How America Is Breaking Public Education (?)

Ethan Siegel, writing and depicted below, somehow manages to combine unoriginality with being a bit of a nut.  The image below is only one of his eccentric depictions of himself.



Siegel has reduced the problems of education to only one factor -- albeit a factor popular among teachers.  He says teachers need to be treated like professionals but that they are not. What teacher union would disagree with that?

Being Left-leaning, however, Siegel has not thought to ask WHY teachers are inapty treated.  To describe a problem seems to him a sufficient contribution without offering any solution to it. If you can't call "racism" as a response to some problem, Leftists are stumped.

And for anybody with experience in the education sector, the reason for the situation is obvious:  Most public school teachers are dummies.  Except for a few dedicated souls, those who teach are those who could get no other work deserving of a college education.  A bright graduate will look to teach only as a last resort, and  will very rarely drop to that last level.  The "Teach for America" system is an explicit recognition that bright graduates typically don't go into teaching.

OK.  That's the first part of the explanation.  Now we ask WHY teaching is such an unattractive job in most places today.  It helps to answer that to consider some places where teachers are high quality -- say South Korea.  Teachers there mostly have higher degrees and are something of an elite.  How come?  Because teaching has long been a rewarding and prestigious occupation and there is nothing in South Korea to disrupt that.  Even from ancient Sumeria we have a depiction of a parent giving a teacher a fleece -- a bit better than an apple for the teacher.

So what has gone wrong in the Anglosphere countries of recent times?  Answer: Leftist destruction of discipline.  Teachers now have very few disciplinary options available and a few unruly students can now totally destroy the classroom experience.  Teaching becomes a constant battle to get the attention of the students.  In many public schools teachers are little more than child-minders.  They can do very little teaching. So we have the experience of places like California where students can graduate High School while being barely able to read and write

And who would want to work in that environment?  Only those with no other options.  So as older teachers retire, classrooms have been left in the hands of people with very little in the way of educational achievement themselves.  Politicians talk about demanding that admission to their teacher-training colleges include only candidates with good GPAs etc but if they insisted on that, they would soon run out of teachers.

But good classroom management is within living memory so higher educational standards are possible -- but only if Leftist "reforms" of the last 30 years or so are rolled back

The ultimate dream of public education is incredibly simple. Students, ideally, would go to a classroom, receive top-notch instruction from a passionate, well-informed teacher, would work hard in their class, and would come away with a new set of skills, talents, interests, and capabilities. Over the past few decades in the United States, a number of education reforms have been enacted, designed to measure and improve student learning outcomes, holding teachers accountable for their students' performances. Despite these well-intentioned programs, including No Child Left Behind, Race To The Top, and the Every Student Succeeds Act, public education is more broken than ever. The reason, as much as we hate to admit it, is that we've disobeyed the cardinal rule of success in any industry: treating your workers like professionals.

Everyone who's been through school has had experiences with a wide variety of teachers, ranging from the colossally bad to the spectacularly good. There are a few qualities universally ascribed to the best teachers, and the lists almost always include the following traits:

* a passion for their chosen subject,

* a deep, expert-level knowledge of the subject matter they're teaching,

* a willingness to cater to a variety of learning styles and to employ a variety of educational techniques,

* and a vision for what a class of properly educated students would be able to know and demonstrate at the end of the academic year.

Yet despite knowing what a spectacular teacher looks like, the educational models we have in place actively discourage every one of these.

The first and largest problem is that every educational program we've had in place since 2002 — the first year that No Child Left Behind took effect — prioritizes student performance on standardized tests above all else. Test performance is now tied to both school funding, and the evaluation of teachers and administrators. In many cases, there exists no empirical evidence to back up the validity of this approach, yet it's universally accepted as the way things ought to be.

Imagine, for a moment, that this weren't education, but any other job. Imagine how you'd feel if you found yourself employed in such a role.

Requiring teachers to follow a script in a variety of educational settings is one of the surest ways to squash creativity and kill student interest. It is a more widespread practice than ever before.

You have, on any given day, a slew of unique problems to tackle. These include how to reach, motivate, and excite the people whose education and performance you're responsible for. It includes imparting them with skills that will enable them to succeed in the world, which will be vastly different from state-to-state, county-to-county, and even classroom-to-classroom. Gifted students, average students, special needs students, and students with severe disabilities are all often found in the same class, requiring a deft touch to keep everyone motivated and engaged. Moreover, students often come to class with problems that place them at a competitive disadvantage, such as food insecurity, unaddressed physical, dental, and mental health issues, or home life responsibilities that severely curtail their ability to invest in academics.

If your goal was to achieve the greatest learning outcome possible for each of your students, what would you need to be successful? You'd need the freedom to decide what to teach, how to teach it, how to evaluate and assess your students, and how to structure your classroom and curriculum. You'd need the freedom to make individualized plans or separate plans for students who were achieving at different levels. You'd need the resources — financial, time, and support resources — to maximize the return on your efforts. In short, you'd need the same thing that any employee in any role needs: the freedom and flexibility to assess your own situation, and make empowered decisions.

In public education, if teachers do that, they are penalized to an extraordinary extent. Passion is disincentivized, as whatever aspects your passionate about take a back seat to what will appear on the standardized test. Expert knowledge is thrown to the wayside, as curiosity and engagement is seen as a distraction. A vision for what successful students look like is narrowed down to one metric alone: test performance. And a teacher's evaluation of what skills are important to develop is treated as less than nothing, as anything that fails to raise a student's test score is something that everyone — the teacher, the school, and the student — are all penalized for.

If this were common practice in any other industry, we'd be outraged. How dare you presume to micromanage the experts, the very people you hired to do a difficult job full of unique challenges to the best of their abilities! Yet in education, we have this unrealistic dream that a scripted, one-sized-fits-all strategy will somehow lead to success for all. That we can somehow, through just the right set of instructions, transform a mediocre teacher into a great one.

This hasn't worked in any walk of life, and it doesn't work in education. If we were serious about improving the quality of public education in this country (or any country), we wouldn't focus on a one-size-fits-all model, whether at the federal or state level. We would fully fund schools everywhere, regardless of test scores, economic concerns, or teacher quality. We would make a concerted effort to pay desirable wages to extremely qualified, expert-knowledge-level educators, and give them the support resources they need to succeed. And we'd evaluate them across a variety of objective and subjective metrics, with any standardized testing components making up only a small part of an evaluation.

The most important goal of an education is something we rarely talk about: the set of skills and the capabilities of thinking and problem solving that a student acquires. Part of what makes an adult successful in this world is the unique toolkit they have for approaching, attacking, and defeating the challenges they face in this world. A diversity of experiences and methods among the population is a great way to ensure that more problems can be solved; absolute uniformity is as bad for human society as monoculture is for agriculture. The greatest advances in science and society have come about because of the unique backgrounds and approaches some of the greatest minds in history possessed and utilized. Unless our goal is societal stagnation, we need to encourage creativity and excellence, not only in our students, but in our educators as well.

Like any job involving an interaction with other people, teaching is as much of an art as it is a science. By taking away the freedom to innovate, we aren't improving the outcomes of the worst teachers or even average teachers; we're simply telling the good ones that their skills and talents aren't needed here. By refusing to treat teachers like professionals — by failing to empower them to teach students in the best way that they see fit — we demonstrate the simple fact that we don't trust them to do a good job, or even to understand what doing a good job looks like. Until we abandon the failed education model we've adopted since the start of the 21st century, public education will continue to be broken. As long as we insist on telling teachers what to teach and how to teach it, we'll continue to fail our children.

SOURCE 





Why history education is central to the survival of democracy

Canadians are at war over their history. The CBC series Canada: The Story of Us caused outrage in spring 2017 with the choices made for its historical storyline. Critics called the series anglocentric and said it omitted the roles of the Acadians and Mi'kmaq people.

Statues and names of prominent Canadians have also been the centre of vigorous debate across the country this year. One of these debates has focused on the statue of Edward Cornwallis in a public park in Halifax — the military officer who founded Halifax for the British in 1749, but also offered a cash bounty to anyone who killed an Indigenous person. They have also included calls from the the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario (EFTO) to remove so-called “architect of genocide” Sir John A. Macdonald’s name from elementary schools across the province.

Amid debates over the renaming of public buildings across the country, our public history is being hotly contested. And Canada is not alone. As protests and counter protests about the public commemoration of Civil War figures in the United States demonstrate, history is a significant public concern in many places around the world.

For history educators like myself, the good news is that the public obviously cares about history very much. The bad news is that we can’t seem to talk about it without resorting to name calling, vitriol and sometimes — as evident in recent events in Charlottesville — violence.

I believe the teaching of history to be more important than ever. History — if funded and taught well — can teach a tolerance for ambiguity. It can provide people with strategies to help them think through complex issues.

War, and war memorials in particular, are central to collective memory. Taught well, war offer windows into the construction of personal and national identity.

Between virtue and evil

Our public discourse has become dangerously polarized — making democratic deliberation about collective memory, history and the common good almost impossible.

Reflecting on the 2017 French election, French political scientist Nicole Bacharan described the worry and stress resulting from, “the division of the country and the hatred that came out of groups of people who can’t discuss anything, can’t understand each other, can’t talk.”

Bacharan is just one of many voices lamenting the poverty of civic discourse in democratic jurisdictions around the world. The debates about public history installations are one manifestation of that wider trend. I think they illustrate an important aspect of this toxic polarization — a seeming inability to handle nuance.

Citizens want things kept simple. In their view, historical figures or events represented in public memorials are either iconic representations of virtue and progress that should stand for all time, or they are manifestations of evil and should be torn down. There seems to be no room for complex alternatives.

The trouble is, life is complicated and full of nuance. We like the dividing line between our heroes and villains to be clear but as Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn points out in The Gulag Archipelago:

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Teach history, teach complexity

I am convinced that contemporary approaches to history education can help citizens develop the tolerance for complexity and ambiguity necessary to engage effectively in civic life.

Over the past half century there has been an explosion in theoretical and empirical research related to the teaching of history, and there is a growing consensus around the world about what constitutes effective teaching and learning in the field. Some key elements of that consensus include:

* History education must move beyond the transmission of what historians know to include attention to historical method — how historians know. This is often referred to as historical thinking.

* History education must include attention to historical consciousness, or how history and memory work to shape how we think about ourselves, our communities and our place in the world.

* There are many places where history can be learned, including classrooms, historical sites, museums, patriotic ceremonies and family events.

* History education must engage students in thinking about what constitutes evidence about the past and how we assess and construct accounts about the past.

* Research evidence makes it clear that students, even those in primary school, can learn to think in sophisticated and complex ways about the past and its relationship to the present and the future.

* Effective history education requires well-educated and skilled teachers.

History as educational priority

While this consensus exists among researchers and many history teachers around the world, conditions in the classroom or lecture theatre are often very different.

One key issue is that education in social studies — and history education in particular — has diminished as a priority area in public education in Canada and around the world.

Traditionally social studies was considered one of the core areas of the curriculum, but the policy changes in the past 30 years — in New Brunswick, across Canada and globally — has been toward subjects considered more immediately useful for fostering employment, particularly in technical fields.

There are several other key factors limiting the implementation of effective history education. These include a persistent focus on nation building rather than developing critical skills, and assigning teachers with little or no history background to teach courses in the area.

War and collective memory

Colleagues and I at the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society at the University of New Brunswick have developed a broad program in history education to complement the Centre’s well-established work in history.

Central to this initiative is collaboration between historians, history educators and teachers — to develop materials and approaches that implement the consensus on effective history education described above.

We believe the theme of war and society offers a potentially effective way to do this for several reasons:

* Topics in the area are often presented as iconic and, as Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan points out in The Uses and Abuses of History, part of the purpose of teaching history is to challenge and investigate icons.

* War and war memorials are often central to collective memory and they provide a window into the construction of personal and national identity.

* War shows up in school curricula, museums, family lore and community memorials. This provides the opportunity to bring the community into the classroom, as well as consider relationships among the past, present and future.

* Virtually all elements of the study of war and society, including community memorials, are contested. This provides opportunities for students to examine diverse historical perspectives.

* The issues involved are multilayered and complex. As historian Tim Cook points out in his recent book about the Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge: “Vimy, like all legends, is a layered skein of stories, myths, wishful thinking and conflicting narratives.”

Research from around the world shows that fostering the abilities of young citizens to grapple with these complex and difficult questions lays a foundation for enhanced civic discourse in the future.

We do not want to end debates about our history; we do hope to make them more substantive and fruitful.

SOURCE 






College Republicans Kicked Out Of Coffee Shop For Wearing MAGA Hats

A coffee shop owner gave college Republicans five minutes to get out of the shop because of their MAGA hats, according to a Friday video.

The unnamed owner of Rodrigue’s Coffee at Fordham University in New York kicked the college Republicans out because the MAGA hats allegedly violated the shop’s “safe space policy,” reported Campus Reform. “I am protecting my customers,” said the owner.

“We are your customers,” responded a member of the college Republicans. “We bought something.”

“I don’t want people like you supporting this club. No one here wants people like you supporting our club,” the owner told the group. “I am giving you five minutes.”

When one student asked for a refund, the owner said “you had some coffee … do not try to outsmart me.”

One of the college Republicans asked the owner to explain how the MAGA hat violated the safe space policy, to which the owner responded by suggesting it stood for “fascism! Nazis! You have three minutes.”

Rodrigue’s Coffee Shop’s “safe space policy” instructs customers to “not make assumptions about someone’s gender, sexuality, race, class, or experiences. Be aware of your identity, while being considerate of the personhood of your peers.”

“We went there because we wanted to test the unwritten rule that conservatives were banned from that coffee shop,” said one Fordham College Republican to Campus Reform.”We went there and just started doing some homework and studying. Then we were asked to leave.”

The college Republican asserted that, as a student who paid over $70,000 in tuition per year, he should be able to use campus buildings and express his political views in them.

“Rodrigues is a student-operated part of our student-led Campus Activities Board and advised by Student Affairs staff,” said Bob Howe, Fordham’s assistant vice president for communications, to The Daily Caller News Foundation. “There is no University safe space policy, nor one that excludes any members of the Fordham community from any public spaces on the basis of their political views.”

Howe told TheDCNF that Fordham values a diversity of opinions and said that the university is still looking into the occurrence and will appropriately sanction students who may have infringed upon the school’s code of conduct.

TheDCNF reached out to Rodrigue’s Coffee Shop for comment, but received none in time for press.

SOURCE