Education Reformer Hypocrisy: If It Can't Be Measured, It Can't Be Good

In this NY Times piece touting social and emotional learning comes this from ed deformer Robert Pondiscio:

Despite the growing demand for S.E.L., some worry that asking teachers to address feelings takes valuable time from academics. Vital subjects like science, history, art and music “are already starved for oxygen,” Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning education policy group in Washington, wrote in an email. “It’s easy to recognize the importance of S.E.L. skills. It’s much harder to identify and implement curricular interventions that have a measurable effect on them. Thus ‘what works’ tends to be defined as ‘what I like’ or ‘what I believe works.’”

Right - because so many other reformer pipe dreams, from the small schools initiative to Common Core, have been proven interventions with a measurable effect.

These are the goals of social and emotional learning:

To advance the science and practice of S.E.L., researchers at Yale established the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning in 1994; under the leadership of Roger P. Weissberg, it moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1996.

Drawing on decades of research, the group set forth what it described as the five goals of S.E.L. for students:

•Self-awareness: The ability to reflect on one’s own feelings and thoughts.

•Self-management (or self-control): The ability to control one’s own thoughts and behavior.

•Social awareness: The ability to empathize with others, recognize social cues and adapt to various situations.

•Relationship skills: The ability to communicate, make friends, manage disagreements, recognize peer pressure and cooperate.

•Responsible decision making: The ability to make healthy choices about one’s own behavior while weighing consequences for others.

You can see why so many corporate deformers wouldn't much like this kind of thing.

How many deformers are able "to make healthy choices about one’s own behavior while weighing consequences for others?"

From Bill Gates to Michael Bloomberg to Andrew Cuomo to Joel Klein to Arne Duncan to John King to Michelle Rhee to David Coleman, I see a group of people who like imposing their own agendas and ideologies on others without a care about "weighing the consequences for others."

Look at the above group and ask yourself how many are able "to empathize with others, recognize social cues and adapt to various situations?"

As for "the ability to reflect on one’s own feelings and thoughts," we all know what David Coleman so famously said: No one gives a shit what anybody else thinks or feels, they only care if they can get the market analysis done by Monday.

No wonder deformer shills like Pondiscio see social and emotional learning as a threat.

It goes at the very core of the flawed corporate deformer model - emotionally and spiritually-stunted people imposing their own ideologies and agendas on the country without any accountability for results.

The Old Paradigms For Education Cannot Work In This World Anymore

The editorials from the NY Post about de Blasio and Farina get more vicious and ridiculous by the day.

Today's is about how ruthless competition among schools and putting extra stress on students is the key to success for children:

In the course of admitting he didn’t have a good reason for taking a good school away from kids in Harlem, Mayor de Blasio said that to fix a “broken” city school system, we have to “shake the foundations.”

Today, some 1,500 students and teachers from Success Academy charter schools will be doing that at the Armory on the Hudson. They are holding a giant pep rally as they head into next week’s tests. It’s called “Slam the Exam!” And it’s a terrific example of how to “shake the foundations” of a public-school system mired in low expectations and even lower performance.

This Empire is centrally organized, overly bureaucratic and failing 85 percent of our black and Latino students.

Yet it has its defenders. Look at Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña. She’s already made clear charter children are not her concern. So what does she tell principals of the children who are her concern? Not to go overboard on “test preparation.” Hmm. Wonder if that’s the approach in Singapore or South Korea, whose students score well above ours in reading, math and science.

Fariña worries about “stressing” students. She should go to the armory today. These kids believe they can compete with the best of them, and that tests give them an opportunity to prove it. So their approach to testing is simple: “Bring it on.”

Then there’s Mayor de Blasio’s idea of shaking it up, which is to take away good schools for kids if they are charters and keep failing schools open if they are traditional schools. That’s the instinct of the old guard who put teachers union above student performance.

The mayor complains about competition. But competition is the key to shaking the foundations. Because charters are showing kids can learn, and in so doing, deprive failing public schools of excuses. And they invite comparisons important to parents.

Our students need more of this, no matter how much the Empire of the mayor and his schools chancellor may strike back.

I figured when the Post published the story a few days ago about Farina talking about the rash of suicides that has struck New York City school students the last seven weeks, they would look to use her statements against her.

And they are - they're mocking her for worrying that the current system is "stressing" students, that she should instead be teaching these kids the kind of "grit" and "determination" the Success Academy students show while trying to "Slam the Exam!"

The sociopath who wrote this editorial clearly does not understand that teaching kids to divorce themselves from their feelings and use external events and extrinsic motivation to get through works to make for a good and healthy life in the long run.

Neither does Jeb Bush, who defended the Common Core this week by railing against people who worry that the current battery of education reforms isn't healthy for children.

The refrain from the reformers is always the same here: "Screw what you think or feel, do what you have to do to succeed the way we tell you to succeed!"

One of the reasons we have such a screwed up culture these days is because so many people are divorced from their inner selves, so many people are leading lives of distraction and isolation, alone with their technology and their material things.

This is the sort of culture sociopaths like Jeb Bush and the Murdoch people like because it keeps them in the money, everybody playing on their field with their rules, with competition and materialism the highest order of the day.

One of the best lessons we can teach students these days is to be able to judge if they want to live by these rules the Bushes and their ilk make for them or if they want to find their own way in life, find their own sources of value and beauty.

I dunno, might be the Jesuit education I received as a teen, but I come from the school of education that looks to teach kids to have the confidence that they can find their own way in a society and a culture that is clearly troubled and getting worse by the year.

I'm not a big fan of teaching them to "slam the exam!" or telling them to get some "grit" to outcompete everyone else.

According to the sociopaths at the Post, that makes me a bad educator.

I'm supposed to be teaching children to "slam the exam!", to learn "grit" and "determination" to succeed no matter the cost.

But looking around at what is left of our dying ecosystem, deteriorating economy and dreadful culture, I think we need to find a different way for education going forward that emphasizes collaboration over competition, intrinsic motivation over extrinsic, and new ways of looking at ourselves and our world that take into account not just the material but also the emotional and, dare I say, the spiritual.

How's that for "shaking the foundations!"?

Oh and about South Korea and their terrific education system?

It leads the world not just in test scores but also suicides of children and adults.

Can You Imagine A School Chancellor Who Promoted This Kind Of School System?

An article by Kathleen Cashin and Bruce Cooper for a new style of education reform (reposted in full because it's now behind a paywall):

Remaking Schools as Socioemotional Places

By Kathleen M. Cashin and Bruce S. Cooper

Premium article access courtesy of Edweek.org.

What do children do in school when they are treated like objects to be shaped, controlled, and rewarded—or punished—for what they said or did, learned, or failed to learn?

How can these children grow, be human, be happy, and become good adults? And how can teachers thrive and survive if they, too, are not treated with dignity, and humanity, by their students, colleagues, and administrators?

How can students engage in the learning process if they feel isolated, a condition that affects many students and teachers alike? For teachers are often working in isolation. And students, when they stare at computers all day, are hardly interacting with teachers or peers.

A homeless student, Marlene, a junior in a large urban public high school, told one of us (Kathleen) her feelings about online learning in her school: “I didn’t like it. All the kids weren’t really doing anything. It was all ‘read a passage and answer the questions.’ It was very boring, and I was very upset.” Marlene had been shifted to a classroom where instruction was computer-based because her regular classroom teacher felt Marlene was too disruptive in the traditional class. But Marlene found the experience isolating, “like being in a shelter. I missed interaction with my teachers.”

"Schools have lost much of their full, rich, active curriculum in their rush to teach basic English and math."

Tragically, many schools are becoming test-preparation factories where the human, interpersonal side of learning gets lost in the urgent routine of identifying test needs, problems, and distractions from achievement, for the sole purpose of improving “test results.” Often, this tendency comes in tandem with computer-based learning rather than the more personal pupil-teacher relationship.

The joy, love, caring, and fun of being a child in a classroom have been diminished by the need to raise test scores, at all costs.

We argue for the reinstatement of the socioemotional dimensions of education—what was once called, in the educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom’s words, “the affective domain,” where teachers built into a lesson and the curriculum the human feelings, needs, and aspirations of their students, along with the cognitive demands of the learning experience.

Children should be asked what their point of view is and what it could be—how they would feel if, for example, they adopted the perspective of a struggling heroine in a story. Kids must also be encouraged to connect with one another—and the text—to start determining what’s true and real. This process of identifying and understanding is sometimes called critical thinking.

Thus, cognitive learning must be coupled with human, social, and emotional experiences, as they all go together. And schools must link the socioemotional with the cognitive by making these two changes:

1. Reinstate teaching and learning as the primary activity in schools. Children in such an environment would be encouraged to communicate, take challenges, and even learn to take risks without fear of failure and humiliation. In Ellen Galinsky’s 2010 book Mind in the Making, she writes that “Sad + Mad = You Can’t Add” is just another way of saying that children’s emotional status greatly affects their ability to learn.

Unfortunately, learning has often been converted from an interesting, complex, engaging process to a too easily quantifiable, isolated, and boring process: e.g., a yes-no, right-wrong, win-lose experience, devoid of human emotions and meaning.

Somehow, schools have lost much of their full, rich, active curriculum in their rush to teach basic English and math (the subjects that are most likely to be tested and for which teachers will be held accountable).

Dropped or diminished in these program are classes in the arts, physical education, vocational-technical education, and some hands-on sciences and social studies. These courses are disappearing because they are not included in testing and, consequently, have become less valued.

2. Ensure that online learning does not supplant teacher and student interactions in the classroom. Online learning is here to stay, as it allows students to move at their own pace and drill down in areas of interest.

Online learning is everywhere and can reach even those students who cannot or will not come to school. However, it has several potential disadvantages, including: removing or minimizing the human interactions that are important to real learning; taking the joy and camaraderie out of education; isolating and limiting students’ voices and involvement; and making education lifeless and dull.

We believe that cutting costs, constricting classroom life to memorization and test preparation, and replacing human contact with online interaction hurt the growth and learning of the whole child, turning education into a “bucket to be filled” and not “a fire to be kindled,” to paraphrase a famous saying.

We must take the steps above to stop the decline of real education and to build the ability of schools to meet the socioemotional needs of our children and their teachers once again. And when cost-cutting policies are being implemented, programs for the neediest children cannot be first on the chopping block.

The key is to bring school leaders and the staff together, in an exciting, focused way.

As Michael Fullan wrote in a 2011 paper: “After minimal needs are met, what turns most people on is something that is personally meaningful, and which makes a contribution to others as well as society as a whole.” Certainly, this applies to educators. Even more importantly, it applies to our children as well.

Kathleen M. Cashin serves on the New York state board of regents and is a clinical professor at Fordham University's graduate school of education, in New York City. Bruce S. Cooper is a professor of education leadership at the school.

I wanted to repost this in full.

I thought the article is that important.

Compare the system these two writers propose to the kind we're getting now as described in my last post, Common Core Is Making Kids Hate School And Learning.

Which system do you want?

Which system do you think would help kids more?

Which system would help our society develop in a healthier direction?

No Wonder The Education Reformers Don't Want Kids Reading Literature Anymore

From the NY Times:

Reading Chekhov for a few minutes makes you better at decoding what other people are feeling. But spending the same amount of time with a potboiler by Danielle Steel does not have the same effect, scientists reported Thursday.

A striking new study found that reading literary fiction – as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction – leads people to perform better on tests that measure empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence.

Social And Emotional Learning - Hey, Maybe Let The Measurements Be?

A pretty good article in the NY Times about the promise of social and emotional learning programs to help children with both academic performance and life skills.

The gist is this:

If you can help children to reframe how they view something that has happened to them, it can have a a positive effect on how they react to the incident and move forward from it:

With the district’s support, Aydlett attended social-emotional learning training. The program was an unlikely choice for Aydlett — a socially awkward man who confesses to being “awful” at ordinary human encounters. But since beginning the emotional-literacy work, Aydlett said, he had become more aware of interpersonal dynamics, and even made going on a vacation with his wife a priority — something he never bothered to do before. (“I didn’t see the point in that kind of connectedness,” he admitted. “But I’ve learned that it’s important.”) On the morning I visited, he stood greeting children at the gate with high-fives, then led me to the classroom of Jennifer Garcia, who teaches second grade. 

As Aydlett and I watched, Garcia walked her class through an exercise in nonverbal cues, asking the children to imagine times when they felt sad or angry or frustrated, and then to freeze in those expressions and postures. As the kids slumped forward in exaggerated positions of woe, Garcia complimented them on small details: a bowed head or hangdog expression. Afterward, Garcia turned to the class. “This is the thinking part of your brain,” she said, holding up her thumb. She pointed to her fingers. “And this is the feeling part of your brain.” Folding her thumb into the center of her palm, she closed her fingers around it. “When we have strong emotions, the thinking part of our brain can’t always control them,” Garcia explained, waggling her fist. “What do we do in those moments?” As the kids called out answers — counting to five, “self-talk,” “dragon breaths” (a kind of deep-breathing exercise) — Garcia nodded. 

Such strategies may seem simplistic, but researchers say they can have a profound effect. When I spoke with Mark Greenberg, who developed a social-emotional curriculum known as Paths (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies), he noted that repeatedly practicing these skills means they gradually become automatic. “The ability to stop and calm down is foundational in those moments.” 

The value of such skills was evident later that day, when I sat in on a fourth-grade class meeting, in which students worked through interpersonal conflicts as a group. Sitting in a circle on the carpet, Anthony, a small boy in a red shirt, began by recounting how he cried during a class exercise and was laughed at by some of the other students. Asked whether he thought the kids were giggling to be mean, or just giggling because they were uncomfortable, Anthony paused. “I think that some people didn’t know what to do, and so they giggled,” he admitted finally — though he was also adamant that a few of the kids were actually laughing at him. “I was really sad about that,” he added.

Though Anthony was still upset, his acknowledgment that not all the kids were snickering — that some may just have been laughing nervously — felt like a surprisingly nuanced insight for a 9-year-old. In the adult world, this kind of reappraisal is known as “reframing.” It’s a valuable skill, coloring how we interpret events and handle their emotional content. Does a casual remark from an acquaintance get cataloged as a criticism and obsessed over? Or is it reconsidered and dismissed as unintentional? 

Depending on our personalities, and how we’re raised, the ability to reframe may or may not come easily. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, notes that while one child may stay rattled by an event for days or weeks, another child may rebound within hours. (Neurotic people tend to recover more slowly.) In theory, at least, social-emotional training can establish neurological pathways that make a child less vulnerable to anxiety and quicker to recover from unhappy experiences. One study found that preschoolers who had even a single year of a social-emotional learning program continued to perform better two years after they left the program; they weren’t as physically aggressive, and they internalized less anxiety and stress than children who hadn’t participated in the program. 

It may also make children smarter. Davidson notes that because social-emotional training develops the prefrontal cortex, it can also enhance academically important skills like impulse control, abstract reasoning, long-term planning and working memory. Though it’s not clear how significant this effect is, a 2011 meta-analysis found that K-12 students who received social-emotional instruction scored an average of 11 percentile points higher on standardized achievement tests. A similar study found a nearly 20 percent decrease in violent or delinquent behavior. 

But as usual in 21st century America, reformers and researchers are wondering just how you measure whether social and emotional learning is effective.

What data will prove that kids are reacting better to incidents after learning how to reframe than before they had those lessons?

Also, education reformers in general seem loathe to go down the road of social and emotional learning skills because, well, to be honest they're lacking in these skills as well.

Read the following paragraph from the Times article and ask yourself if Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, et al. would score "highly effective" in these skills?

Social-emotional learning programs often rely on strategies from conventional therapy, like the ability to get distance on a feeling, or to unpack the deeper emotions that may be hidden within it. But fostering these skills in a child is a complex undertaking. For a child to master empathy, Jones notes, she first needs to understand her own emotions: to develop a sense of what sadness, anger or disappointment feels like — its intensity and duration, its causes. That awareness is what lays the groundwork for the next step: the ability to intuit how another person might be feeling about a situation based on how you would feel in a similar circumstance. 

And so, because there is difficulty and complexity in measuring the effectiveness of social and emotional learning programs and because many people who are less than skilled at handling their own emotions feel like this stuff is too touchy-feely, social and emotional learning programs can often be dismissed.

I say, maybe let the measurement stuff go a little here.

We overemphasize measurement and data in education, we fetishize statistics and so-called scientific research (ever notice how many "definitive" scientific studies get over turned later by new "definitive" studies?), we make believe like the data used in so many studies is untainted and the results garnered from them are "objective" and "scientific" (think VAM.)

In 12 step programs, there is this idea that it is only in letting go of trying to control everything that a person truly frees himself/herself from his addiction.

It seems counter-intuitive, but the more you try and control something, the worse that something often gets, the more out-of-control things become.

Again, in 12 step programs, the idea is the more you try and control your drinking, your drugging, your overeating, your overspending, or whatever, the more out-of-control things get because control mechanisms ultimately do not work.

Surrender to the problem, let go of the control, accept that you cannot solve the problem yourself and ask for the help of some higher power, force or group to help you.

I don't think we can run education reforms this way, of course, and I'm not saying we shouldn't measure programs for effectiveness, viability, etc.

But I do think we often kill the greater good by automatically thinking, how do we control what it is we're doing here, how do we measure it, how do we track it?

The obsessiveness over measuring and tracking data to test for effectiveness is just a kind of control mechanism that in the end doesn't seem to be working so well.

Maybe that's because the data we're using is funky, the way the studies are funded is problematic, the way we frame everything as "Sure we can measure and solve this!  We're humans!" is a flawed way of thinking about things.

In a couple of centuries from now, people are going to wonder about the 20th/21st centuries' over-reliance and festishization of so-called scientific studies.

One of these cliches these days you hear all the time is "Research shows..."

Ah, but how often later we find that the research that showed what we were told it showed didn't actually show that at all?

I don't have any answers here other than to say, "You know, maybe you scientific observers and researchers aren't as smart as you think you are and maybe you're causing more problems than you're solving with your overreliance on data and your compulsions around measuring everything."

Maybe just once in a while, let the measurements be, track no data and just see how the universe works things out.

It's been my experience that often the universe works things out a helluva lot better than humans, in all their arrogance and hubris, do.

I first learned that by reading the Greeks.

Then learned that lesson in my own life.

Now I watch it unfold daily in education and other important issues of the day as humans apply their "solutions" and so-called wisdom to problems and make things worse.

Science is great and certainly I'm not looking for us to go back to reading bird entrails or anything when it comes to making policy decisions.

But I do want to point out how humans aren't as smart as we think we are and our science isn't as good as we think it is.

After all, both have helped give us the world as it is in 2013.

Forget The Bandwidth, Give Schools More Counselors, Psychologists And Social Workers

President Obama wants to increase Internet access and bandwidth in schools.

So does Scott Stringer.

What I am going to say may be heresy in this over-technologized age where everybody is on their cell phones every moment of the day checking their email, Twitter account and Facebook page.

But forget the Internet access and broadband increase for schools.

It's not that important.

Seriously.

Do you know what students really need?

More counselors, school psychologists and social workers.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports the following:

Children’s mental disorders affect boys and girls of all ages, ethnic/racial backgrounds, and regions of the United States.  Previous studies estimate up to 1 in 5 children have mental disorder and a new CDC MMWR Supplement finds that millions of American children live with depression, anxiety, ADHD, autism spectrum disorders, Tourette syndrome or a host of other mental health issues. The MMWR Supplement titled, “Mental Health Surveillance Among Children in the United States, 2005-2011,” is the first-ever report to describe federal efforts on monitoring mental disorders, and presents estimates of the number of children aged 3-17 years with specific mental disorders, compiling information from different data sources covering the period of 2005-2011.

• Millions of American children live with depression, anxiety, ADHD, autism spectrum disorders, Tourette syndrome or a host of other mental health issues.
• ADHD was the most prevalent current diagnosis among children aged 3–17 years.
• Boys were more likely than girls to have ADHD, behavioral or conduct problems, autism spectrum disorders, anxiety, Tourette syndrome, and cigarette dependence whereas adolescent girls were more likely than adolescent boys to have depression or an alcohol use disorder.

Let me add some anecdotal evidence (which I know is no longer valued, as we only privilege that which can be quantified, collected, collated and tracked, but nonetheless here it is):

I am starting my 13th year teaching in a public school. 

In the last few years, I have seen a remarkable increase in students suffering from depression, anxiety, suicidal feelings, eating disorders, alcohol or drug use, and other mental and emotional issues that keep them from reaching their full potentials as both students and human beings.

The increase in these issues surely has been a side effect of the 2008 recession which has made the lives of so many of the families where these children come from more stressful.

Nonetheless, students were facing these mental and emotional issues before the recession started and they'll be facing them long after the unemployment rate drops under 4%.

Our modern society, with a large disparity between have's and have not's, with an overreliance on technology, with many of the old community connections like family, church and school destroyed, with so many people living isolated lives, creates these mental and emotional problems in people.

Instead of trying to solve these issues with more humanity, with more community, with more connectedness in the real world, the people running our country and our states and cities want to give us more technology, more Internet access, more bandwidth.

I have nothing against any of that, indeed, I am writing a blogpost using my Internet bandwidth right now.

But there is more to life and more to education than technology and Internet access and bandwidth.

Something you'll very rarely (or never) hear education reformers say is that our schools are suffering a crisis of the heart and the soul and we need to begin ministering to our children in order to help them adapt to an increasingly competitive and cutthroat world so that they can lead happy, healthy lives.

But it's easier to say "We need to enlarge bandwidth in schools!" than it is to say "We need to help our children heal their hearts and souls of their hurts and angers and sadness so that they do not grow up medicating themselves with drugs, alcohol, food, sex, shopping or other compulsive behaviors."

Alas, many of our children are doing just that.

The CDC says 1 in 5 children may be suffering from mental or emotional disorders.

Given the stigma around these issues, you can bet these numbers are much higher than that.

And we're not going to solve these problems with more bandwidth, Internet access or standardized testing.

We need more counselors, school psychologists and social workers.

In my school, the counselors no longer have the time to counsel to emotional needs.

They're too busy tracking data and test scores.

I have said this before, I will say it again and again until the day I take my last breath:

If you want raise academic achievement in schools, start with the mental and emotional health of the children in those schools.

Children who are mentally, emotionally and physically healthy are ready to learn.

Children who are full of hurt and anger and rage and sadness have a lot of other issues going on that have to be attended to before they can be as ready to learn.

I'm Sure More Standardized Testing And Standardized Rubrics Will Solve This Crisis

In an article entitled What It Takes to Make New College Graduates Employable, Alina Tugend writes the following:

A special report by The Chronicle of Higher Education and American Public Media’s Marketplace published in March found that about half of 704 employers who participated in the study said they had trouble finding recent college graduates qualified to fill positions at their company.

But, surprisingly, it wasn’t necessarily specific technical skills that were lacking. 

“When it comes to the skills most needed by employers, job candidates are lacking most in written and oral communication skills, adaptability and managing multiple priorities, and making decisions and problem solving,” the report said. 

Jaime S. Fall, a vice president at the HR Policy Association, an organization of chief human resources managers from large employers, said these findings backed up what his organization was hearing over and over from employers. 

Young employees “are very good at finding information, but not as good at putting that information into context,” Mr. Fall said. “They’re really good at technology, but not at how to take those skills and resolve specific business problems.” 

This isn’t a dilemma just in this country, but around the world, Ms. Swan said. A global study conducted last year of interviews with 25,000 employers found that nine out of 10 employees believed that colleges were not fully preparing students for the workplace. 

“There were the same problems,” she said. “Problems with collaboration, interpersonal skills, the ability to deal with ambiguity, flexibility and professionalism.”

Replacing the reading of fiction (which helps students to deal with ambiguity, uncertainty and areas of grey in life) with non-fiction, promoting standardized rubrics and grading rules all across the curriculum (as is happening in many schools), replacing most personal response writing and assignments in the ELA classroom with argumentative and informational writing based only upon close textual readings - I'm sure that's going to help students learn collaboration skills, interpersonal skills, the ability to deal with ambiguity, and flexibility.

Oh, wait - no, it probably won't.

Common Core reform will exacerbate these problems.

ELA Common Core developer David Coleman famously said "No one gives a shit what your kids think or feel about anything..." and he proceeded to develop English Language Arts standards that put that particular value into practice.

But if you want kids to grow up to be employees who are flexible, can deal with ambiguity, can work well with others and can adapt to change, you have to help students to deal with their emotions.

This means actually caring about what kids think or feel about things.

That means having assignments and lessons where kids can explore their feelings about personal issues, societal issues, cultural issues and a host of other things.

Too bad David Coleman and the other developers of the Core either didn't know or didn't care about this kind of thing.

Next year we were told there should be very little text to self response in the ELA classroom if teachers want to be rated "effective."

Everything in the ELA classroom must now revolve around close readings of difficult texts, argumentative and informational writing around those texts, and tests that will assess those kinds of skills through the use of standardized rubrics and grading criteria.

You can bet this will not help kids to grow into adults who are flexible, can deal with ambiguity, can work well with others and can adapt to change.

UFT, NYCDOE Join Together For Health Clinic

From the Daily News:

A community-based eye clinic to be housed in a South Bronx school is set to open next school year.

A new vision clinic at PS. 18 John Peter Zenger, will provide eye exams, and fittings and glasses for every student who needs it, school officials announced.

The vision clinic is the result of an initiative between the United Federation of Teachers and the city Department of Education to boost access to social services in public school.
“It feels organic to have the clinic at this site,” said Sophy Aponte, a fifth grade teacher and UFT Chapter Leader at PS 18. “We are working so hard to nurture the whole child. It feels natural that the clinic would be placed in the community with such high need.”

The clinic will be staffed with an onsite optician, optometrist and opthalmic technician. OneSight, the nonprofit arm of the eyewear giant Luxottica, will fund the clinic and staff during its first year, according to Luxottica. Montefiore Medical Center will then administer the vision center as part of PS 18’s school health clinic, Dr. David Appel, director of the Montefiore School of Health Program, said.

“At that point, the hope is the clinic would be fully operational and the funding through insurance reimbursements would sustain the eye clinic,” said Appel.

Luxottica will launch a second vision clinic at PS 188 in Coney Island, Brooklyn, officials said.
Aponte said although the area has a lot of hospitals and medical centers, parents can wait three or four months for an appointment with an eye doctor.

In March, staff from the nonprofit Helen Keller International tested PS 18’s fourth and fifth grade students’ eyes, and out of 167 students, 43 students failed the eye exam, 42 needed glasses right away and four were referred to specialists, Aponte said.

“The need is definitely there,” she said.

About one fourth of school age children have an untreated vision problem, according to the American Optometric Association.

Schools need these kinds of services.

You want test scores to go up?

Provide the psychological, physical, emotional and mental health services needed to ensure that every student is having her/his needs met and test scores will go up.

Calling Mayor Bloomberg

This seems like a good cause:

Hip hop mogul Russell Simmons called for funding for unarmed peacekeepers in schools during a press conference on City Hall's steps today saying, "when underserved communities are at risk, you're all at risk."

The hip hop mogul joined NYC Council members Leroy Comrie, Ruben Wills, Jumaane Williams and Terrie Williams along with NYC nonprofit Life Camp founder Erica Ford to draw attention to gun violence in the black community where he says the issue is being ignored.

"No matter how much we scream it seems that our calls aren't answered," Simmons said.

"The recent Sandy Hook incident put gun violence in the forefront but there's a Sandy Hook every weekend in Chicago."

Citing a bloody weekend in Chicago when 56 young people were shot, Simmons argued that the story was dismissed because it happened in a minority community.

"The Sandy Hook incident and other incidents like it are important and have brought this discussion to the forefront, but still it seems that these kids are left out."

Simmons asked for funding for nonprofit organizations like Life Camp, Man Up and I Love My Life that promote peace through unarmed patrol officers and offer counseling to emotionally troubled people.

"It's a real national problem," Simmons said.

"We have the peacekeepers in 25 cities and they're just getting started but they need funding as well. 

Maybe some of the ed deform billionaires and hedge fundies can put some money to this?

Maybe Mayor Michael "I'm Going To Single-Handedly Save You From the NRA!" Bloomberg can put some money toward this?

Or are testing initiatives and teacher evaluation programs the only things these guys fund?

We Need To Add Social And Emotional Learning To The Curriculum

In an education system that only privileges high test scores and "academic achievement", there were no warning signs that James Holmes needed some kind of help.

Until his test scores went down, of course.

Here is how the Washington Post describes his academic track record:

Before he allegedly walked into the Batman movie early Friday in Aurora, Colo., dressed head to foot in black body armor and carrying a handgun, a shotgun and an assault rifle, James Holmes was a graduate student in neuroscience — a PhD candidate who sat in classes with titles such as “Biological Basis of Psychiatric and Neurological Disorders.”

He was known as a very quiet young man, introverted but pleasant. Holmes, 24, had shown scholarly promise in the recent past. He’d earned a merit scholarship out of high school in a sunny San Diego suburb. He had graduated from college with honors. From there, he’d gone to graduate school at the University of Colorado at Denver.

And then something changed. By this spring, Holmes had begun to struggle with poor test scores. He eventually decided to quit school.

The next step, the alleged descent into horrific violence, remains mysterious.

...

Holmes went to Westview High School in the upscale San Diego neighborhood of Torrey Highlands, where his parents, Robert and Arlene Holmes, moved in 2005. Westview classmate Breanna Hath, who now works as a nurse, said she remembers Holmes as extremely quiet and “really sweet, shy. He didn’t have any creepy vibe about him at all.”

Hath said Holmes lacked self-confidence.

“There were no real girls he was involved with. . . . It seemed he was really into a video game group that hung out together.”

Another classmate, John Kabaci, said, “There was nothing negative or weird about him — he just stuck to himself.”

The theme was repeated by Darryl Guiang, another high school classmate: “He seemed like a really shy kid.”

Holmes earned his undergraduate degree in neuroscience at the University of California at Riverside, graduating with honors in 2010. “He had the capability to do anything he wanted academically,” Timothy White, chancellor of UC-Riverside, said at a news conference Friday.

Holmes appears to have never had a scrape with the law, other than a speeding ticket last year. UC-Riverside said he never got into trouble as an undergraduate.

The photograph of Holmes released by the graduate program in Colorado shows a clean-shaven, boyish young man with a cheerful expression on his face.

A spokeswoman for the San Diego Police Department handed out a statement on behalf of the Holmes family and asked the media to respect its privacy, along with that of neighbors.

“The Holmes family is very upset about all of this. It is a tragic event, and it has taken everyone by surprise,” the police spokeswoman said, adding that the family is “fully cooperating” with investigators. “As you can see from their statement, their hearts go out to the friends and family of those that were involved.”

Holmes kept a low profile while living in an apartment building near the medical campus. Neighbors said they didn’t know him.

On the dating site Adult Friend Finder, a post bore a photo of a man with dyed orange hair who appears to be Holmes. The FBI was investigating Friday night but had not confirmed its authenticity. In the post, the man, “classicjimbo,” describes himself as “looking for a fling or casual sex gal. Am a nice guy. Well, as nice enough of a guy who does these sort of shenanigans.” In another part of the page, he asks: “Will you visit me in prison?”

A neuroscience faculty member at the University of Colorado at Denver, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of privacy concerns, described Holmes as “very quiet, strangely quiet in class” and said he seemed “socially off.” Although Holmes got weak scores on the comprehensive exams last semester, the educator said, the school’s staff wasn’t going to toss him out. Instead, they planned to give him remedial instruction and perhaps put him on academic probation.

You never ever hear the USDOE or education reformers talk about social and emotional learning as an important component of K-12 education.

Oh, sure, they'll talk some about bullying and the importance of preventive education around that, but even then, they mostly use that as an excuse to blame teachers for not catching the bullying when it is happening in schools.

But the USDOE and the education reform movement are much too obsessed with testing and test scores to care much about helping students with social and emotional learning.

Here is how Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) is defined:

"a process for learning life skills, including how to deal with oneself, others and relationships, and work in an effective manner. In dealing with oneself, SEL helps in recognizing our emotions and learning how to manage those feelings. In dealing with others, SEL helps with developing sympathy and empathy for others, and maintaining positive relationships. SEL also focuses on dealing with a variety of situations in a constructive and ethical manner."

Boy, it sure sounds like that is something that not only James Holmes could have used, but also something everybody in our society could use, from the oligarchs on top like Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg who run roughshod over everybody else because they think they're more important than the rest of humanity to the rest of us in the 99% who are left to fight it out in our competitive, free market-based society that privileges only the survival of the fittest.

I took a week of professional development that focused on Social and Emotional Learning earlier this summer, and I must tell you that I am more than ever convinced that this is the way forward not only for the education system but for the culture as well.

Let's face it, scientific advances and innovations come pretty easy to our society.

Learning how to identify personal feelings and work through them in a safe, constructive manner does not.

Given how much we have poisoned the earth and the atmosphere with our scientific advances and innovations, maybe it is time to move away from a societal emphasis on wealth and material accumulation as a sign of success and more to spiritual, emotional and personal development as a sign of evolution.

In education that means getting away from emphasizing testing and test scores.

Now I know that Bloomberg, Gates, Obama, Bush, Duncan, Spellings, Rhee, Klein, Murdoch, Tisch, King, et al. are not going to allow that in the current environment.

Indeed, we are heading toward all-year testing on the state and local level as the new evaluation systems come on line in New York State.

But make no mistake, continuing to emphasize only "academic learning" in the education system will lead us down the road to many more problems - from the kinds of things happening on Wall Street and in business culture to this horror that happened in Aurora early Friday morning.

We need to educate to the whole person - mind, heart, spirit - not just to the mind.

Because James Holmes was doing fine on his test scores throughout most of his academic life, no one ever said "Hey, he looks like he is having trouble relating to others. And he looks like he is hurting over this. Let's see if we can help him to heal this."

I understand that's hard work to do. It requires education officials and teachers willing to heal their own emotional and psychic pains in order to help heal those of their students.

But I believe that is the kind of education that will make the world a better place.

Clearly what we are doing now isn't working.

Just look from Wall Street to the City of London to Aurora to see the evidence of that.