Respectful Behavior
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Long before "responsibility" and "hard work" became dreaded codewords for "socialism," they were values Americans wanted to see in their schools. Let me give you a glimpse of the good old days before the dust-up over the president's speech to school children.
In 2005, 93 percent of Americans said "teaching hard work and responsibility" was a very important goal for public schools. Forty-four percent said it was the most important goal. No other goal achieved a higher rating. These numbers come from a Learning First Alliance poll of likely voters. (The Alliance sponsors this website.)
These poll results should come as no surprise. Support for (and criticism of) public education reflect ingrained American values. We ignore that fact at our own risk.
The most enduring reforms rest on shared values. These days, we should cherish common ground when we find it. The recent tempest in a teacup does us no favors.
Update (7:23 pm): Teacher Larry Ferlazzo has his hands on the president's speech, and he has very specific ideas for using it in his own classes. ...
My favorite education innovation is better than yours.
That seems to be the reigning sentiment in many policy discussions across the education blogosphere these days. Gotham Schools offers a recent, though relatively mild, example. Together, New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and NYU professor Pedro Noguera visited PS 28, a successful Brooklyn elementary school serving low-income children. They came back describing what could have been two different schools.
Noguera praised the school for its focus on both the academic and non-academic needs of its students: The school offers an extended school day, social services, social and emotional learning, professional development for teachers, etc. Klein praised the school for using data to improve instruction.
Frustrated by what he saw as Klein's unwillingness to acknowledge the school's focus on non-academic needs, Noguera told Gotham Schools reporter, "I told him to look at the full picture, all of the things that they were doing.... A lot of people are stuck on this idea that there’s only one way to go about educating urban kids: It’s the KIPP way."
The Gotham Schools story illustrates a common destructive tendency to set apparently successful school reform models in competition with each other. Data-driven improvement can exist comfortably with support for non-academic needs, but you wouldn't know it from much education policy discussion these days.
Happily, both Noguera and many KIPP supporters can see the virtue of multiple approaches to ...
The Honorable Lee Hamilton represented Indiana’s 9th congressional district for over three decades. After leaving Congress, he co-chaired the Iraq Study Group and served as Vice-Chair of the 9/11 Commission.
Now president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and director of Indiana University's Center on Congress, he sits or has sat on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the President's Homeland Security Advisory Council, the FBI Director’s Advisory Board, the CIA Director’s Economic Intelligence Advisory Panel, and the Defense Secretary’s National Security Study Group.
A life of public service has fueled Representative Hamilton's commitment to civics education, a commitment he honors as co-chair of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools. Representative Hamilton recently sat down with us for an interview on the significance of civic education at a time of political change and economic upheaval.
PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: I've heard you say--or rather, write--that you have found a lot of young Americans don't necessarily know what it means to be American. They haven't really thought it over. I was wondering if you could describe the implications of what that means and what schools might be able to do about it.
HAMILTON: I think a representative democracy depends on an educated citizenry. It's very important that not only homes--parents--but also schools take on the responsibility of assuring that young people know how to become good citizens and they learn the attributes of good citizenship: Involvement in their community, listening to their friends and neighbors, trying to solve problems, reach a consensus, discuss, and to get a sense of democracy into their bones. So that they recognize that the question that Lincoln asked, whether this nation, so conceived and so dedicated, could long endure, is answered affirmatively.
I'm very concerned about what's happening today in our schools. You see so much emphasis upon math and science, and I'm certainly not opposed to that. We need that emphasis. But in many respects I think the emphasis there, in part because of the requirements of federal law, are reducing--diminishing--the amount of time that is spent on ...
Walter Dean Myers understands second chances. A high school dropout by age 17, he enlisted in the army and worked odd jobs as a young adult. It was his lifelong relationship with books that put him on a path to becoming one of the nation's most celebrated young adult authors. Five Coretta Scott King Awards and two Newbery Honors later, Myers is sharing the lesson of second chances with a new generation of at-risk youth.
Last week, Myers spoke with us about the central themes of his new novel, Dope Sick: personal responsibility and redemption. The novel tells the story of a young man facing the consequences of a drug deal gone wrong who has an opportunity to review and revise his life choices. This story line reflects a belief Myers avowed throughout our interview: We must empower teens to take greater control of their lives.
Dope Sick has become the centerpiece of an effort to do just that. Myers is collaborating with AdLit.org and the NEA on the Second Chance Initiative, which aims to help youth make better choices. As part of this initiative, the novel will be available for free on HarperCollins' website from February 10th through 24th. The initiative also offers Dope Sick reading guides and writing activities along with resources on preventing high school dropout, teen pregnancy and substance abuse.
Underlying this effort is Myers' long-standing faith that reading can offer hope to teens who need it most.
Listen to highlights from our interview with Walter Dean Myers here (16 minutes), or read a transcript below:
PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: You're releasing your new novel, Dope Sick, very soon. What's the novel about?
MYERS: It's about a young man who has reached a point of crisis in his life. He goes into a building, running from the police, and he meets another young man his own age. The new young man is a somewhat fantastic creature who can call up ...
Like others in the media, David Brooks is composing an epic about a battle for Barack Obama's soul. It's the education "reformers" against the education "establishment." The good guys against the bad guys.
This may make for good copy, but it certainly doesn't help his readers come to grips with the complexity of challenges facing public education. (Indeed, Brooks himself doesn't always know what side he's on.)
Take, for example, the question of "merit pay for good teachers," which Brooks characterizes as a major weapon in the reformers' arsenal. The Quick and the Ed, a blog that has been nothing if not supportive of performance pay for teachers, just posted a long piece on the unreliability of the "value added" student performance measures central to most proposed performance pay systems. In other words, current measures of teacher quality offer an unstable foundation for teacher compensation decisions.
Should we therefore abandon the question? Of course not. But we should at least acknowledge that this reform, like most others, involves difficult tradeoffs and real risks. It is possible to have principled ...
That's the tagline of a new ad campaign to discourage bullying and harassment of gay and lesbian students in American schools. The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) teamed up with the Ad Council to launch the campaign, which targets pervasive but offensive phrases like "that's so gay"-a comment teens commonly use to describe anything unappealing: "When you say, 'That's so gay,' do you realize what you're saying? Knock it off."
The campaign is getting off the ground amidst news that 9 out of 10 lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (lgbt) youths suffer verbal of physical harassment in school. According to a new GLSEN School Climate Study, more than 1 in 5 report that they have been physically assaulted.
You can learn more about the campaign at http://www.thinkb4youspeak.com. ...
In the past few years, we've heard a great deal about the religious and ethnic intolerance tainting school curricula in Middle Eastern countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia. We hear less about the growing push in countries like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to promote tolerance in schools.
I had the privilege of speaking with His Excellency Dr. Hanif Hassan, the UAE's Education Minister, when he was in Washington about two weeks ago. (For those of you who don't know, the UAE is a small, prosperous and progressive country on the Persian Gulf, between Oman and Saudi Arabia.) ...
Last week, the Chicago Sun Times ran a series of editorials advocating social and emotional learning in Chicago Public Schools. According to the Sun Times, troubled schools whose students regularly face the consequences of violence and neglect confront sobering odds in raising those students' academic performance. The writers call for a social and emotional learning curriculum in all schools, as well as for more social workers, school counselors and psychologists.
Like the signers of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, they recognize the importance of stressing "social development and non-academic skills" alongside academic learning. And like the Broader, Bolder Approach signers, they will likely be accused of abandoning academic rigor for some fuzzy-headed notion of "life skills." ...
Stories about what's working in public schools and districts keep rolling in to Public School Insights. Here's a list of five inspiring new stories we've posted in the past two weeks:
- Great Neck Public Schools, New York: Bending Bureaucracy to Meet Kids Needs, June 10
- George Middle School, Oregon: Promoting Academic Success through Community Partnerships, June 6
- Cameron Elementary School, California: Using Incentives to Motivate Students, June 2
- Interlake High School, Washington: Helping All Students Reach their Highest Potential in Math, May 30
- Clarke County School District, Georgia: Bringing Dropouts Back to School, May 28
Alexander Russo's recent blog posting about the French film that received the Palme d'Or at Cannes last week caught my attention. The Class (Entre les Murs), which depicts a year in a junior high school that serves one of Paris's poorest neighborhoods, won nearly unanimous praise at Cannes--which is no mean feat. Here's hoping that the film crosses the pond soon and finds a large American audience. ...
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A Village Route to Early Childhood Education
In the 1990s, we at Davenport Community Schools noticed a trend: Children were coming to kindergarten unprepared to learn. A troublingly low number of our district’s children (more than half of whom receive free or reduced price lunch) had preschool experience. Recognizing the importance of early childhood education in ensuring students are ready to succeed in school and life, we developed the Children’s Village, which includes formal preschool classes and all-day, year-round programming serving children from six weeks to five years old. Today, when a Children’s Village student arrives for the first day of kindergarten, the teacher can say, “This child is ready to learn.”
With early childhood education, students learn more, teachers accomplish more and taxpayers get more for their education tax dollar. But it takes all our students, teachers, staff, administrators, parents and partners to make the Children’s Villages a success. Indeed, it really does take a village to ensure quality early childhood education. Read more
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