, FILED, and FLOOD’’, will all seem the same.

It takes a lot of mental effort to read words using only sight memory. Sight memory was meant to be used for only small words. Children who are reading using only their right hemisphere often are exhausted after reading just a few paragraphs, and can only parrot back words or sentences by memory. In addition, their minds are busy deciphering each word and therefore are not free to create the pictures and actual scenes associated with the words they are reading. This limits their overall comprehension. These are the children who plagerize or copy a text verbatim, word by word, when they are doing a report. This is because they can only recall the exact words they read and therefore can’t summarize, condense, or comprehend ideas very easily.

For all of these reasons, reading should be taught in school only after children have developed both their right and left reading centers. This will enable children to use sight memory for small words and the more efficient method of phonics for larger words. In addition, children need to have developed the “bridge” pathway that connects the two reading centers together. When children have developed this connection between the right and left cerebral hemispheres (bilateral integration), they can access both the right and left reading centers of their brain at the same time, and therefore can decide at any given moment whether to read a word by sight, if the word is short (a right hemisphere activity), or sound out the word phonetically if the word is long (a left hemisphere activity).

A physical sign that children have developed bilateral integration and can now read both by sight memory and phonics is shown by their ability to do do the cross-lateral skip (swinging their opposite leg with opposite arm forward at the same time) without thinking or concentrating. This is because movements on the right side of the body are connected to the left hemisphere of the brain, while movements on the left side of the body are connected to the right side of the brain. If children can move their opposite arm and leg at the same time, then the right and left hemispheres of the brain are “talking” or connected to each other. If children can only skip using their feet or only skip extending the same arm with the same leg (the homolateral skip), they are not ready to read, since they can’t access both sides of the brain simultaneously.

Children who can simultaneously access their reading centers in the right and left hemispheres of their brain will read easily and will create visual images and pictures in their mind related to the content of what they are reading. They will be able to discuss or write about what they have read using their own words, because they can replay the scenes in their mind and don’t have to think so much about the specific words used in each sentence. Therefore, they will have an easier time understanding the meaning behind the stories and books they are reading. Learning to spell will be easier too.

Besides pushing children to read and spell before their minds are developed, we also ask them to hold a pencil and write before they are developmentally ready. I see very young children being asked to write with one hand while they still have overflow movements occuring in the fingers of the opposite hand. Before six or seven years of age, the vertical midline of the child is not fully integrated. When a child moves the fingers of one hand, the fingers on the other hand will also move, often without the child’s conscious awareness. Children should not be forced to write until this vertical midline is integrated. If we force children to hold a pencil or pen and write before they have integrated this vertical midline, they will develop a tense pencil grip, a cramped writing style, and a spatially compromised and jerky penmenship. It makes more sense first to teach children to write the small letters of the alphabet in cursive before teaching them to print these lower case letters. When doing form drawings or writing in cursive the right and left hemispheres are both active and working together. Printing of the lower case letters is a more abstract and advanced developmental task that requires the left hemisphere, which often isn’t developed enough for this task until seven to nine years of age. Girls may be ready to do this task by age six while boys often can’t do this task until after nine years of age.

My greatest concern is that I am seeing more and more fourth, fifth, sixth, and even seventh graders from public and private schools who can’t spell easily and are still reading mostly by sight memory. They can now use their left brain to sound out words, but they approach every word they read first by using the reading center in right brain (by sight). For example, when I give these children a sentence to read like “Six byos wnet on a vaccaiton tohgeter and tehy wnet fsihing in a bule baot”, they often do not notice any of the misspelled words. Furthermore, when I have these same children read another paragraph where every word is spelled correctly, they often tell me that both paragraphs are exactly the same or only note one or two words where the spelling is different.

My worry is that these children were pushed to read too early, when only their right brain was developed enough for reading. They compensated by learning to read everything using only sight memory. When the reading center in their left hemisphere finally developed, the habit was still to read by using the reading center of the right hemisphere. Therefore, these children first looked at the words in a sentence using sight memory, and if the words didn’t make any sense, then they accessed the left reading center to sound out the words. The problem was they weren’t using the reading centers in the right and left brains simultaneously. Many of these children still lacked bilateral integration in their physical movements as well as in their reading. For some of the children, reading was slow and took a tremendous amount of effort. For other children, their sight memory was so strong that they could read quickly but their comprehension and spelling were still poor. Neither group of children could easily picture the scenes from the words they read or remember how individual words were spelled.

Many of these children need cranial therapy because of a history of a c-section birth, prolonged labor, induced labor, or use of suction forceps at delivery. In addition, these children need lots of cross-lateral types of movements (where the opposite arm moves at the same time as the opposite leg) to strengthen bilateral integration. Movements like walking or hiking with the arms swinging, swimming the various strokes, rock climbing and playing tennis will all strengthen bilateral integration. Also, specific movement therapies such as Therapeutic Eurythmy, Extra Lesson, Parelli horseback riding, Spacial Dynamics, Bal-A-Vis-X, Brain Gym, HANDLE, and sensory integration therapy will foster the development of these neurological pathways. These movements need to be non-competitive, and the therapists needs to avoid overstimulating the children or activating their fight and flight “stress” nervous systems. For neurological pathways do not form well when children are stressed. Once these pathways and connections are formed, many of these children will need tutoring to re-learn the rules of spelling and phonics and to start using their left brains for reading. Even if these children were taught phonics in the first or second grade, they need to revisit these reading skills because they didn’t have access yet to the reading center in their left brain.

In addition, when children feel loved unconditionally (loved for who they are and not what they do), they will work hard to overcome any challenges. As parents, teachers and therapist for our children, we need to BE PRESENT when working with children and experience the joy in each moment. Being fully present with children when doing any type of movement work or therapy will create the most profound healing environment for their mind and their entire Being will flourish.

Part III— Prevention of Learning Disabilities

Overall, schools and parents can support a child’s learning by serving healthy foods rich in protein, good quality fats (especially omega 3 fatty acids), fresh fruits, and vegetables, while eliminating partially-hydrogenated oils and trans fats, which occur when cooking or frying foods in corn oil. Adequate sleep will increase the percentage of rapid eye movement or REM sleep. A lack of sleep leads to less REM sleep and therefore, less consolidation of the previous day’s learning. Extremely limiting screen time (television, videos, and computer games) and eliminating it altogether on school nights, will keep the mind free to do its own picturing and not stress it with violent images and rapid sequences of pictures that the brain can not fully process. Regular rhythms and routines in eating and sleeping as well as daily activites will promote a more relaxed nervous system for learning.

In addition, children can’t learn and neurological pathways can’t form as easily when children’s nervous systems are experiencing stress. Forcing children to write, read, and spell and giving them “standardized” tests before they are developmentally ready, will stress their nervous systems. Furthermore, children will dislike reading and will not want to go to school. If we insist on pushing writing, reading and spelling before the children’s minds are ready, we will continue to create an epidemic of behavior and learning difficulties, especially in our boys.

First grade is the time to introduce lots of form drawing, learn the capital letters as pictures that children can draw, and practice cursive writing by drawing each small case letter in a repetitive series (eg. drawing the cursive form of “c” ,over and over like the waves of the ocean). Over the next year or two, as the majority of children in the classroom strengthen their proprioceptive skills and integrate their right and left hemispheres (as evidenced by their ability to stand on one foot with their eyes closed, remember the shapes that are drawn on their backs, jump rope forward and backwards by themselves, and easily perform the cross lateral skip), the children can be more formally taught to read, spell, and print the lower case letters.

It is time to remove the desks from kindergartens and preschools. Our preschools and kindergartens need to fill their curriculculms with play consisting of lots of sensory intergration activities that will strengthen fine motor movements, visual motor abilities, balance, muscle tone, proprioception, as well as strengthen children’s social and emotional development. Activities like imaginary play, climbing, running, jumping, hopping, skipping, walking the balance beam, playing circle games, singing, playing catch, doing meaningful chores, painting, coloring, playing hand clapping games, doing string games, and fingerknitting will strengthen their minds for learning. Children need these healthy, harmonious, rhythmic, and non-competitive movements to develop their brains. For it is the movements of their body and their love for learning that create the pathways in their mind for reading, writing, spelling, mathematics, and creative thinking.