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.

Jeb Bush Channels David Coleman In A Defense Of The Common Core

College Board President David Coleman, one of the architects of the Common Core State Standards, famously told an audience in New York State that one of the things you learn in life when you get older is that nobody gives a shit what you think or feel about stuff.

Jeb Bush channeled that Coleman sentiment in a recent defense of Common Core:

Bush has repeatedly explained the standards, implemented and controlled by the states, are designed to make the United States more competitive with the rest of the world. He said those who oppose the standards support the “status quo,” oppose testing and are worried too much about children’s self-esteem.

“Let me tell you something. In Asia today, they don’t care about children’s self esteem. They care about math, whether they can read – in English – whether they understand why science is important, whether they have the grit and determination to be successful,” Bush said.

“You tell me which society is going to be the winner in this 21st Century: The one that worries about how they feel, or the one that worries about making sure the next generation has the capacity to eat everybody’s lunch?”

We've covered how the education system is in China just a bit here at Perdido Street School blog, but I'm going to revisit two recent posts as a rebuttal to Jeb Bush's jive:

Tell Me Again Why The U.S. Should Mimic The Chinese Education System?

A lot of these suicide stories are coming from South Korea, another country with a high stakes education system that leads to an awful lot of stress and pressure on children and teens, but this one's from China:

Surveillance cameras have caught the shocking moment an under-pressure Chinese student jumped to his death during class.

Heart-stopping footage claims to show the at first motionless boy suddenly leaving his desk, running over to a ledge and leaping out.

His actual jump occurs out of shot, and was not filmed due to the camera's angle.

But the devastated reaction of his fellow classmates, who sprint over to see what's happened before pacing up and down with their heads in their hands, appears to suggest he had tried to commit suicide.

A commenter at the Daily News writes:

How much longer are we going to pretend that children are something to ignore, mistreat, and mis-educate..... This child was coerced into believing this test was so important that combined with the rest of the stress he was feeling he ended his life. Here in the US the children are equally mistreated but they are ignored and mistreated along with being misled.

The older you get the more you realize it's not that big of a deal, and that you should be focusing on aspects of education that actually aren't in the curriculum. This common core crap and the overstressing of test results are completely destroying our children's futures.

And that's absolutely what the plutocrats in power want.

 

And this one:

Many In China Hate The Chinese Education System - Even If Arne And Barack Love It!

From The Guardian:

The streets surrounding Shijia primary school in Beijing were mobbed by a crowd of parents so dense that cars were obliged to beat a retreat.

At 3.45pm on Friday, 11-year-old Zou Tingting, five minutes late, bounded through the school's west gate and into her waiting mother's arms. Tingting's classes were over, but her day was just beginning – she had an hour of homework, plus lessons in ping pong, swimming, art, calligraphy and piano.

Tingting's mother, Huang Chunhua, said that, like many Chinese mothers, she once considered Tingting's academic performance her top priority; now she realises the importance of a well-rounded education. "I've seen British curricular materials, and I'm actually kind of jealous," she said. "British teachers guide students to discover things on their own – they don't just feed them the answers, like in China."

In recent weeks British parents and educators have been in a panic about the discrepancy between the Chinese education system and the UK's. In December the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released the 2012 results for its triennial Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) test – a reading, maths and science examination administered to half a million 15-year-olds in 65 countries. Shanghai students topped the rankings; the UK ranked 26th.

Next week education minister Elizabeth Truss will lead a "fact-finding mission" to Shanghai to learn the secrets of China's success. She plans to adjust the UK's education policy accordingly.

Yet Chinese parents and educators see their own system as corrupt, dehumanising, pressurised and unfair. In fact, many are looking to the west for answers. Huang said that some parents bribe Shijia primary school to admit their children (though she declined to say whether she had done so herself).

Tingting attends an expensive cramming school at weekends, leaving her tired. She will probably have to abandon extracurricular activities in high school to devote more time to the college admission exam, called the gaokao. Many parents consider the gruelling nine-hour test a sorting mechanism that will determine the trajectory of their children's lives.

Chinese experts are also less impressed than Truss by the Pisa scores. "Even though Shanghai students scored well on the test, this doesn't mean that Shanghai's education system doesn't have any problems," said Lao Kaisheng, a professor in the education department of Beijing Normal University. "In fact, it's the opposite."

As long as China's education system remains vast but resource-constrained, Lao added, its schools will default to testing as a reliable indicator of competence. "The education system here puts a heavy emphasis on rote memorisation, which is great for students' test-taking ability but not for their problem-solving and leadership abilities or their interpersonal skills," he said. "Chinese schools just ignore these things."

Read the whole article - this is an important piece of journalism that gets at the lie that Asian education systems like the one's in China or South Korea, are vastly outperforming public schools in the United States or Britain.

We keep hearing from Duncan, Obama, et al. that the Chinese or the South Koreans are vastly outperforming us.

We hear the same from Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein et al.

But the truth is much more complex than the test scores these deformers hawk.

Later we'll take a look at the epidemic of suicides in South Korea and the misery many children in the South Korean education system feel over their circumstances.

I've asked this before, I'll as it again - is this the kind of education system we want to mimic here in the United States?

How Education Reform Is Harming The Health Of Children

There is a horrific story in the NY Post this morning about a rash of suicides involving NYC school children over the last seven weeks:

The city’s public schools are in the grip of a suicide epidemic.

Ten students have taken their own lives in the past seven weeks, according to remarks made Saturday by Chancellor Carmen Fariña.

“As chancellor, I’ve been on the job seven weeks, and there have already been 10 reported suicides. We cannot allow those,” she told 250 new principals at Stuyvesant HS during a private meeting.

“I get those e-mails all the time. And it makes me heartsick.”

The tragic statistic — which amounts to more than one suicide per week — has not been released publicly. The Post obtained a recording of Fariña’s address.

None of the suicides occurred on school property, Department of Education spokeswoman Margie Feinberg said later Saturday. She could not immediately provide the ages or schools of the children.

Chancellor Farina is responding to this epidemic of suicides:

In her remarks, Fariña implored principals to identify lonely and troubled kids. She related how, as a principal, she’d single out such students for Principal for a Day activities, taking them on her Friday rounds and giving them individual encouragement.

“The DOE is taking this very seriously and has provided information recently to principals and networks to help prepare and support school communities for these traumatic times, in addition to training provided each school year,” Feinberg said.

A spokeswoman for the city’s principals union said the outbreak was a shock to her.

“I’m surprised,” said Chiara Coletti, of the Council of Supervisors and Administrators. “If I heard of one or two in the last couple of years, that would be a lot. [Ten] sounds like a lot to me.”

City Health Department stats show youth suicides are rising, with suicide the third leading cause of death for New Yorkers ages 15 to 24. In 2010, 58 people in that age group took their lives. In 2011, the toll was up to 64, and in 2012 it reached 66.

The stresses on children these days have hit pressure cooker levels.

Many NYC school children come from families still struggling mightily with the effects of the recession and the economy and all the problems that come with that struggle.

It's a dog eat dog economy out there, with many people being tossed by the wayside and left there for good.

When children come to school, there is no change from the dog eat dog world - it's all Common Core rigor and assessments and argumentative writing and the like all the day long, with children being told over and over that in order to be "college and career ready" they must get their test scores as high as they can go.

The message at school in the Era Of Education Reform is "You Are Your Data Points" - in some cases, this is the subtle message, but when kids have their test scores placed on data walls in the classrooms or school hallways, it's as overt a message as can be.

In the best of times, children can be mean to each other, but you add the pressure cooker stresses of a bad economy with high stakes schooling and you can bet half a dozen foreclosed mortgages that children are going to act out in response.

This means more instances of bullying, cyber bullying, and fighting when they're acting out against each other.

It means more problems with alcohol or drug use, eating disorders, cutting (physical harm) when they're acting out on themselves.

Many children are starving from a lack of physical, emotional and spiritual nourishment and one of  the very places where they should be getting that nourishment - school - has turned into a toxic environment of rote Common Core learning and high stakes assessment for students, teachers and the school itself.

And don't kid yourself about how much damage education reform is doing to children - when they no longer do art in art class or no longer do physical activity in gym because school administrations are enforcing "Common Core rigor" in those classes and kids are spending the time reading informational texts and writing argumentative essays even in art and gym class, there is damage being done.

In English class, there is no more text-to-self writing or discussion.  The NYSED ELA modules do not allow for any of that sort of learning - everything is rote text-to-text learning, rote close reading exercises, rote assessments after every lesson.

Children are expressing despair over the direction schools have gone in the past few years (with Internet memes of children crying over their Common Core homework making the rounds all the time), but there is little that school staff can do to mitigate the problems.

Many counselors no longer have time to counsel students on anything except academics and grades.  Many teachers no longer have time to spend talking with children outside of class because of the extra compliance work associated with Governor Cuomo's APPR teacher evaluation system. With all the extra meetings, obsessive lesson planning, curriculum mapping, focus groups, professional learning community meetings, Common Core professional development and artifact collecting, there is no time to just talk to kids and find out what's going on with them.

APPR has done damage beyond the taking of time from teachers that could be spent working with students - it has added more testing and more high stakes to the school year, with added performance assessments coming in fall and spring and the stresses of those assessments falling onto students as they know if they don't do well, their teachers might get fired by the "student lobbyist" in Albany.

So given all of this insanity going on these days, it is not a surprise to me that more and more children are suffering from depression and a lack of physical, emotional and spiritual nourishment.

It would be nice to say that Chancellor Farina's directive that administrators scrutinize students in their schools in order to catch those who are falling prey to depression and despair, but the truth is, there are so many that I have seen over the past few years that I'm not sure how principals, teachers and counselors address the epidemic given how poisoned the school system is with high stakes so-called rigor and reform.

Until the insanity of the high stakes around testing is ended, until the rote learning of the Common Core is replaced with individual-centered learning that allows for personal growth, until the obsession with argumentative writing and close reading of complex texts is replaced with a broad arts, humanities and science curriculum that allows for children to express themselves in many different ways, the despair and depression that is now rife in the school system is not going to end.

There isn't much educators can do about the economy at large that causes stress on children.

But there is something we can do about the education reforms that are harming millions of children around this state and a million+ in this city.

Let us take back our education system from the emotionally-stunted misanthropic education reformers who tell us that no one gives a shit what children think and feel and return it to people who know that children are whole beings who must be nourished physically, emotionally and spiritually with a rich, broad, diverse curriculum in a school environment that is welcoming and nurturing.

Tell Me Again Why The U.S. Should Mimic The Chinese Education System?

A lot of these suicide stories are coming from South Korea, another country with a high stakes education system that leads to an awful lot of stress and pressure on children and teens, but this one's from China:

Surveillance cameras have caught the shocking moment an under-pressure Chinese student jumped to his death during class.

Heart-stopping footage claims to show the at first motionless boy suddenly leaving his desk, running over to a ledge and leaping out.

His actual jump occurs out of shot, and was not filmed due to the camera's angle.

But the devastated reaction of his fellow classmates, who sprint over to see what's happened before pacing up and down with their heads in their hands, appears to suggest he had tried to commit suicide.

A commenter at the Daily News writes:

How much longer are we going to pretend that children are something to ignore, mistreat, and mis-educate..... This child was coerced into believing this test was so important that combined with the rest of the stress he was feeling he ended his life. Here in the US the children are equally mistreated but they are ignored and mistreated along with being misled.

The older you get the more you realize it's not that big of a deal, and that you should be focusing on aspects of education that actually aren't in the curriculum. This common core crap and the overstressing of test results are completely destroying our children's futures.

And that's absolutely what the plutocrats in power want.

Tom Friedman, Arne Duncan Miss This Part Of The South Korea Story

Tom Friedman wrote another doozy of a column this morning, blaming lazy American children and parents for the so-called education crisis in American schools.

He used an Arne Duncan speech from 2009 to drive his point home - American students and parents are lazy, American schools are bad.

Unlike, say, schools, parents and students in South Korea:

“In 2009, President Obama met with President Lee of South Korea and asked him about his biggest challenge in education. President Lee answered without hesitation: parents in South Korea were ‘too demanding.’ Even his poorest parents demanded a world-class education for their children, and he was having to spend millions of dollars each year to teach English to students in first grade, because his parents won’t let him wait until second grade. ... I [wish] our biggest challenge here in the U.S. was too many parents demanding excellent schools.

“I want to pose one simple question to you: Does a child in South Korea deserve a better education than your child?” Duncan continued. “If your answer is no ... then your work is cut out for you. Because right now, South Korea — and quite a few other countries — are offering students more, and demanding more, than many American districts and schools do. And the results are showing, in our kids’ learning and in their opportunities to succeed, and in staggeringly large achievement gaps in this country. Doing something about our underperformance will mean raising your voice — and encouraging parents who aren’t as engaged as you to speak up. Parents have the power to challenge educational complacency here at home. Parents have the power to ask more of their leaders — and to ask more of their kids.”

Here's that world class South Korean school system in a nutshell:

SEOUL: Nearly 140 South Korean school students killed themselves in 2012, according to a new government report that cited family problems, depression and exam stress as the main triggers.

The report, published this week by the Education Ministry, covered all students from elementary to high school.

The figure of 139 suicides recorded last year was the lowest for three years, but still worryingly high in a country with one of the world’s highest overall suicide rates.

Of the total, 88 were high school students, 48 from middle school and just three from elementary school.

About 40 percent were motivated by family-related problems, while 16 percent were triggered by depression and 11.5 percent by exam-related stress.

Dozens of teenagers kill themselves every year around the time of South Korea’s hyper-competitive college entrance exam, unable to cope with the intense scholastic and parental pressure to secure a place in a top university.

Last year’s student suicide figure compared with 202 suicides in 2009, 146 in 2010 and 150 in 2011.

South Korea has the highest suicide rate among members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, with an average of 33.5 people per 100,000 taking their lives in 2010, far higher than Hungary (23.3) and Japan (21.2) which ranked second and third.

The figure for South Korea equates to nearly 50 suicides a day and shows a steep increase from 2000 when the average incidence of suicide was 13.6 people per 100,000.

The capital Seoul has installed anti-suicide monitoring devices on bridges over the Han river after 196 people jumped to their deaths last year.

South Korea - a country that leads in international test score competitions, child and teen suicides and overall rates of people killing themselves.

Hell, so many people were killing themselves, they had to put up anti-suicide monitoring devices on the freaking bridges.

And this is the school system and school culture Duncan and Friedman want to bring here?

Teacher Kills himself After LA Times Declares Him "Ineffective"

Now the ed deform movement has blood on its hands:

A missing schoolteacher from South Gate apparently committed suicide in the Angeles National Forest, it was reported Sunday.

Rigoberto Ruelas, 39, a teacher at Miramonte Elementary School, was last seen last Sunday dropping off a present for his sister's birthday, according to the South Gate Police Department.

Ruelas notified the school he would need a substitute teacher assigned for his classes on Monday and Tuesday, but he did not show up to work on Wednesday and had not called in, police said. His family reported him missing that day.

Ruelas' body was found just before 9 a.m. in the forest, said Deputy Jeff Gordon of the Sheriff's Headquarters Bureau.
"(Sheriff's deputies) had been conducting training exercises near the Big Tujunga Canyon area of the Angeles National Forest," he said. "On Big Tujunga Canyon Road near mile marker 6.6, they located a vehicle connected to Rigoberto Ruelas, who had been reported missing. A subsequent search in the ravine approximately 100 feet below a nearby bridge lead to the discovery of Rigoberto Ruelas, who was deceased."

Suicide was suspected, authorities reportedly said.

Family members told a TV station that he scored low on a teacher rating report recently published by the Los Angeles Times, and that may have caused Ruelas to go missing.

The newspaper's database lists Ruelas as being "less effective than average overall," "Less effective than average in math," and "average in English."

The Times' analysis of teacher performance took into account available student scores on standardized tests between 2002 and 2009.

"The value-added scores reflect a teacher's effectiveness at raising standardized test scores and, as such, capture only one aspect of a teacher's work," reads a disclaimer on the online database of teachers.

"Although value-added measures do not capture everything that goes into making a good teacher or school, The Times decided to make the ratings available because they bear on the performance of public employees who provide an important service, and in the belief that parents and the public have a right to the information," according to the website.

The study looked at about 6,000 third-, fourth- and fifth-grade teachers at 470 Los Angeles elementary schools.

Family members reportedly said Ruelas had been a teacher for 14 years, with near perfect attendance.

14 year veteran, near perfect attendance, declared "ineffective" by the scum at the LA Times using their value-added jive, now he's dead.

Wonder if the education experts at the NBC Education Nation will talk about this tomorrow.

No, who am I kidding.

I know they won't.

They don't care about stuff like this.

Hell, they LIKE stuff like this.

Nothing like cutting payroll AND avoiding pension payouts.

Not enough bad stuff can happen to these people.

Seriously.

POSTSCRIPT: Write to the journalists who worked on the LA Times value-added analysis article and let 'em know they have blood on their hands.

E-mail address format: Firstname.Lastname@latimes.com

Here are the names of the journalists:

Jason Song, Jason Felch and Doug Smith

I am not an advocate of violence, but tonight I feel like doing a value-added analysis upside their heads.