I remember how it was -- JR
New York City public schools sent top educators to Baltimore last week to learn how to implement a new literacy curriculum.
Yes, you read that right: Baltimore! Next we’ll be sending cops to Chicago to brush up on homicide prevention.
The city’s educators chose Baltimore — a city where only 19% of students are proficient in literacy — to learn about “Wit & Wisdom,” one of Chancellor David Banks’ new reading curriculums.
They might’ve been better off simply visiting Manhattan School District 2, which covers the Upper East Side down to Battery Park City.
The heartbreaking educational failures in Baltimore, particularly the staggeringly low reading scores, mean generations of students have been deprived of the simple joy of reading books — and of course, of meaningful employment in any job that requires literacy.
As a mom of four public-school students in District 2 schools, a member of numerous Parent Associations and School Leadership Teams and a former president and current member of the district’s Community Education Council, I well know of its remarkable history and formidable academic strengths.
For decades, educators from around the country, and indeed the world, have been flocking to District 2 to learn from our teachers about our teaching methods.
The year before the COVID pandemic cruelly and unnecessarily closed schools and suspended state testing, District 2 achieved a 75% English Language Arts proficiency rate, the city’s highest.
Student success has been longstanding and consistent.
District 2 teachers and staff were encouraged to aim for excellence and to reward hard work and merit in students, and it resulted in an impressive array of highly coveted schools with innovative programs and incomparable strengths.
The district’s oft-discussed screened middle and high schools were the creation of Anthony Alvarado and were explicitly designed to staunch the 1980s attrition of public-school families departing the school system.
Chancellor Banks is facing the exact same crisis today, as over 120,000 families have fled the city public-school system and kindergarten enrollment numbers plummet.
School closures and mergers are now on the agenda, thanks to lower enrollment.
But instead of looking to the obvious and aiming to replicate the successful methods to attract and retain families, Banks’ team of crony advisers devised a $21 million ad campaign to boost enrollment.
When District 2 actively emphasized merit, hard work and academic achievement and freed schools to deliver their impressive results, families stayed and enrollment exploded.
The boom was so large it required several new elementary schools, and the district even built a new middle school — with the largest student capacity.
Yet when these priorities came under attack from the anti-merit policies of former Mayor Bill de Blasio and his identitarian-obsessed Chancellor Richard Carranza, who replaced good practices with lottery-number admissions schemes and social-justice narratives that pitted people against each other based on skin color — families fled.
Wit & Wisdom, the curriculum city educators were sent to learn about in Baltimore, is one of three reading curricula Banks offered district leaders.
Many educators were surprised District 2 selected it, as it’s not considered the strongest of the trio.
On the other hand, they and parents were thrilled to see the end of the disastrous era of Lucy Calkins’ Reading Writing Workshop, which rejected phonics and left so many families seeking literacy support outside school hours.
Banks’ focus on literacy and his willingness to get rid of an entrenched program failing so many students and families is commendable, but it’s insufficient.
He also needs to realize that one-size-fits-all planning that seeks to achieve equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity will cheat a lot kids and turn away many parents.
The chancellor should ensure that superintendents in high-achieving districts listen to both the departing parents as well as those who’ve stayed, when we say, “end the lottery” and “restore and rebuild honors programs.”
If given the opportunity, students in District 2, and districts all over this city, can and will dazzle us with their skills, willingness to work hard and achieve great results.
***************************************************
Michigan Tech University professor Carl Blair is slammed for blasting conservative students as 'childish, stupid, homophobic, dumb, racist twits'
University bosses have ordered a liberal professor at Michigan Tech to calm down after he launched into a furious rant about his freedom-loving students commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Dr Carl Blair was triggered when the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) staged a 'Freedom Week' on the Houghton campus to mark the 34th anniversary of the Cold War's end.
Events entitled 'Celebrating Our Veterans' and 'The Victims of Socialism' prompted the archeology professor to lash out at students in class, seemingly unaware that one was recording him.
'It was childish, stupid, homophobic, dumb, racist twits,' he told them, 'that's the polite version.' 'It was wrong, it was tacky, stupid, uncollegial, really bad taste, and it shows what a bunch of ying yangs they are,' he continued.
'You know, it's too bad you all have to deal with things like that. Wasted half my morning dealing with things like that. It's annoying.'
To promote their event the group constructed a model of the graffiti-splattered Berlin Wall erected by Communist East Germany in 1961 to stop its citizens fleeing to the West.
Its fall in 1989 was widely celebrated around the world and marked for many the end of the Communist threat to Europe.
But that too sparked fury at the former mining school where one student tried to destroy the group's exhibit.
'We stand by free speech on all campuses across the United States,' the group said in a statement. 'We do so in the face of insults from a professor and others who think First Amendment protections only apply to their worldview.
'The student who vandalized our display has the right to free speech, but went too far, endangering people and damaging property.'
The university was the scene of a furious row two years ago when computer engineering professor Jeffrey Burl claimed he had been 'systematically discriminated against for 40 years for being a white man'.
He demanded an apology from the college after it passed a resolution criticizing 'anti-Blackness and systemic racism' in both the university and society.
'Simple statistical analysis will demonstrate that Michigan Tech's hiring practices are biased against white males,' he wrote.
'At Michigan Tech, I have seen no signs of discrimination against women and people of color.'
Dr Blair, who specializes in Roman and Anglo-Saxon England, describes himself on the university website as 'the most experienced experimental archaeology metal smelter in the world'.
But he has attracted mixed reviews on the student website ratemyprofessors.com with one describing him as 'Incredibly pretentious and rude', and another calling him 'straight up insufferable'.
'All he did was talk about how great socialism could be and was so confused as to why people fear communism,' claimed a third.
Blair claimed his targets in YAF were deliberately being provocative to trigger a clampdown by university authorities.
'There are, quite bluntly, certain faculty members who are hoping the students will be censored for this,' he said.
'Because then they can go off and say and pretend "Oh we're victims, you're restricting our, you know, freedom of speech, we should have, we have a constitutional right to be insulting, violent and threatening. How dare you restrict our speech?"
'That's not what college should be about,' he continued.
'You know, it should be a place where you could learn, experience, do interesting things, have interesting opportunities – hint, hint, study away – uh, rather than wasting your time and having to address idiots. 'They're idiots out there. Sorry, that's life.'
The university has refused to be drawn into the row, but it issued a barbed hint that Blair should mind his manners.
'As a flagship technological university with a strong research focus, Michigan Tech vigorously supports freedom of speech and academic freedom,' a spokesman told Fox News. 'With this, we expect an environment of respect and civility, even more so within our classrooms.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12758289/Michigan-Tech-Carl-blair-YAF-berlin-wall.html
*******************************************************Universities caned over ‘woke’ degrees for trainee teachers
Universities are indoctrinating trainee teachers in “wokeness and political activism’’, with only 10 weeks of a four-year degree dedicated to teaching children literacy and numeracy, the first national audit of education degrees reveals.
The Institute of Public Affairs has analysed 3713 teaching subjects in education degrees offered by 37 Australian universities. One-third of all subjects relate to what the IPA describes as “woke” theories of identity politics, decolonisation and social justice.
Just one in 10 subjects relate to teaching children how to read, write and learn mathematics.
Bella d’Abrera, the director of IPA’s Foundations of Western Civilisation Program, said only 218 subjects covered the teaching of mathematics, 43 subjects involved phonics-based reading instruction, and 37 subjects covered grammar skills.
She blamed the “woke’’ training of teachers for the failure of one in three Australian students to meet basic standards of literacy and numeracy in this year’s NAPLAN (National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy) test.
“Instead of being taught how to master core academic curriculum such as reading, writing, mathematics, history and science, prospective teachers are being trained by university experts to be experts in critical social justice, identity politics, and sustainability,’’ she said. “We are setting Australian students up for failure by spending so little time teaching our teachers core literacy and numeracy skills, while university courses focus on woke issues and activism.
“The system is clearly failing both trainee teachers, as well as the students they go on to teach, and it is in urgent need of reform.’’
The IPA audit found that university teaching degrees included 1169 subjects in “critical social justice’’, compared to 371 subjects that instructed how to teach literacy and numeracy skills.
The University of Canberra offers a unit in Indigenous education that criticises the way “anthropocentrism’’ promotes economic prosperity.
“It is well evidenced that social and ecological wellness in Australia has been in accelerating decline since contact where colonial processes and Western perspectives have elevated rational, analytical ways of knowing and robust anthropocentrism, most recently to prioritise individualism, economic prosperity and global competitiveness,’’ the unit description states.
Monash University offers a study unit on “rethinking Indigenous education’’ that introduces trainee teachers to “radical thinking and alternative models of education … Student will engage with Indigenous and black scholarship that envisions the abolition and replacement of existing models and practices of settler colonial education,’’ it states.
Monash University’s bachelor of education instructs trainee teachers to “theorise social justice … The unit aims to develop in you a strong grasp of the concept of ‘cognitive justice’, and the associated notions of ‘epistemic’ and ‘epistemological’ justice,’’ it states.
Student teachers at Monash also learn to teach mathematics through a “social justice” lens.
At Victoria University, students who want to learn how to teach children of different backgrounds are required to use a “critical pedagogy framework to challenge dominant discourses that perpetuate notions of privilege, power and oppression’’.
Federal, state and territory education ministers have ordered universities to change their education degrees by mandating that new teachers are trained to teach children English and mathematics, and to manage classroom behaviour but universities will not be required to teach the core content until the end of 2025.
Dr d’Abrera said Australian teaching degrees had “replaced core skills and knowledge with woke ideology and political activism’’. As a result, teacher training is “woke and notoriously lacking in evidence-based preparation for the realities of the classroom’’.
******************************************************
My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
******************************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment